As the world of Fitness is always expanding, you may be asking yourself “how the heck am I going to add Mobility into my routine”? “I barely fit in enough time to do a HITT workout or a quick run into my day!” Mobility has become integral in recent years to help keep you injury free, to enable you to get you to a better place within your program and to actually help heal past injuries. You make no gains and do yourself no favours by simply jumping into your fitness routine without spending 5-10 minutes on mobility or even adding a day where you just practice mobility and stretching. If you are wanting to perhaps squat deeper or increase your Romanian Deadlift Range of motion you can learn to do so by practicing the exercise without any weight before you start, just do the range of motion. As we age it becomes more and more difficult to move smoothly and effortlessly as we did when we were younger. It does not have to be this way if you take your body through mobility movements.
You might have a desire to swing your golf club in that full range of motion and you get stuck because of a tight shoulder girdle, you can help open that area up with practicing more mobility, using a band or a TRX to increase your range of motion can be super helpful. Practicing Mobility before your exercise also helps to circulate synovial fluid through the joints, warms up your muscular tissues and will give you better performance in the long run. On your off workout days you may not have as much Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) if you get into a “Mobility for Recovery” program on the day after a gruelling weight training program, a major run or any workout that taxes you. Think of a runner, as he/she ages and only runs with little stretching or mobility recovery the body is always stressed in the same joints, as they keep working in the same plane of motion and the impact remains the same, the muscles are worked the same over and over and soon they shorten and the body starts to pull into that position of the runner, ever so slightly forward bending, the strides become shorter, the neck starts to be misaligned and the head forward poking. Eventually injury sets in and advice is given to lay off or to start something else, to go to biking perhaps but there we are in the same plane of motion again, with less impact for sure but if he/she had practiced proper range of motion, mobility and stretching along side the running chances are that the sport would have been an enjoyment for much longer.
As a Personal Fitness Trainer I have seen so many people over the years with preventable injuries, myself included, become restricted in doing what they love. Repetitive motion without proper recovery results in overuse and abuse of the joints, bones, tendons and muscles involved. If you love what you do learn to loosen and lengthen and prepare properly and recover to keep on keeping on. So swing those legs, twist that body, go deeper, jump higher, swing wider and move better with a properly designed individual mobility program. I promise your body, mind and soul will thank you.
