A Guide to Movement and Mobility

Mobility Guides, Sorted by Body Part, At Bottom of Page

By “Mobility” we are referring to the ability to have stability and strength through full ranges of functional movement patterns. In this guide, we hope to bridge the gap between gold standard physical therapy practices and actionable things you can do daily, at home, to identify areas that could use improvement, present a method and way of thinking that will help you re-gain full ranges of motion, resolve nagging pains, build resiliency to injury, and boost recovery your recovery from exercise.

Our mobility efforts should provide tangible results. We want to feel good, have movement options, and to not be limited by pain or dysfunction. When these things are in line, our performance skyrockets along with our resiliency to injury. The base of it all is to be capacity and efficacy in performing functional movements. Before we assume any issues we are having are actually joint or tissue restriction related, we need to start with a solid understanding of how to move our body and optimize our positions. If you haven’t watched our foundation videos, this should be the first place you start.

Most nagging pains are caused by overuse. Overuse can occur with any movement patterns and we can also build up a tolerance to any movement pattern, but, there are more and less optimal positions with the most optimal positions allowing the biggest buffer zone to overuse injury and highest ceiling for performance. When we are using sub-optimal techniques, we increase the risk of injury while simultaneously creating leverages and positions that require more effort for smaller amounts of work. Pain can be a chicken and an egg sort of thing. Does the poor movement quality cause the restriction or does the restriction cause the poor movement quality? Typically it’s both, but the first place we need to go is to check our technique. Many times, people’s pain goes away simply by fixing technique issues.

Movement Tests

Now that you’ve reviewed your foundation of movement, we can take the next step and do some basic movement tests to identify if you have any functional movement restrictions. Through these tests, we can identify the specific areas that will need a more than maintenance dose of mobility work. Once we have these areas identified, we’ll walk you though the strategies of designing a mobility routine that fits your exact needs.

General Mobility Work

More can be better, especially when you’ve identified specific areas that you’d like to get back up to snuff. But, a maintenance amount of mobility work that will develop full ranges of motion over time is actually very reasonable. Our recommendation is to perform 10 minutes of mobility every morning with the goal of hitting end range positions of every body part and shape while also hitting some goofy positions. Over time, daily exposure to end range positions, goes an extremely long way. At the MovementLink.FIT Gym, we warm-up with this type of strategy in every class to make sure people are getting consistent exposure. Check-out examples here:

Specific Mobility Exercises

Along with, or part of, our 10 minutes of daily mobility exercises should be targeted, specific mobility exercises. This would be using mobility tools like a foam roller, massage ball, voodoo band, etc., to target specific areas based on your movement tests or just how you feel while performing your 10 minutes of mobility exercises.

Below are targeted mobility guides designed to help you check in on specific areas of your body, check ranges of motion, and perform mobility exercises designed to keep us feeling great!

Some mobility terminology:

First of all, unlike some of the below name suggests and unlike how some of the exercises may feel, mobility work should be a very calm practice that is optimized with integrated breathwork. Along with some joint, tissue, and nerve stimuli, it is the desensitization of pain signals that seems to be the major benefitting stimulus at play. Our brain is in constant communication with our muscles, tendons, ligaments, and nerves and is always on guard to protect us. When we reach end ranges of motion that our body does not have a lot of experience with, it protects us by limiting our movement and power output (read performance). So, with our joint distractions, smashing, and stretching, one of the major things we are trying to accomplish is end range movements and applying pressure to tissues all while our breathing is relaying signals to the brain that we are safe and it is safe for those areas to relax and move in that way. So, we like to look at it as we are getting comfortable in positions and with pressure that is uncomfortable and through this, we can tie our new ranges of motion that don’t trigger panic in the brain into our functional movement patterns.

Joint Distraction

Using an external force (like gravity or a band) to help pull bones into more appropriate positions within the joint capsule where we then like to get quality movement in at many different angles. This helps the joint move better and can help improve joint impingements. If a joint is sticky, the impacts of smashing and stretching will be very limited. Flossing is another term that gets thrown around with joint distractions as it’s like we are cleaning up the area between bones.

Smashing

Using an external object (like a foam roller, massage ball, your fingers, etc.) to apply pressure to tissues. We smash one general area at a time as we allow ourselves to relax into the pressure, and possibly move through ranges of motion with pressure applied to the area. Scrubbing is when we are smashing, but move the apparatus around in a slightly larger area.

Stretching

Holding end range positions. We like to add in maximally contracting our muscles and then relaxing into the positions deeper. If our stretching is in warm-ups, we keep it more dynamic, simply meaning that we don’t just sit still in a position for too long.

Mobility Breathwork

There are two main breathing techniques we use when doing breathwork:

Exhale twice as long as our inhales.
Full, 100% breath in as we tighten our muscles and then relax and slowly exhale our air.

These breathing techniques can also be a huge boost to recovery when done right after a workout which is why the cool-down can be such a valuable time. We are already hot and sweaty which is great for mobility work and it is a major benefit to use the same breathing techniques we use in mobility work, so, instead of only breathing, we’ll do some mobility with our breathwork.