Flexible Follies: Avoiding the Mobility Traps

In the last two posts, you learned how a poor vocabulary when describing sensations leads to ineffective actions. Now, I’m going to teach you why they’re ineffective. 

We’ve got some odd fetishes about range of motion. They’re built upon misunderstandings: more is believed to be better and curative, and you need to get it ASAMFP.

Imagine this common scene: Fred, a physical therapist, stands over Ty, who is supine on a luxuriously cushioned table with wobbly chopsticks for legs. Fred spends about fifteen minutes coercing Ty’s “tight” right hip into forty-five degrees of internal rotation, the “proper” amount, and they both are conditioned to think, “Ah, finally, a ‘free’ hip.” Job done. 

That would be true if humans were made by Toyota. But since Ty’s brain did nothing to get that range, he has no idea how to use it. Red flag. He won’t keep it. Red flag. He will reinvest into the movement patterns that brought him to Fred’s table. Red flag.

“You’re just always tight, Ty.” Red flag.

If you were Ty, what makes you think you could keep this new range of motion when Fred keeps giving it to you—and you’ve never kept it? 

Why do you need a band or someone’s hand to move your body? Did you have a stroke? 

Your joints and their muscles evolved to move actively, with full participation of your motor cortex. 

What do you think happens if find yourself in a new joint position you haven’t visited in years or decades? And without first demonstrating an inkling of strength, endurance, or power in those positions? What if you visit that new range, at speed, on accident, and in your sport—without muscular or conscious control, nor capacity for this range you never train? 

I shudder at the thought of this normal occurrence.

Joint and tissue health is about control. So is performance. Rather than someone else’s hands or some object, the better your brain orchestrates your muscles and their respective joints, the better you will feel and perform.

The better words you employ to describe your problems, the better solutions you’ll find. You won’t need to pay Fred every week or pneumatically hammer muscles into mush or impale yourself on any device marketed for your “muscular health.” 

So let’s say you’ve started gaining ROM by using that big brain of yours and moving yourself into desirable positions. Assuming they’re beneficial postures, how do you get them to show up in competition without worrying about them all the time? In the next post, I’ll show you how I ensure my clients get that progress—and keep it.

— AE

P.S. Sorry, Fred.