What is Mobility?

Mobility is a hot topic in the strength and conditioning / fitness world, but it’s nothing new. Physical therapists have been long familiar with the term. More often than not, they’re helping their patients with restoring mobility after an injury or corrective surgery. What may seem new is the increased focus on preventive mobility training being brought to the forefront of S&C by trainers in the know.

It seems that everywhere you look there is another program, device, or philosophy on mobility. And for good reason. It’s important to your training. A lot more important than you might think.

For those not yet in the know, you might be asking: Is mobility just another way of saying flexibility?

The answer is no. Not exactly.

Flexibility is the ability to lengthen a muscle.

Think about touching your toes. As you increase your flexibility, you can lengthen the hamstring muscles allowing you to reach further and further toward the ground.

Mobility is slightly more involved. While flexibility refers to lengthening a muscle, think about mobility as the ability to move a joint and accompanying muscles in the full range of motion it was designed for without mechanical assistance.

Someone with great mobility can move their entire body freely and without pain through a full range of motion. This involves much more than simply muscle flexibility. It requires: range of motion in your joints, joint and muscle stability, muscle strength, proper alignment and muscle symmetry, and muscle flexibility.

Why are Mobility Exercises Important?

This is a basic question with many potential answers. Since we’re a performance blog with an emphasis on strength and conditioning we’ll discuss through that lens: A lack of mobility can kill your gains, keep you from peak performance, and even cut your training career short.

1. Mobility issues decrease your strength and power output. A lack of mobility can lead to improper technique, which depletes your ability to most effectively produce maximum power and strength output. This also hinders muscle growth for you physique-minded Heroes.

2. Mobility issues increase your chances of joint and muscle damage (injury). Nothing kills your gains in the gym quite like being forced to take time off due to injury. Poor mobility combined with loaded movement is a recipe for disaster.

3. Increased pain and muscle fatigue. The key to performance gains is consistency. Pain and excessive soreness brought about by mobility issues can kill your consistency. If you perform a movement with a limited range of motion and don’t properly activate your major muscle groups, smaller muscles will take on extra unintended workload. Because these “assistance” muscles are smaller and weaker than your primary muscles you risk increased pain in the gym or will be left feeling extra sore after a workout. Potentially so much so that you put off training the next day.

It’s clear that mobility issues can keep you from achieving your fitness goals. However, if you step back and think about the definition of mobility, the importance of maintaining it becomes ever more clear.

Mobility is our ability to move through the spaces we occupy freely and without pain. Everything in our lives that requires movement is impacted by our mobility – from box jumps and explosive lifting to tying your own shoes as you age.

Why Should I Care? Who Is Impacted By Mobility Issues?

Everyone can benefit from a focus on mobility. Yes even you, the 20-something that can move like a ninja and train all day without being sore tomorrow. 

Whether you’re a weekend warrior, a desk sitter, a parent, a partner, or a competitive athlete, mobility issues will impact you at some point in your training career or life. 

Mobility isn’t just something to think about through a corrective lens. It’s something we should be proactive about. 

As we age, we all become less mobile. It’s a fact of life. Look no further than a child for proof. Kids can hold a squat position seemingly forever, especially toddlers. We’re hard pressed to find many adults, except for the most fit people we know, that can do this. 

Physical therapist Kelly Starrett, issued a challenge in this Men’s Health article that paints a picture. Stand up, warm up, sink into a full squat with your feet flat on the ground and hold it for 10 minutes. 

Mobility isn’t just about holding static positions. It translates into your daily life. Groms (children skiers and snowboarders for those of you not hip to the Colorado mountain lingo) can bounce up from a crash on a ski slope that turned them into a rolling ball of limbs, snow, and equipment which would easily end the day (or season) of an adult. Why? It certainly isn’t pain tolerance or even skill. No, it’s their ability to fall down like Gumby without causing major damage to their joints. It’s mobility. 

Combine this with the reality many of us face in our work life – long periods of time hunched over, seated in a chair, trapped, and we’re being hit with a 1-2 punch. 

If we want to stay active and pain free into our old age, we have to prioritize mobility now (whatever age you happen to be). 

This means that our time and focus in the gym should expand from becoming stronger, leaner, faster, more explosive, more swole, etc. and take into conscious account that we’re also restoring basic human physiological functionality that is being eroded daily. 

The good news is that you can easily incorporate mobility into your training. That’s why we compiled this guide covering some common mobility trouble spots and giving you some suggestions on how to tame them.

A Deep Dive on Mobility Training with Vernon Griffith

Mobility is a hot topic in the strength and conditioning / fitness world, but it’s nothing new. Physical therapists have been long familiar with the term. More often than not, they’re helping their patients with restoring mobility after an injury or corrective surgery.

What may seem new is the increased focus on proactive mobility training being brought to the forefront of S&C by trainers in the know.

It seems that everywhere you look there is another program, device, or philosophy on mobility. And for good reason. It’s important to your training. A lot more important than you might think.

For those not yet in the know, you might be asking: Is mobility just another way of saying flexibility?

The answer is no. Not exactly. It’s more complex than that and slightly more nuanced.

So we sat down with coach Vernon Griffith, an expert in mobility having trained countless people ranging from professional athletes to military operators and everyday people who just want to feel and move better.

Buckle in for another great edition of the Training Lab.

Key moments from our video interview with Mobility Training Expert, Vernon Griffith

0:24 – Intro to mobility training 
0:53 – Intro to coach Vernon and his path to becoming a mobility training expert
2:45 – What is mobility training & how do you approach it?
8:46 – Using the landmine attachment to train mobility movements
14:44 – Questions from the TrainHeroic audience

Want to learn more from coach Vernon? Ready to add a mobility training program to your training? 

Introduction

Even if you have cannons that would make Hulk Hogan in his prime blush, your upper arms might still need a little help.

Not necessarily in terms of their size or ability to bang out umpteen curls, rows, and chin-ups, but rather with regard to their range of motion and overall tissue health.

If you’re experiencing excess soreness, dealing with tightness in your elbows and/or shoulders, or just haven’t mobilized this area for a while, try spending 10 minutes on the following bicep exercises once or twice a week.

Bicep Scrape

Chin-up Hang

Biceps Opener with Stick

Introduction

If you lift heavy, hard, and often, the likelihood is that your poor old hips take a battering.

Of course, a little soreness and stiffness comes with the territory, and you need a certain level of carefully dosed training stress paired with adequate rest to prompt adaptation and obtain the results you seek.

However, it’s all too easy for your hips to lock up, causing pain and discomfort, limiting your range of motion, and inhibiting performance.

Here are 5 hip mobility exercises to help with that. Put them into action (just a few minutes a day is all you’ll need to make change) and start sorting out your hips.

Hip Capsule External Rotation

Side Hip Smash

Couch Stretch

Single Leg Flexion With External Rotation

Hip Capsule Internal Rotation

Introduction

Whether you are a weightlifter, pitcher, quarterback, tennis player, or a golfer, you’ve probably experienced elbow pain.

The fire that burns with an intensity you’ve never experienced. The elbow pain that nothing seems to extinguish. Sure, you can apply an ice pack after practice or swallow a couple of post-game ibuprofen.

Maybe you start wearing a compression sleeve, and have a little PT work done. But sure enough, that pesky elbow pain flares up again before you know it.

However, there might yet be hope. With some simple elbow exercises you can start to fix your elbow issues. These exercises will increase mobility, and strengthen the joints around the elbow.

This will prevent further injuries like golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow from occurring.

When it comes to elbow pain, the joint itself is rarely the issue.

It’s often the soft tissues above or below it that are sending excess stiffness both upstream and downstream.

While the burn comes from your elbow, it’s the surrounding muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascia that are supplying the kindling. Stoking the inferno and keeping it ablaze.

This means we must do one thing. We have to address the tacked-down tissues in your wrists and forearms.

Open up a line along the biceps and into the outer chest, and feed slack into your triceps.

All of these tissues are readily accessible and you can manipulate them with a few inexpensive tools.

A lacrosse ball, Voodoo Floss Band, barbell or roller, and medium resistance band will do the job.

This should come as good news to you. Instead of getting your elbow prepped for orthopedic surgery, you can implement non-invasive elbow exercises to start dousing the flames.

And the best part? You don’t even need to consult a professional to get started. If you spend 10 to 15 minutes a day on these elbow exercises, I’m convinced you’ll see noticeable improvements.

The benefits won’t be restricted to getting you out of pain, either. You should be able to remove adhesions that are limiting your range of motion.

You can also eliminate the distracting “damn, my elbow hurts” voice in your head, thereby improving your performance too.

Tricep Smash

Forearm Tack and Floss

Banded Lateral Opener

Elbow Voodoo Floss Flexion and Extension

Introduction

Low back pain might be the most prevalent injury among those who train, but shoulder issues are arguably a close second.

Whether it’s an impingement that limits range of motion, hypermobility that makes dislocation more likely, or the dreaded rotator cuff tear that keeps orthopedic surgeons busy to the tune of 250,000 repair procedures each year, shoulder problems are pervasive.

This means that regular shoulder mobility work is a must. But sometimes people are coming at the problem with the goal of removing restrictions and adding greater range, when in fact what’s lacking is stability and strength.

Even when people realize this, their attempted solutions fall short.

Endless variations of “rotator cuff exercises” – see five kinds of shoulder flys, endless scarecrows, and three-pound Granny weights – are the go-to, and yet often produce little more than local soreness.

While a few of these movements have a place you have to understand that there are other “big rock” exercises that do much more to stabilize and strengthen the muscles and other tissues of the shoulder and scapula area.

Here are three kettlebell exercises focused on shoulders to add to your training repertoire:

Single-arm Kettlebell Shoulder Press

Overhead Carry to Suitcase Carry

Turkish Get-up

Of all the exercises you can do to sort out your dodgy shoulder/s, the get-up arguably reigns supreme. Why?

Because it requires both a horizontal (when you’re lying on the floor) and overhead press position and tests the integrity of your shoulder complex while static and in motion. Plus, unlike many movements, the get-up involves controlling the path of a kettlebell across the transverse plane, which is why folks like the Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) prescribe it for golfers.

Not to mention that the off-arm has to provide stabilization through the shoulder as you maneuver your body from lying, to a lunge, to a standing position, and then back down. As the get-up is a highly technical exercise, you can follow the directions below and check out this video, but you’ll be best off seeking a qualified kettlebell instructor to make sure you’re getting the finer points down. 

• Lie on your back with your left leg straight and left knee bent, with your right leg flat on the floor. Then position a kettlebell next to your left shoulder and grip the handle with your left hand.
• While still gripping the kettlebell with your left hand, use your right hand to help move it toward the center of your body and then extend your left elbow
• As soon as your arm is locked out, allow your left shoulder to move to the back of the socket. Your left hand and elbow should be in a straight line over your left shoulder. Try to maintain this alignment throughout the rest of the exercise.
• Roll onto your right elbow, keeping your gaze fixed on the kettlebell
• With your right arm staying straight, push off the ground with your right leg and extend your right elbow with the right palm flat on the ground and positioned in a straight line down from the other arm, which is still gripping the kettlebell overhead
• Squeeze your butt muscles and drive off the ground with your right foot as you extend your hips toward the ceiling
• Use your right arm and leg to support you as you pull your left leg under your hips. Then place your right knee underneath your torso, making sure that you keep looking up at the kettlebell.
• Move your bodyweight toward your right side and get your torso upright. As soon as your right hand comes off the ground, pull your shoulder back and turn your arm outward. You should be in a lunge position. 
• Use your left leg to push yourself up out of the bottom position of the lunge with your torso remaining upright and weight centered over your hips
• Bring your right foot forward so it meets the left, and stand up with your feet facing forward and shoulder width apart. Your left arm should be fully extended overhead and your right arm straight out in front of you.
• Reverse the pattern to return to the floor.

Form tip: Don’t ever do an AMRAP-style workout with get-ups, but rather focus on quality and take your time between reps. In some sessions, reduce the weight (again, this should be lighter than you think you can lift to begin with until you nail the correct technique) and pick one segment of the get-up to pause at during each rep (e.g. the lunge with arm overhead, or rolling onto the elbow).

Introduction

As the years pass even your hands begin to become sore as heck. This might be just a getting old thing, but there could also be more to it.

Let’s be honest, when was the last time you thought about hand mobility, or even acknowledged that it was even a thing?

Let’s dive into some mobility fixes that can help all the sore hands out there.

When you’re performing mobility exercises, it might well be that you typically focus on the obvious areas: Major muscle groups going from head to toe over the course of a training block or hitting the body parts they just taxed in today’s session.

This makes perfect sense, but both strategies have a flaw, in that they neglect smaller yet crucial parts of the musculoskeletal system.

This can lead to excess stiffness traveling upstream and downstream, resulting in diminished power production, movement compensations that groove sub-optimal motor patterns, and, if left unaddressed, eventually injury.

In the case of sore and tight hands, this can mean that you start over gripping, which will not only compromise your grip over the long haul, but also locks down your overtaxed forearms and elbows.

Further workarounds will then occur further up the kinetic chain in the biceps, triceps, and front deltoids, which can cause or exacerbate range of motion issues and limit force generation in the shoulders.

Keep following this knock-on effect far enough, and you might start to see further over-compensations in the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spine, down through the hips, and into the lower body.

To stop this chain of events in its tracks, address acute and chronic pain, and restore full slide and glide, here are a few mobility exercises you can perform.

Two to three times a week would be fine, though if it’s a persistent issue, you could perform these movements daily.

Accumulating two minutes per exercise per hand is a good rule of thumb (pardon the pun), though you should keep going until it makes change.

Forearm Ball Smash

Forearm Scrape

Banded Wrist Distraction

Introduction

Some have sore necks all day, every day. There are several possible culprits.

It could be that your traps and the structures of the thoracic and cervical spine handle a lot of load and throughput. Whatever the case may be when excess stiffness becomes the new normal it can trigger or exacerbate headaches or even migraines.

While no one move is a magic bullet, here are four simple neck mobility exercises that can help alleviate neck pain and hopefully put laid to those headaches and migraines, too.

Neck Tack and Floss

Supraclavicular Scrub

T Spine Overhead Extension

T Spine Flexion

Introduction

Mobilizing your lower body seems pretty straightforward, right? Roll out those crazy tight quads, smash those sore hamstrings, and give those poor aching calves some attention.

But when it comes to upper body mobility, it can be a bit of a crapshoot, can’t it? The temptation is just to go after what’s most sore, whether that’s locked up shoulders, pecs that might explode if you so much as attempt one more rep, or triceps that feel like they’re on fire. But yet it’s all too easy to pass over a true workhouse: your lats.

These big bands of muscle come into play in just about every upper body exercise, from the obvious ones like pull-ups and bent-over rows in which they’re a prime mover to those in which they play more of a secondary role push and bench presses.

They’re also involved as stabilizers in moves that you might not consider, such as deadlifts, squats, and kettlebell swings.

Such stiffness doesn’t exist in isolation and isn’t confined to the lats themselves.

This can mean that if you don’t take mobilize your lats when they’re all bunched up, they could cause pain in the ribs and side of the chest wall, alter mechanics in several major movement patterns and even be a contributor to that shoulder and hip issues that have been bugging you for so long.

So if you clean up your lats, you can positively impact the range of motion, tone, and neuromuscular control of tissues and joints above and below your lats.

With that in mind, here are a few exercises to incorporate into your mobility routine. Even doing them for two to five minutes a side twice a week will make a big difference.

Banded Bully With Extension Bias

Bar Hang

Lateral Opener

Lat Smash