The Number That Your Power Meter Cannot Show You
You have an FTP number. You probably know your VO2max estimate. You might even track your training stress score week to week. But here is the thing nobody tells you about all those metrics: they measure your engine while completely ignoring the chassis it sits in.
I see this pattern constantly. A rider with a 280-watt FTP who cannot stand on one leg for ten seconds without grabbing a wall. A cyclist who averages 160 kilometres a week but cannot hinge at the hip without rounding the lumbar spine. Someone who will spend four hours in the saddle on a Sunday but has not touched their toes since secondary school.
The bike hides all of this. It hides it brilliantly. The fixed pedal path constrains your movement to a narrow, repetitive arc. The saddle supports your pelvis. The handlebars prop up your upper body. You can have appalling movement quality and still produce respectable watts — right up until the moment something breaks. A knee that starts aching at kilometre sixty. A lower back that seizes after three hours. A hip flexor that feels like it has been set on fire during the first hill repeat.
The dysfunction was always there. The bike just let you ignore it.
What the Functional Movement Screen Actually Is
Gray Cook and Lee Burton developed the Functional Movement Screen — the FMS — in the mid-1990s as a standardised way to assess how well a person moves. Not how strong they are. Not how flexible. How well. The distinction matters.
The full FMS battery includes seven fundamental movement patterns, each scored on a 0 to 3 scale. It was originally designed for use across all sports and populations, from American football linemen to weekend joggers. The system caught on because it did something no strength test or flexibility measurement could do: it revealed compensations. The hidden workarounds your body invents when one joint lacks range, one muscle group fires late, or one stabiliser has quietly gone on holiday.
For cyclists, the full seven-test battery is more than you need. Some tests — the hurdle step, for instance — assess qualities that are not primary limiters for endurance riders. What matters is applying the FMS principles to the specific movement deficits that cycling creates.
I have adapted the screen to six tests. Together, they cover every joint and every movement quality that cycling degrades over time: ankle dorsiflexion, hip mobility and stability, thoracic rotation, hamstring length, single-leg balance, and the ability to control your body through a split-stance pattern. These are not random exercises. Each one targets a specific dysfunction that physiotherapists working with cyclists see so frequently they could diagnose it with their eyes closed.
The Scoring System: Keep It Simple
Before you run the tests, understand the scoring. Cook and Burton's system uses a four-point scale, and it works beautifully because of its simplicity:
Score 3 — You completed the movement cleanly. No wobble, no shift, no compensation. Full range of motion with control throughout. This is the standard.
Score 2 — You completed the movement, but something compensated. Your torso rotated when it should have stayed square. Your heel lifted off the floor. You wobbled and caught yourself. You got the job done, but your body found a workaround to do it.
Score 1 — You could not complete the movement at all. Not with compensation, not with effort. The range or the stability simply was not there.
Score 0 — You felt pain during the test. Stop. This is not a training problem. This is a clinical problem that needs professional assessment before you do anything else.
Here is the good news: for cyclists, a score of 2 on most tests is entirely workable. You are looking for the 1s and the 0s — the genuine restrictions and the pain responses. Those are the weak links that will eventually present as injuries if left unaddressed.
The Six Tests That Matter for Cyclists
Test 1: The Overhead Squat Pattern
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, toes pointing forward. Hold a broomstick or dowel overhead with arms fully extended, slightly wider than shoulder width. Now lower yourself into a full depth position — thighs at least parallel to the floor — while keeping the stick directly overhead.
This single movement reveals an extraordinary amount about your body. Watch for: heels lifting off the floor (ankle dorsiflexion deficit), knees caving inward (hip stability or ankle mobility issue), torso falling forward excessively (thoracic mobility restriction), arms drifting forward of your ears (shoulder or thoracic limitation), and lower back rounding at the bottom (hip mobility or motor control deficit).
Most cyclists fail this test. The combination of limited ankle dorsiflexion from hours in cycling shoes, stiff thoracic spines from the aero position, and tight hip flexors from repetitive pedalling makes a clean overhead pattern remarkably rare in riders who do nothing but ride. That is not a criticism. It is a diagnostic.
Test 2: Single-Leg Stance
Stand on one leg. Arms across your chest. Close your eyes. Hold for thirty seconds.
That is it. That is the whole test. And it is devastating.
The standard is thirty seconds without a foot touch-down or significant trunk sway. Most recreational cyclists manage twelve to fifteen seconds before the standing leg starts trembling, the hip drops, and the foot comes down. Open your eyes and you will do better, which tells you the deficit is proprioceptive — your balance system, not your strength.
Cycling trains your legs to produce force through a guided, bilateral pattern. It does absolutely nothing for single-leg stability, ankle proprioception, or lateral hip control. The glute medius — the muscle on the side of your hip that prevents your pelvis from dropping when you stand on one foot — gets almost no stimulus from pedalling. Over years of riding without any single-leg work, it quietly atrophies.
This matters because single-leg stance is one of the most predictive tests for knee and hip problems in athletes. If you cannot control your pelvis on one leg, you cannot control your pelvis on the bike during hard efforts when fatigue strips away your compensations.
Test both sides. Note any difference. An asymmetry of more than five seconds between left and right is clinically significant and worth addressing.
Test 3: The Hip Hinge
Stand with your feet hip-width apart. Place a broomstick along your spine — it should touch the back of your head, between your shoulder blades, and your sacrum. Now push your hips backward as if closing a car door with your backside, allowing your torso to tilt forward. The stick should maintain all three contact points throughout.
The hip hinge is the foundation of safe off-bike movement. It tests whether you can flex at the hips without rounding the lumbar spine — whether your body knows the difference between hip movement and spinal movement.
Most cyclists have lost this distinction. The cycling position flexes the whole trunk as a unit: hips, lumbar spine, and thoracic spine all curve forward together. After years of this, the body forgets how to dissociate — how to move the hips independently while the spine stays neutral. The stick will tell you immediately. If it lifts off your sacrum, your lower back is rounding. If it lifts off the back of your head, your thoracic spine is compensating.
A poor hip hinge pattern is the single best predictor of lower back problems in cyclists who also do any form of off-bike activity — carrying shopping, picking up children, gardening, anything that involves bending forward under load.
Test 4: Active Straight-Leg Raise
Lie on your back, both legs straight. Keep one leg flat on the floor and raise the other as high as you can with a straight knee. Do not force it. Do not bounce. Just lift steadily and note where it stops.
The standard for a score of 3 is the raised leg reaching past 80 degrees — roughly perpendicular to the floor. A score of 2 sits between 60 and 80 degrees. Below 60 degrees is a 1.
This test assesses two things simultaneously: hamstring length on the raised leg and hip flexor flexibility on the leg that stays flat. If the down leg lifts off the floor as you raise the other one, your hip flexors are too tight to allow full hip extension. If the raised leg stops well short of vertical, your hamstrings are short.
Cyclists are notoriously tight through both. The pedal stroke never takes the hamstrings through full length, and the hip flexors are held in a shortened position for the entire ride. The combination creates a predictable pattern: the thigh on the floor pops up, and the raised leg stops at about 55 to 65 degrees. If that is you, welcome to the vast majority.
Test 5: Seated Thoracic Rotation
Sit on a chair or bench with your feet flat on the floor and a cushion or foam roller squeezed between your knees. Cross your arms over your chest, hands on opposite shoulders. Now rotate as far as you can to one side without letting the cushion drop or your pelvis shift.
Healthy thoracic rotation should reach approximately 45 degrees to each side — about the point where your shoulder faces the wall beside you. The cushion between the knees locks out the lumbar spine and pelvis, isolating the thoracic contribution.
This is the test where cyclists fail most spectacularly. The sustained flexed, rounded-forward position of road cycling progressively stiffens the thoracic spine into a kyphotic curve. The vertebrae in the mid-back lose their rotational range because nothing in cycling asks them to rotate. After years of riding, many cyclists have less than 25 degrees of thoracic rotation — barely more than half the healthy standard.
And this is not just a flexibility concern. Limited thoracic rotation means the lumbar spine has to compensate by rotating more than it should. The lumbar spine is built for stability, not rotation. When it is forced to rotate because the thoracic spine will not, disc injuries, facet joint irritation, and chronic lower back pain follow. Every physio working with cyclists will tell you the same thing: fix the thoracic spine first. It resolves most of the lower back complaints downstream.
Test 6: The Inline Lunge
Stand with your feet on a line, one foot directly in front of the other, separated by roughly the length of your shin bone. Hands on your hips. Lower the back knee toward the floor, keeping the front knee tracking over the second toe and the torso upright. Touch the back knee gently to the floor and return to standing.
This tests balance, hip mobility, knee stability, and ankle dorsiflexion simultaneously. It also reveals asymmetries — most riders have a noticeably weaker side.
Watch for: the front knee collapsing inward (glute medius weakness or ankle dorsiflexion restriction), the torso tilting forward or to one side (core stability deficit), loss of balance requiring a step out (proprioceptive deficit), and the inability to touch the back knee to the floor without pain (hip flexor tightness or knee pathology).
The inline lunge is particularly useful because it mimics the split-stance patterns of real life — walking, climbing stairs, stepping over obstacles — that cycling never trains. A cyclist with a clean inline lunge pattern has the off-bike movement quality to support their on-bike training. A cyclist who fails it has identified exactly where their next injury is likely to come from.
What the Scores Reveal: The Classic Cyclist Pattern
Run these six tests and you will almost certainly find a predictable cluster of deficits. Physiotherapists who work with cyclists — people like Phil Burt, former head of physiotherapy at British Cycling, or Emma Colson at the Australian Institute of Sport — describe this pattern so frequently it might as well be a diagnosis:
Restricted thoracic rotation — typically 20 to 30 degrees instead of the 45-degree standard. Caused by hours in the aero position with the thoracic spine locked in flexion.
Tight hip flexors — the down leg lifts during the active straight-leg raise. Caused by the hip never reaching full extension during the pedal stroke, compounded by desk sitting.
Limited ankle dorsiflexion — the heels lift during the overhead pattern, the front knee drifts inward during the inline lunge. Cycling shoes with stiff soles and elevated heels allow the ankle to avoid dorsiflexion entirely, and over years the range disappears.
Weak glute medius — the pelvis drops on single-leg stance, the knee collapses inward during the lunge. The glute medius receives almost no training stimulus from cycling, which is a sagittal-plane, bilateral activity.
Poor proprioception — single-leg stance fails early, especially with eyes closed. Cycling provides constant bilateral support through the pedals, saddle, and handlebars. The balance system atrophies from disuse.
If you scored poorly on three or more of these tests, you are not broken. You are a cyclist. And every one of these deficits is fixable with specific, consistent corrective work.
The Corrective Exercises: What to Do About Each Deficit
Thoracic Mobility: Foam Roller Extensions and Open Book Drills
Foam roller thoracic extensions: Lie face up with a foam roller positioned across your mid-back, roughly at the base of your shoulder blades. Support your head with your hands. Let your upper back extend over the roller, opening the chest toward the ceiling. Hold for three to five seconds, return to neutral, then move the roller one vertebra higher and repeat. Work through five to six positions along the thoracic spine. Two to three sets.
Open book drill: Lie on your side with knees bent at 90 degrees, stacked, and arms extended in front of you, palms together. Keeping the knees stacked and the pelvis still, rotate the top arm up and over your body, reaching toward the floor behind you. Follow the hand with your eyes. Hold the fully rotated position for two breaths, then return slowly. Eight to ten repetitions per side.
These two exercises, done consistently, can recover 10 to 15 degrees of thoracic rotation within four to six weeks. That is often the difference between a score of 1 and a score of 3.
Hip Flexors: Half-Kneeling Stretch and Couch Stretch
Half-kneeling hip flexor stretch: Kneel with one foot forward, both knees at 90 degrees. Squeeze the glute of the back leg — this is the critical part, because glute activation reciprocally inhibits the hip flexor, deepening the stretch. Shift your weight slightly forward without arching the lower back. Hold for 45 to 60 seconds per side. Two to three sets.
Couch stretch: Place one knee on the floor against a wall or the front of a sofa, with the shin running up the vertical surface behind you. The other foot is flat on the floor in front, knee at 90 degrees. Squeeze the glute of the back leg and stand tall through the torso. Hold for 60 seconds per side. This is uncomfortable. That is the point.
Ankle Dorsiflexion: Wall-Facing Mobilisation
Stand facing a wall with one foot about 10 centimetres from the baseboard. Drive the knee forward over the toes, trying to touch the wall while keeping the heel flat on the floor. If you can touch the wall easily, move the foot back a centimetre and repeat. Find the distance where you can just reach the wall with the heel still down. Perform 15 to 20 repetitions per side, holding each end position for two seconds.
A healthy standard is the knee reaching the wall with the toes 12 to 14 centimetres back. Most cyclists start at 6 to 8 centimetres. Progress is steady — expect to gain one to two centimetres per week with daily practice.
Glute Medius: Side-Lying Clams and Banded Lateral Walks
Side-lying clams: Lie on your side with knees bent at 45 degrees, feet together. Keeping the feet in contact, rotate the top knee upward like a clamshell opening. Do not let the pelvis roll backward — the movement comes purely from the hip. Control the lowering phase. Fifteen to twenty repetitions per side, two to three sets. If this feels easy, add a resistance band around the knees.
Banded lateral walks: Place a resistance band around the ankles or just above the knees. Stand in a quarter position with feet hip-width apart. Step sideways, leading with one foot and following with the other, maintaining tension in the band throughout. Twenty steps in each direction, two to three sets. Keep the hips level and resist the pull of the band — do not let the trailing leg snap back.
These two exercises target the gluteus medius and the lateral hip stabilisers that prevent pelvic drop during single-leg stance and during the pedal stroke under fatigue.
Hamstrings: Active Straight-Leg Lowering
Lie on your back. Raise both legs to vertical. Keeping one leg pointing straight up, slowly lower the other leg toward the floor with a straight knee. Control the descent. Stop when the lower back begins to arch away from the floor. Return to vertical. Ten to twelve repetitions per side, two sets.
This is not a passive stretch. It is an active eccentric exercise that lengthens the hamstrings while teaching your core to stabilise the pelvis against the pull. It addresses hamstring tightness and core stability simultaneously — which is precisely what cyclists need.
When to Screen: Three Points in the Year
Screening is not a one-off event. Movement quality changes throughout the season as training loads shift, fatigue accumulates, and the hours in the saddle vary.
Pre-season — before you ramp up training volume for the year. This is your baseline. Run all six tests, record your scores, and build your corrective programme around the results. If thoracic rotation and hip flexors are your weakest links — and they will be for most of you — those exercises become your daily non-negotiables for the next eight to twelve weeks.
Mid-season — roughly halfway through your competitive or peak riding period. Re-test everything. Some scores will have improved because your corrective work is paying off. Others may have regressed because the accumulated hours on the bike have tightened things back up. This check tells you where to adjust. If your thoracic rotation has dropped again despite the corrective exercises, increase the frequency or add a pre-ride rotation drill.
Post-injury — whenever something goes wrong. A screening after injury often reveals the compensation pattern that contributed to the problem. The knee that started hurting at week twelve of your build? Run the single-leg stance and inline lunge tests and you will likely find a glute medius weakness on that side. The lower back that flared after a three-day stage race? The thoracic rotation score will almost certainly have dropped.
The Masters Perspective: Why Screening Matters More After 40
Here is where it gets really interesting for masters riders, and it is where the research from Cook and Burton intersects with the ageing physiology that everyone in our audience lives with.
After 40, three things happen simultaneously. Joint mobility declines as articular cartilage thins and synovial fluid production decreases. Tendon elasticity reduces as collagen cross-linking increases — tendons become stiffer and less tolerant of rapid loading. Proprioception deteriorates as the density of mechanoreceptors in joint capsules and muscle spindles decreases.
Now layer cycling on top of those age-related changes. The sport that restricts joint range, eliminates single-leg challenge, and removes balance demands is being practised by a body that is already losing mobility, elasticity, and positional awareness. Cycling and ageing compound each other. The restrictions accelerate. The compensation patterns deepen. The gap between your fitness on the bike and your movement quality off it widens every year.
This is why a 45-year-old cyclist who has never done corrective work will typically score lower on the FMS than a sedentary 45-year-old. The sedentary person at least walks, climbs stairs, and bends in multiple directions throughout the day. The cyclist has replaced much of that varied movement with a single, repetitive, constrained pattern.
The fix is not complicated. But it is non-negotiable. Ten to fifteen minutes of corrective work, three times per week, is the minimum effective dose to maintain movement quality alongside serious riding. Less than that and you are running on borrowed time.
Your Corrective Programme: The Ten-Minute Protocol
Here is how to structure it. Choose the three exercises that match your lowest-scoring tests and run through them three times per week. The entire session takes ten to fifteen minutes. No equipment beyond a foam roller and a resistance band.
If thoracic rotation is your weakest link: foam roller extensions (2 sets of 6 positions) and open book drill (2 sets of 8 reps per side). Four minutes.
If hip flexors scored lowest: half-kneeling stretch (2 sets of 45 seconds per side) and couch stretch (2 sets of 60 seconds per side). Five minutes.
If ankle dorsiflexion failed: wall-facing mobilisation (2 sets of 15 reps per side). Three minutes.
If glute medius is the deficit: banded lateral walks (2 sets of 20 steps each direction) and side-lying clams (2 sets of 15 per side). Four minutes.
If hamstrings are limiting: active straight-leg lowering (2 sets of 10 per side). Three minutes.
Pick your three biggest deficits. Stack those corrective blocks. That is your programme.
Do it before a ride as part of your warm-up, or on recovery days, or in the evening while the television is on. The timing is flexible. The consistency is not. Three sessions per week, every week, for the duration of your riding career.
Stop Guessing, Start Testing
The difference between a cyclist who stays healthy for decades and one who cycles through recurring injuries — knee, back, hip, repeat — often comes down to something that never appears on a training plan or a performance chart. It comes down to whether they know where their body is failing and whether they are doing something about it.
The FMS gives you that knowledge. Six tests. Fifteen minutes. A foam roller and a bit of floor space. No physio appointment needed, no gym required, no excuses left.
Run the screen. Record your scores. Address the weakest links. Re-test in six weeks. The pattern of improvement will tell you more about your long-term durability as a cyclist than any FTP test ever will.
And if you want a structured framework for building this kind of work into your training — alongside the coaching, the nutrition, the periodisation, and the community of riders who are doing the same work — that is exactly what we do inside the Roadman Cycling community. Because being fit on the bike is only half the equation. Moving well off it is the other half. And you need both if you are not done yet.