What Actually Happens in a 20-Minute Movement Screen

A woman called the front desk last month, asked three questions about the free assessment, and then said she would think about it. She called back six weeks later and booked. When I asked what changed, she said she had finally figured out we were not going to put her on a table and crack her back.

Nobody was ever going to crack her back. But she did not know that, and not knowing was enough to cost her six weeks.

So let me just tell you what the twenty minutes are. All of it, in order. If it sounds like something you want, we are running a Free Assessment Day on Friday, October 16, 2026, and you can have one of those slots. If it does not sound like something you want, you have lost nothing by reading.

Before we start

You wear regular clothes. Whatever lets you move, so shorts or loose pants rather than jeans with no give. No gown. Nobody is asking you to undress.

There is no insurance card, because there is no billing. This is not a claim against your benefits and it does not use up a visit. You are not signing up for anything, and if you decide at the end that you are done, you shake my hand and go get lunch.

Bring the imaging report if you have one. Not the disc, just the report. And bring the number of the thing you cannot do anymore, if you have one. "I used to walk four miles and now I turn around at one" is more useful to me than any MRI.

Minutes one through four: the story

We sit down and I ask you what is going on.

This is not a form. I want to hear where it hurts, when it started, what makes it worse by the end of the day, and what you have already tried that did not work. I ask what you stopped doing. That question tells me more than the pain scale ever does, because the thing you quit is usually the thing that matters to you most.

Then I ask what you want back. Kayaking off Old Mission. Sleeping through the night. Getting up out of a low chair without planning it first. Whatever it is, that is the target, and I need to hear it in your words, not mine.

If you have not thought about that question in a while, it is worth five minutes in the car on the way over. What would you be doing this month if your hip were not part of the decision?

Minutes five through nine: watching you move

Then you get up and I watch.

Walking first, down the hallway and back, and I am not looking at your hip. I am looking at your foot hitting the ground, your knee tracking, your pelvis, your ribcage, your arm swing. The place that hurts is rarely the place that started it. We are not looking at the spot that hurts. We are looking at why your body is sending the load there in the first place.

Then a few basic things. Standing up out of a chair. Stepping up onto a box. Reaching overhead. Turning to look behind you. Simple stuff you do a hundred times a day, done slowly enough that I can see where the motion is coming from and where it is not.

Minutes ten through fifteen: three planes, whole chain

This is the part that makes us different from a standard exam, so let me explain it plainly.

Most exams check your hip going forward and back. That is one plane of motion, and you do not live in one plane. Your body moves forward and back, side to side, and in rotation, and every joint from your big toe to your neck contributes to all three.

So I check all three, at the hip and at the joints above and below it. How far does your ankle bend forward on that side. How much rotation do you have through the hip in each direction. What does the pelvis do when you shift your weight sideways. What does the mid-back do when you turn.

Here is why it matters. Say your right ankle is stiff. When you walk, that ankle cannot let your body travel forward over the foot, so the hip has to make up the difference on every step. Ten thousand steps a day of a hip picking up an ankle's slack, and eventually the hip is the thing that hurts. Treat the hip alone and it goes quiet for a while. Find the ankle and it stays gone.

That approach has a name. It is called Applied Functional Science, it comes out of the Gray Institute, and I did the fellowship in it. Every therapist here is certified in it too, which is why you will get the same twenty minutes no matter who you sit down with.

I also measure things. Range in degrees. How long you can stand on each leg. How many times you can stand out of a chair in thirty seconds. Numbers, written down, so we can compare them later instead of guessing.

Minutes sixteen through twenty: what I found and what it means

Then we sit back down and I tell you.

In normal language. Not "you present with decreased hip internal rotation and gluteus medius insufficiency." More like: your right hip turns in about half as far as your left, your ankle on that side barely bends, and when you stand on the right leg your pelvis drops. That combination explains why the front of your hip hurts when you walk downhill.

I will tell you if I think this is something we can help with. I will also tell you if I do not, which happens, and then I will tell you who you should see instead. If something in the exam looks like it belongs to a physician, you will hear that plainly and you will hear it that day.

What you walk out with

Four things, and none of them cost anything.

• A clear explanation of what your body is actually doing, in words you can repeat to your spouse in the car.
• Two or three specific movements to work on, shown to you and practiced once so you know you are doing them right.
• Your baseline numbers, written down, so in six weeks you can tell whether anything changed.
• An honest answer about whether you need care, and roughly how much.

You do not walk out with a treatment plan you have to sign, a package to buy, or a phone call from us next Tuesday asking if you have decided. That is not how we do it, and I would rather lose the booking than run it that way.

The bottom line

Twenty minutes is not enough time to fix a hip. It is plenty of time to find out what is going on and whether it is fixable, which is the question you are actually sitting at home wondering about.

In Michigan you do not need a physician's referral to see a physical therapist. You can just make the call.

Free Assessment Day is Friday, October 16, 2026. We block the schedule, we run these back to back all day, and when the slots are gone they are gone. If the day comes and goes and you are still thinking about it, that is genuinely fine. We do these year round.

To claim a spot on Free Assessment Day, Friday October 16, call the West Front St office at (231) 944-6541. Twenty minutes, in clinic, a real look at how you move. No charge, no insurance, no pressure to book anything afterward. If the 16th does not work, ask for the next available.

If your hip is the reason you are reading this, my book on hip replacement recovery is free at thesuperiortherapy.com.