Are You Trained to Move or Sit? Why Mobility Training is SO Important.

My good friend and business partner told me a story about being in grad school to become a physical therapist when the topic of stretching and mobility came up. His professor posed the question "Who are the most prolific athletes on the face of the earth?" These soon-to-be professionals called out answers like “running backs!” and “Olympians!” – things we might all expect the answer to be.  After a while, the teacher answered "Thoroughbred Horses.”  The teacher ended the class with this question to ponder "How much do thoroughbreds stretch?"

 

Do you consider yourself a healthy person with good workout habits, but lately you feel like you are nursing more minor injuries than you are getting any real work done? These wear and tear injuries are caused by overly tight muscle groups and/or weak muscle groups. Not having enough range of motion prevents you from doing important exercise movements correctly, and therefore, you are unable to strengthen the muscles that prevent these injuries.

Think about it, everyone has that exercise or two that no matter how much their trainer yells at them, they just cannot seem to get the proper motion, or maybe you just cannot seem to feel it in the spots your trainer is telling you about. This is most likely because of extremely tight antagonist muscles that simply will not allow the movement to happen. If the movement (that causes the desired muscle groups to activate) cannot and will not happen; will the muscles we are trying to get stronger get any stronger? The answer is a big NO!

So what do we do about it?

The answer is: intelligent and purposeful mobility training.

I am not talking about the old, bend-over-and-touch-your-toes or the arms-out shoulder rotation. These are the very archaic, somewhat useless ideas of warm-up/flexibility/mobility exercises that most athletes and trainers employ. The fact of the matter is, most static stretching is useless without a properly warmed up muscles, and any given stretched position needs to be held for up to 20-30 minutes to actually see any significant lengthening of the muscle belly.

As a professional athletic trainer it is my job to force your body into a new normal of efficient functional movements, pain free! Kelly Starrett, Physical Therapist to the world's most elite athletes and author of Becoming a Supple Leopard believes that "all human beings should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves." He also says that "humans should be able to alleviate about 98% of pain on their own."

What KStar (as he is referred to in the Crossfit community) is saying is that with intelligently designed mobility training, we can all safely alleviate 98% of wear and tear injuries incurred by poor form and improper instruction.

 

The question my friend’s professor asked can be approached in several different ways. The most relevant for this topic are: "Well, they never stretch, so we can only conclude that stretching/mobility is useless. We should just allow our strong muscles to get stronger and are weak muscles to get weaker because we do not need them." and "Our muscles will adapt by getting stronger here and weaker there, tighter here and looser there to facilitate our most common objective, allowing for optimum performance at what we do most."

The 2nd thought is exactly my point. Thoroughbreds eat, sleep and dream (I’m assuming) racing. That is all they do. Therefore the muscles that they want to get tighter and stronger do and the muscles they want looser and weaker get that way as well. The problem with this is that most human bodies have already adapted their bodies for optimum performance at their most common activity: SITTING!

So please, if you are feeling like your workouts are causing you more harm than good lately, or if you're tired of sitting all the time and still feeling achy, come see me and my athletic mobility specialists here at Core SPI. We can help you maximize your life!

Be Safe

Work Hard
Repeat

God Bless,

Shane