The FMS, or Functional Movement Screen, is a standardized set of seven physical tests designed to reveal weaknesses, imbalances, and limitations in how your body moves. Developed by physical therapist Gray Cook and athletic trainer Lee Burton, it’s used by personal trainers, physical therapists, sports teams, and military organizations to establish a baseline of movement quality before someone begins a training program or competitive season. The core idea is simple: if you can’t move well through basic patterns like squatting, lunging, and reaching, loading those patterns with weight or repetition increases your risk of injury.
The Seven Movement Tests
The FMS evaluates your body through seven fundamental movement patterns, each targeting different combinations of mobility, stability, and coordination. No single test tells the full story. Together, they create a map of how well your joints and muscles work as a connected system.
- Deep squat: Tests overall body control along with knee, ankle, hip, shoulder, and core stability. This is the most demanding pattern because it requires nearly every major joint to work together.
- Hurdle step: Evaluates hip, knee, and ankle stability and mobility while you balance on one leg and step over a hurdle.
- In-line lunge: Assesses hip, knee, ankle, and foot mobility along with spinal stability in a split-stance position.
- Shoulder mobility: Measures your shoulder range of motion and how well your shoulder blades coordinate with your upper and middle back.
- Active straight leg raise: Reveals hamstring tightness and can help pinpoint contributors to back pain.
- Trunk stability pushup: Tests core strength and stability alongside upper body flexibility and strength.
- Rotary stability: Gauges coordination and the stability of your core, shoulders, and pelvis during a cross-body movement on all fours.
The equipment is minimal. A standard FMS kit includes a dowel (a lightweight stick for overhead positioning), a hurdle that adjusts to different heights, and a flat board used for alignment during certain tests. The entire screen takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes to complete.
How Scoring Works
Each of the seven tests receives a score from 0 to 3, giving a maximum possible score of 21. The scale works like this:
- 3: You complete the movement correctly with no compensation or wobble.
- 2: You complete the movement but need some kind of workaround, like shifting your weight or losing alignment.
- 1: You cannot perform the movement pattern at all, even with modification.
- 0: You experience pain anywhere in your body during the test. A zero automatically flags that area for further evaluation, and the professional may shift to a more clinical assessment called the Selective Functional Movement Assessment.
Five of the seven tests are performed on both sides of the body. When your left and right sides score differently, that asymmetry is flagged separately. The creators of the FMS emphasize that looking at the total number alone isn’t enough. Identifying asymmetries and any scores of zero matters more than the overall tally, because those are the specific weak links that corrective exercise can target.
What the Score Means for Injury Risk
The most widely referenced threshold is a composite score of 14. Research on military and law enforcement personnel (often called “tactical athletes”) found that individuals scoring 14 or below had roughly 1.9 times the odds of sustaining an injury compared to those scoring above 14. For men specifically, that figure was 1.83 times, and the increased risk applied to both overuse injuries and traumatic injuries.
That said, the predictive power of the FMS is still debated in sports science. While the 14-point cutoff has held up in several studies of tactical populations, researchers have noted that limited evidence strongly supports the tool’s validity and reliability across all sports. The screen was designed to assess general movement quality, not sport-specific demands. A tennis player, a firefighter, and a recreational gym-goer all take the same seven tests, which means the screen can miss movement problems unique to a particular activity. It works best as one piece of information rather than a standalone predictor.
How Results Guide Corrective Exercise
The real value of the FMS is what happens after the score. Rather than jumping straight into strengthening, the system follows a priority order. Pain comes first: any test scored as a zero means that movement pattern needs professional evaluation before training around it. Asymmetries come second, because a significant difference between your left and right sides often points to a motor control issue that increases injury risk more than general weakness does.
The creators note that asymmetries closer to the core of your body, like differences in trunk rotation or hip stability, are both more important and more correctable than asymmetries in your hands or feet. Sport-specific side dominance naturally creates some imbalance in the extremities, but proximal symmetry (the trunk, hips, and shoulders) is the priority for corrective work. Once pain and asymmetries are addressed, the focus shifts to improving any movement patterns scored as a 1, building the foundation before adding load or intensity to a training program.
Who Gets Screened and Why
The FMS is most commonly used in four settings: professional and collegiate sports teams screening athletes during preseason, military and fire departments evaluating recruits, physical therapy clinics establishing baselines before rehabilitation, and personal training studios assessing new clients. In each case, the purpose is the same. The screen creates a shared language between the person being tested and the professional designing their program. Instead of guessing where someone’s movement limitations are, both parties can look at seven specific scores and agree on what to work on first.
You don’t need to be an athlete to benefit. The seven patterns, squatting, stepping, lunging, reaching, and stabilizing, are movements you perform in daily life every time you pick something up, climb stairs, or twist to grab something off a shelf. A low score on any of these tests doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means there’s a specific pattern your body has learned to compensate around, and that compensation is worth addressing before it becomes a problem under stress or fatigue.