What are red lights?
First, everybody knows the trafic light signals. Green, Yellow, Red.
Green means go!
Yellow means speed up real fast and drive like a maniac 🙂 Just kidding. Yellow means slow down.
Red means Stop!
Now if we take that into training:
Green means you are ready for movements at the full level of progression or able to move up to even more advanced versions or exercises.
Yellow means take a step back and go back or start with earlier progressions of a movement or exercise.
Red means don't do that exercise or movement. More damage can be caused then good.
At Improvement Warrior Fitness, we want to make sure that you are not doing exercises that should be red lighted. And you are moving in an appropriate progression. As you can see from the poster below there are red lights based on your score on the Functional Movement Screen (FMS).
There are 7 tests on the FMS- you can see those here. But the scoring criteria is:
0= Pain in movement
1= Serious Dysfunction
2= Acceptable but movement is not perfect
3= Perfect Movement
So if you score a 1 or 0, you will be red lighted based off which red light you have. You can have multiple Red Lights.
How will the coaches know that you, or any of our Improvement Warrior members have been red lighted?
Our clients will wear colored wrist bands indicating that they are not able to perform said exercise for the day, and will be performing one of their corrective exercises instead. For the corrective exercises please see the second poster below in this post.
For example, say you scored a 1 on the In-Line Lunge Screen. We are planning to do reverse lunges as exercise #3 in a 5-exercise circuit. So for the training session that day you would be wearing a blue wrist band and you would be doing the correctives for in-line lunge instead of the reverse lunge.
Simple. You would start doing the pulsed Hip flexor mobility, once you have mastered that or we feel you are ready for the next stage you would go up to the gastroc soleus stretch, then progress to the Cook Hip Lift, and then finally the assisted Split Squat.
You can see those exercises here.
Once you've gone through all of those correctives you should have brought your In-Line Lunge screen up to at least a 2 and maybe even a 3 :mrgeen:
Now you would lose the blue wrist band.
If you have no red lights you would receive your very own Black Improvement Warrior Wrist band (yours to show off everywhere you go!) and an Improvement Warrior T-Shirt (That is AWESOME 😎
However we can take your black band away. So you need to stay on top of your Improvement Training, because no one wants to lose their black band.
What we look for:
Active Strait Leg Raise ALSR– Proper hip extension with Core Control, and no assistance with lifting the leg from the leg lying on the floor. As soon as the other foot or leg starts to move that’s where we stop the test.
Shoulder Mobility SM– Looking to make sure your thoracic spine (upper back) and gleno-humeral joint (shoulder) have proper range of motion.
Rotary Stability RS– Inability to perform this represents a lack of ability to transfer weight from one side to the other and also the ability to keep an engaged core. This is closely related to crawling, which we must do before walking, and then running.
Trunk Stability Pushup TSPU– Want to see that the head, upper back, and butt all come up as one unit. Strength needs to be increased in lower versions of correctives and push up first. This one is easy to correct.
In-Line Lunge– Is a split squat. Want to make sure you can do this movement before adding lunges and more advanced progressions. All the way down and up while maintaining upright posture.
Hurdle Step HS– Measure your ability to maintain balance and proprioception (knowing where you are in space) while flexing one hip.
Deep squat DS– Squatting is one of our most primal patterns, and is known as the king of all exercises, if done properly. Ankles, hips, core, butt, hamstrings can all lead to a poor a squat as well as the upper back and shoulder mobility. Most of the time if we fix the other stuff first this will automatically get fixed as well.
