Today’s blog post is centred around an area often forgotten and underdone, and that is mobility. A key and fundamental practice all trainers and athletes, beginner or advanced, should be incorporating into their routines if they want to perform at their best and protect themselves from potential injury. Mobility is one of those things people find later in their careers, it is usually looked into when one experiences an injury, recovers from that injury and then practices mobility in hopes of never again experiencing that trauma, but this should not be the case. There should be no injury in the first place, we should be protecting our bodies as best we can so that guilt and bad circumstances do not force us to take precautions we should already have had set in the first place. In this post, we will dive a little deeper into the importance and relevance of a mobility routine in all of your proceeding workouts from today onwards.
Stretching
Recently, there has been much controversy surrounding the practice of stretching prior to working out where often studies will look at the acute or training effects of stretching. Many studies have evaluated a loss in athletes’ strength of a stretched muscle, termed “stretch-induced strength loss” and a decrease in performance of runners and jumpers. Some studies claim the loss in performance is a result of the stretched muscle having become supple and therefore producing a lower elastic response when generating “kinetic energy”. Ultimately, it does depend on your style of training and what you are training for. It must also be taken into account that the reason why stretching affects performance remains inconclusive, but it is safe to say static stretching prior to weight-training would be counterintuitive.
Mobility
Instead, we suggest mobility. Why? Because it’s amazing! Mobility is the increasing of the range of motion, prevention of injury and improvement in performance, all combined into one 10 minute routine of pure harmony.
Oxford Dictionary definition: Mobility – “The ability to move or be moved freely and easily.“
FFUK definition: Mobility – “Optimal flow of the muscles in the body to produce efficient movement patterns”
We suggest performing a mobility routine prior to every workout; light or heavy, quick or long, allocate a 10-minute routine anywhere in the day before a workout and prepare your body. Remember, the idea behind the exercises is not to “muscle” them, by that we mean avoid trying to move resistance with strength and instead flow through the exercise by moving and controlling the muscle, resistance will follow. Lastly, remember the exercises below are only suggestions, change and adapt to suit your preference.
Mobility Routine
Pulse raiser:
– Skip 3-5 minutes
Main:
– Cat-cow
– Scorpion
– Kneeling twists
– Squats
– Scapula retraction & protraction (hanging and kneeling)
– Downward dog
– Banded internal & external rotations
– Banded Lat pullover
– Banded row
If you found this post insightful, why not check out some of our previous posts on our blog page or if you are interested in becoming a qualified personal trainer check out our main page for course information and if you have any questions feel free to email us at info@focusfitnessuk.com.
Written by Daniyal Siddiqui.