Pre-Season Screening in Football

Harry Routledge, PhD, is an extremely experienced, high-performance practitioner in elite sport performance. Some of his experiences include, but are not limited to, Oxford United Football Club as the Head of Performance, Fleetwood Town Football Club as the 1st Team Sport Scientist, and the Los Angeles Football Club as the Head of Sport Science & Nutrition. 

Hello everyone,

Today we have an insightful blog about pre-season screening for athletes written by Harry Routledge, PhD. Routledge is an experienced, high-performance practitioner in sport performance. Throughout his experiences, he has gained expertise in athlete testing, conditioning, monitoring, recovering, and nutritional strategies. His most recent role was with Oxford United Football Club as the Head of Performance. Enjoy the rest of this blog where he goes into the significance of pre-season screening.

Screening within professional football is an extremely valuable and effective tool, used to assess and influence players' physical qualities. At the beginning of the pre-season, player screening identifies specific physical qualities of players. This helps sport science and medical staff identify areas of potential weakness. A screening battery can identify muscle asymmetries, unilateral and bilateral strength, as well as flexibility and range of motion. This allows the performance department to create bespoke individualised plans to mitigate some of the risk factors of injury that may have presented during the screening.

A screening program, in professional football, can utilise a variety of tools to assess players. Force Plates are widely used to assess various parameters across lower limb strength and power through exercises. Examples include counter movement jumps (CMJ), isometric hamstring strength, both bilateral & unilateral. Some examples are shown below.

Movements	Test Technology	Assessment Result
Lower limb range of motion	Precision Sport	Range of motion across lower limbs
Upper limb range of motion	Precision Sport	Range of motion across lower limbs
Hamstring	Force Plates	Unilateral & bilateral hamstring isometric strength
CMJ	Force Plates	Unilateral & bilateral lower limb strength & power

With areas of weakness that identified at the beginning of the pre-season period, consistent screening during the pre-season phase allows practitioners to observe improvements. In turn this creates a baseline measure of specific exercises that can be continually monitored throughout the season. This ensures baseline scores are maintained and, where possible, improved. 

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