Want to know how to build a strong & resilient body while also reducing pain and reducing your change for injury? Try incorporating these 5 steps to your mobility practice & watch the quality of your lifts ( and your life) Instantly!
- Introduce frequent movement
First and foremost, you need to understand how powerful frequency is if you’re hoping to achieve smooth and pain free movement.
The body is an incredible thing. Part of the reason it’s so incredible is it’s ability to adapt to the specific demands placed on it. You can call this “adaptation”, or “the principle of specificity”, but basically all it means is that your body gets better at doing the things you do the most. Including movement
How often should you be moving?
Every. Damn. Day.
This ensures that your body gets comfortable working in ranges you haven’t paid attention to in a great while. This not only helps you maintain what joint accessibility you currently have, but helps you build new ranges over time as you get more mobile.
- Master irradiation
Irradiation is the body’s ability to co-contract all the muscles at once to provide an internal isometric stimulus. Let me explain
Isometrics are a key player when mastering your movement, as it activates all the tissue surrounding the joint. This is a very good thing. It’s your muscles, tendons, and ligaments job to pull the bones into position when performing a movement, so it only makes sense that we want those tissues to be as active as possible.
This ensures that you are actively achieving your joints true range of motion, and not just passively yanking yourself into different positions
Isometrics are also an incredibly safe and effective way to add significant load & push your body to its limits with a very low chance of injury. Which brings us into our next topic
- Add load (force is the language of cells)
Once you’ve mastered irradiation and applying internal load via isometrics, the next step in mastering your movement is adding external loads.
External loads can be a passive force like pushing into a wall or another immovable object as hard as possible for time
Or it can be holding onto a dumbbell, kettlebell, ankle weights, stick, or Indian club when going through controlled articular rotations (CARs), otherwise known as “joint circles”. I’ll go more into this when I launch the “5 day Bulletproof Body Challenge” on June 16th.
One of the most important things you should take away from this blog, is that force is the language of cells. If you wish to make a change in the body, you need to apply some type of internal or external stressor. This brings us right back to the principal of specificity, the body’s ability to adapt to the demands placed on it.
- Work in end ranges
I hope you’re still paying attention, cause if you aren’t you’re not going to want to miss this next part.
You must work in your end range if you hope to build MORE range, if you don’t you’ll just be strengthening the ranges you currently have; that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when the goal is to increase those ranges of motion you want to make sure you’re challenging yourself enough to make a change in your tissue.
This can get uncomfortable at times, but at the end of the day we know we must place specific demands on the body in order to create change.
How do you tell when you’re in an end range?
Simple. Take your ankle for example. In a half kneeling position, keep your front heel planted firmly on the floor and push your knee pass your front toes.
Eventually you’ll get to the point where you feel a stretch through the calf & your heel wants to come off the floor. That is your end range & where you should start your work
This is so important because your end range is your weakest points of movements and where you are the most vulnerable for non contact injury.
Think of training in your end ranges as making a small safety deposit for when things go wrong. Frequent deposits will grow into something you can fall back on when in a sticky situation (catching yourself from a fall and breaking your wrist is a good example of a Sticky situation that can be avoided)
- Save the work
Last but certainly not any less important than the rest, is saving the work you’ve done
Why are you doing mobility in the first place?
What goal are you trying to accomplish from incorporating more mobility into your life?
We don’t just do mobility cause it looks cool, it’s because we’re trying to achieve a goal. Saving the work helps us achieve that goal faster, and keeps the purpose of our mobility front and center.
We want to move strong & pain free. So we want to USE all that movement we just unlocked in our session.
Taking the example above further. After you’ve worked on that ankle mobility and lengthening that calf tissue, a great way to reinforce the purpose of that movement & use that tissue is to perform slow calf raises. This effectively utilizes the tissues you’ve just worked on stretching and transforms it into strong & usable tissue that can withstand whatever you throw at it.
That my friends is how you master your mobility and create a bulletproof body. Stay tuned for more information on the 5 Day Bulletproof Body challenge launching on June 14th
