Thomas Test

The Thomas Test is a passive flexibility test of the hip and lower leg. I look at this area for two primary reasons. First, we tend to sit too much. Sitting has a strong adverse impact on how the body both looks and moves. Second, the hips are foundational to proper movement, strength, and power. Anything interfering with the hip will interfere with performance.

If you can’t fully extend your hips, it is very difficult to properly and efficiently apply force to the ground to run faster, change direction or push off quicker, and jump higher. Proper hip mobility, position and stability greatly reduces stress and the risk of injury to the knees, ankle and foot.

When the pelvis is in a locked, neutral position with the leg hanging freely over the edge of the table, we are looking for a number of markers:

• The center of the knee should be at or just below the level of the hip joint. An elevated knee is associated with short/tight hip flexors.

• The ankle should hang under or just forward of the knee. A forward position is associated with tight quads.

• We can also look for abduction or adduction of the femur

• We can look at torsion or internal or external rotation of the femur and the tibia/fibula, and even the foot

• There is also a certain amount of spring expected when the thigh is pushed downward

Keep in mind that how the body behaves in a passive situation can be very different to the way it behaves during dynamic movement or even merely when standing upright resisting gravity. You may be hyper-mobile in this test, but due to instability in the hip and Inner Unit core dysfunction, when on two feet your body may show restricted hip mobility (hypo-mobile). This is typically a defensive mechanism, where the body restricts range of motion to ensure stability to reduce the likelihood of injury.