Flexibility used to be an easy to understand concept: when you do the splits or touch your hands behind your shoulder blades, you are flexible. And if you are not flexible, you will need to do some stretching exercises. But in recent years the term mobility has become more popular, and it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing.
Mobility work involves more than stretching. You can use a foam roller or do exercises that both build strength and give you a greater range of motion in your joints. As you work on your flexibility, you may be doing more dynamic stretches than static stretches. Because flexibility is part of mobility, but it’s not the same thing.
The experts’ definitions vary slightly, but the consensus seems to be as follows:
flexibility is how far you can move a joint without injuring yourself. Passive stretching, such as For example, trying to touch your toes while your legs are on the floor tests the limits of your flexibility, particularly how far your hamstrings can passively elongate. It roughly corresponds to your passive range of motion.
mobilityas opposed to how far you can move a joint. Imagine a dancer standing up and lifting her straight leg off the floor in front of her. If she can get her foot high off the ground, she has great mobility. But it’s about more than just hamstring flexibility: it also has the strength, balance, and ability to allow your leg to assume that position.
Why mobility is important
Most things in life require mobility, not just flexibility. Whether you’re squatting with a barbell or picking up a toddler, good mobility means you can bend your ankles, knees, and hips enough to keep your feet steady on the floor while you lift the weight (the barbell or the toddler ) keep safe.
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People with tight calf muscles often have difficulty going to the right depth is appropriate, and one step toward better squats is to get more flexibility in your calves to improve the freedom of movement of your ankles. But it’s about more than just flexibility. Some other things that can affect your mobility:
- The structure of your joints. For example, For some people, the acetabulum is more at the front of the pelvis, for others more to the side. The exact position of the muscles and their starting points is not always the same from person to person. The structure of your body determines the range of motion that is possible before you even consider flexibility.
- stability. Sometimes a muscle needs to contract in order to stabilize a joint and therefore cannot relax too much while still keeping your body safe and under control. Even if we sometimes see strength and mobility as opposites, sometimes it can help to become stronger.
- More power. Sometimes we are just not strong enough to put our bodies in a certain position. The dancer in our earlier example can not only hit this position with flexibility; She also needs to strengthen her hip flexors to be able to lift the weight of her extended leg.
- Whether warmed up or not. A warm muscle can stretch further than a cold one, so it’s not uncommon for you to feel stiff at the beginning of a workout and have better range of motion towards the end.
This is how you achieve better mobility
The first step in working on your mobility is figuring out which movements to make and why. Then find a routine or ask a trainer for steps to improve that particular type of mobility.
For example, we have some suggestions here to improve your ankle mobility for squats. The first is not tedious at all; It is a tip to use shoes with heels or plates. Even if your ankle cannot technically move any further in its range of motion, you can move in a more controlled manner, which effectively increases the mobility of your hips so that you can crouch deeper. Our other tips are stretching and using a foam roller.
Foam rollers are popular for mobility because they stretch your muscles at the micro level without you having to perform a specific, static stretching motion. After rolling the muscles that need to be pliable with foam, you will likely find that you can move them more easily. Because of this, it is often done as part of a warm up.
Dynamic stretches can also help with range of motion and work well as part of a warm-up workout. Instead of sitting down and forcing a muscle into a stretched position, you are using your body to actively move through a range of motion. Controlled joint rotations or CARs, are a type of dynamic stretching in which you slowly move a joint, such as your shoulder, through its range of motion. As you move your arm in ever larger circles, you warm up the muscles involved while working on strength and flexibility.
Static stretching also has its place in a mobility routine. Even if flexibility is only part of mobility, it is an important part! You may or may not need static stretches for your mobility goals, but incorporating them can be an effective way to extend your muscles’ ability to elongate.
