Intoduction and Course Overview

By Will Newton

Mobility matters!

The older we get, the more the maintenance and even development of our ranges of movement impact positively on our lives.

Even though I talk about the development of mobility, it's not so much a matter of gaining mobility as regaining mobility which we've lost over the course of our lives.

The reasons we lose mobility include...

INJURY

Anybody who has lived a physical life - be that sport, work or just being active - will almost certainly have picked up injuries that limit the range of movement around one or more joints.

Some of these injuries involve the addition of othopaedic metalwork to fix things like broken ankles or even joint replacements. While some of this will limit your joint mobility, some of that lost range can still be regained. It's a matter of structural restrictions versus soft tissue restrictions and is usually a combination of these.

DISUSE DUE TO LIFESTYLE

We've all heard about the "use it or lose it" principle.

It applies just as much to mobility as it does to strength or cardiovascular fitness. The lifestyles we live and the comforts we've created encourage us to use far less of our natural movement range than we would if we lived as our ancestors did.

Our bodies are clever and always look for ways to get rid of redundancies. If we don't use a movement pattern, we can be sure it will be de-prioritised and ultimately lost.

REPETITIVE EXERCISE

Always doing the same or similar exercises in a limited range of movement will reduce mobility for the same reasons as the disuse just discussed.

Distance running, for example, happens within a fairly small range of movement. If that's all we ever do, we'll adapt to that range and lose much of our mobility in unused patterns. Is it any wonder that many runners are extremely inflexible; it's not that running is a poor exercise choice - quite the contrary - it should just not be our only form of exercise.

Build muscles that are big beyond what's ideal for function and your mobility will suffer too.

Similar principles operate across physical activity from cycling to powerlifting towards the extremes.

GENETIC AND NURTURE FACTORS

Some people are just very bendy and others aren't.

If you're hyper-mobile, you may not need to spend much time working on mobility. If you have a condition like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, working on joint stability is a bigger priority.

But your genetic inheritance isn't a hard limit, it's a tendency. If you're one of the inflexible folks, you simply have to be more disciplined about developing and maintaining optimal mobility.

I am one of those people. When I was a kid, I couldn't touch my toes. As a very anxious child, that's probably no surprise; my nervous system was always "on the alert". Nowadays, I don't even need to warm up to get my hands close to flat on the floor.

The goal of mobility training is to achieve a balance. A level of mobility that allows you to function well as a physical human is enough. There is little benefit outside of having a cool party trick to being able to tie yourself in knots. And as you'll discover, that level of flexibility doesn't necessarily equal good mobility.

As discussed in the lesson video, here's an overview of the course structure...

So, keeping in mind that optimum mobility makes a massive difference to our enjoyment of physical activity, let's get started.

Ready for the next lesson?

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