A coach asked me this week what questions should he actually be asking on an intake form for clients he never gets a full movement assessment on?
This is what I told him.
The assessment starts when your client walks through the door. Actually, it starts before that. Leveling up your assessment process isn't about a more intricate process, it's about getting better information with more effective questions.
Two of my favorite questions on any intake form have nothing to do with movement. What exercises do you like, and what do you hate. People self-select toward what they're already good at and away from what they're bad at (or what hurts), so those answers tell you a lot more than the full movement screen you learn in an intro PT course usually does.
Just to make sure we're covering all bases, we can add one more, a bit more explicit: any aches, pains, or things that consistently bug you. I'd rather have those three answers than watch someone do an overhead squat, a wall snow angel, or any sort of table test.
This isn't to undersell the value we can derive from a full, more detailed assessment. However, I find more often than not coaches get overwhelmed looking in the weeds for problems they don't even know how to identify or solve with the tools they're using. Instead, using a much more deductive and practical approach, we can find a much more productive starting point for the average client who walks through our door or fills out a coaching form.
If we want a more effective day one, let's make sure we understand the assessment starts before the client even walks through the door. With a few questions, we can not only get a better idea of where to start our hands-on assessment process, but also match their subjective feelings and perceptions of exercise and their body, and overlay that with what we actually see with our eyes.
Want help applying this with your own clients? Book a free coach advisory call.
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