 I recently read two papers back to back. Coincidentally. One on the hip adduction squeeze test. The other on ankle dorsiflexion. Totally different authors, totally different joints, zero reason these two should have anything to do with each other. Yet both of them had A LOT to do with each other. Cross-pollination. A single number isn't a diagnosis. It's just an invitation to keep asking questions.The Squeeze Test Isn't Lying to You — It's Just Not Telling You Enough Groin pain, adductor strain, osteitis pubis, yada yada yada. You get the point. Squeeze test's become the go-to way to flag it. And the reflex, in most places, is basically this: low score → prescribe adductor strengthening → move on to the next athlete. Buchheit and King aren't coming for the test itself. They're coming for that reflex. Their whole point is that the squeeze test is measuring whole-system output, not some clean isolated reading of just the adductors. Trunk control, pelvic position, cross-segment coordination — it's all mixed into that one number. So when the score's low, it could genuinely be coming from four different places:
The point is this — in more than one study (they cited), squeeze scores went up after rehab that never addressed the adductors at all. They worked on intersegmental control instead, and the system just got better at producing force in that position. Not the same thing as the adductors actually getting stronger, but the number climbed anyway. So their proposed solution: Record pain and force, every single time, not just force. Ask if a low score is painful or painless before doing anything about it. Check the indirect stuff before jumping straight to adductor strengthening. And test unilaterally, eccentrically, through range — because testing bilateral and isometric and only in inner range is not dissimilar to testing hamstrings at 90 degrees of knee flexion and calling it a day. My review: A squeeze is not a squeeze is not a squeeze. The Ankle Is Basically the Same Story Swap "squeeze test" for "weight-bearing lunge test," swap "adductor" for "ankle joint," and you're pretty much reading the same paper again. Restricted dorsiflexion gets simplified every time, by default — same stretching, same mobilizing, same cranking, no matter what's actually causing the restriction. Basically whack-a-mole. Yet as astute, intentional clinicians will tell you, restriction can come from the joint, from a muscle-tendon issue, from neural tissue, or other and each one needs a completely different fix. So this paper’s answer is a three-step reasoning chain built around a test most (not all) of us are already using anyway:
Same message as the squeeze test paper, just different anatomy — the test tells you *that* something's restricted, not *why*. The Cross-Pollination Neither paper cites the other. Neither set of authors necessarily even know the others (although I believe they do). But put them side by side and they're making the exact same argument in two totally different area codes of the body. Neither one's telling you to stop testing. Both are telling you to stop stopping at the test. A low squeeze score isn't an adductor problem until you've ruled out pain, an upstream deficit, and bad execution. A stiff ankle isn't a joint problem until you've figured out whether it's actually the joint, the tendon, the nerve doing the blocking (or other - in my opinion). Same reflex both times — squeeze's low, strengthen the adductors; ankle's stiff, crank the joint — and same thing getting skipped both times, which is the one step that actually matters: figuring out what's really going on underneath that number. Cheap, fast, reliable screens aren't the problem here. Treating them like the finish line is. But I get it, most are done during preseason medicals. But the takeaway, cross-pollinated out of two papers that have literally never been in the same room, is this: measure it, go figure out *why* it measured that way, then treat the thing you actually found — not the thing the test made easiest to assume. There's a million roads to Rome once you get to the "how." But the "why" has to come first. Every time. Comments are closed.
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