Most people I come in to contact with on a daily basis tend to need a lot of things. Strength, conditioning, work capacity, abz, nutrition counselling, a credit check, you know, the run of the mill gym stuff.

One thing a lot of people do need is mobility training, but in some instances it’s more specialized than just stretching your shoulder or hitting up the ol hammies. For instance, let’s take someone with the typical office workers posture, where their upper back is slumped and their hips are rolled into a posterior tilt. I call this the Mr. Burns Syndrome.

 

When people sit like this, they tend to have a forward head posture, which means their upper traps and levator muscles are working all the time to keep their head from falling forward, leading many people to say they carry their stress in their neck. From there, the low back muscles tend to sit in a stretched out position, meaning they’re holding tension at their near end range of motion all the time, making the low back somewhat finnicky and occasionally resulting in “tweaks” when someone bends forward.

The common thoughts would be to stretch out those upper traps and low back to help relieve the symptoms, however these muscles are already stretched out and near their end range while holding tension to keep the body parts together. Stretching them may provide some short term relief, but it would likely cause the muscles to either tighten up really quickly or result in some instability in the associated joints.

The same concept applies when you go in the opposite direction into more of an anterior tilt, but in this instance some of the stretched out muscles are a little different.

 

In this instance, the hip flexors tend to always be working over time, as would the muscles right around where the rib cage meets in to the low back, commonly known as the thoracolumbar region. Those pesky tight hip flexors are commonly the bane of a runners existence, especially if they aren’t getting the hip extension needed to drive their run stride, and as a result they drive all the extension from the low back. The psoas works to keep the spine from over extending, essentially acting as an e-brake for the extension mode.

Stretching out the hip flexors without getting the other core muscles involved would decrease the response from the psoas, making it a less stable low back, and as a result causing either some biomechanical strain, or just leading into more tension down the road.

This is a vicious cycle a lot of people get caught up with: a muscle feels tight so you stretch it, which might make it feel okay for a little, but then it tightens up again and needs more stretching. It typically never ends, since the cause of the tightness isn’t being identified.

So feeling tense isn’t necessarily a need to stretch more, but might be a requirement to work on strengthening instead.

Let’s say you just want to walk around and not have any issues. Most walking strides will only ever involve 20 degrees of hip extension and about 30 degrees of hip flexion, so a big range of motion to walk isn’t necessary, but if you want to sit or stand out of a chair it would require a little more mobility. This is especially important in someone who has some low back pain and a history of driving all of their flexion and extension through their spine.

 

For someone like this, they may need some specific mobility work through their hips in order to get them using that as the movement centre instead of getting all of the movement from the spine, but it would have to be in concert with teaching how to create some stability through the spine so it doesn’t keep trying to drive the movement.

Maybe someone has an old injury, like a broken ankle, that has recovered to pain free but still has some limited movement. This is something that could be worked with, but it might respond best to some aggressive manual therapy compared to simple stretch-relax methodologies. If the ankle is tight because the hips aren’t driving extension and in order to walk forward the calves have to do pretty much everything, then stretching and anything that would get blood flowing through the muscles would help to increase range of motion.

Let’s say you want to overhead press, but you’ve never had enough range of motion through your shoulders to do it properly and without your shoulders throwing a hissy fit after each session or without your low back arching hard into extension. If someone were to look at you dead on from the front, your palms point back behind you, and your head is forward from your rib cage, plus if you were to run a finger along the lateral borders of your sternum your pec tendons would be so tender from holding so much tension for so long they would put up a fight just from a feathers touch.

If your thoracic spine is flexed forward, it’s going to affect your ability to get your arms overhead, without any issue whatsoever from the shoulders.

 

You could spend half of your session stretching your shoulders to get more range of motion and never get a millimetre of extra room unless you start looking at the thoracic spine.

You can see that gaining range of motion and controllable mobility is rarely as simple as “here’s an exercise for this part of your body, now do it and you’ll be awesome.” There is always a specific outcome for an exercise, but it has to be for the right reason. Sometimes the interconnections are distant, making determining the root cause a little tricky.

For instance, a few weeks ago I was in London getting ready to teach a seminar with Tony Gentilcore, and managed to book some sessions with a few people beforehand to walk them through some one on one training. One individual complained of chronic hip tightness and stiffness, in spite of taking weekly yoga classes, stretching every day and doing everything he could to get more mobility.

When I assessed him, he had next to zero degrees of hip internal rotation, but when he was laying on the table his shoulders were about 3 inches off the surface and his neck was kind of kinked up like it was hard for him to put his head down that low. His thoracic spine was pretty flexed, even at rest. I checked the range of motion through his shoulders and his anterior structures were all restricted significantly with tender points all over. I had him do some self release work through his pecs, sternalis (on either side of the sternum) and subclavian muscles (right beneath the collar bones) which were incredibly tight, and then without having him move from the table or alter position, I re-tested his hip range of motion.

His internal rotation was now more than 20 degrees on both sides, to which he was audibly impressed, as was his accompanying friend. It was like I was frickin Gandalf or something.

The thoracic spine restrictions were causing him to live in a posterior tilt (that and all the cycling), and he was only able to stand up because his low back was getting about triple the extension it would normally get. The hips were always running to keep the pelvis and spine together, as well as to get him moving. Once he was able to get some range of motion through the ribs and anterior shoulder, the thoracic spine was able to extend a little easier, which reduced the posterior tilt, which allowed the hips to move without as much restriction. Strong science-ing here.

 

This may all sound really confusing, but the cool thing is there’s a really simple schematic to put it all together. Most mobility issues seem to come down to three commonalities:

• Reduced thoracic mobility, specifically through extension or rotation
• Reduced lumbar stability, specifically during deep rhythmic breathing without holding of the breath.
• Reduced Hip mobility, specifically through frontal plane movements and rotation.

Each of the scenarios I painted earlier could be solved with attacking these three aspects. Sure, if someone had shoulder surgery, that would be the direct area where increasing range of motion would be most effective, but those are the special cases that don’t account for 99.9% of the restricted movement capabilities you will see in a day to day life.  The really cool part is when you start to hone in on what is the best aspect needed to get more mobility.

It’s easy to put the pieces of the puzzle together once you know where to look. From there it’s just picking the methods you want to use. As Ralph Waldo Emmerson said “Of methods there are a million and then then some, but of principles there are few. The man who understands the principles can choose their own methods.”

These principles are the corner stone of ,y video product Ruthless Mobility, which is on sale only until the end of July 4th, 2016. This video series covers the anatomy, physiology, and application of how the body responds best to see increases in range of motion, sometimes in as little as 2 breaths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This workshop discusses all of the information I’ve used to put together my approach for getting massive increases in range of motion for everyone from joint replacement clients to pro athletes, olympic gold medalists, weekend warriors, office workers with chronic musculoskeletal issues, fitness enthusiasts and medical professionals who have an idea of what they’re doing.

I want you to get the best results possible, which is why this product is on sale for only $40 until the end of the day, then it doubles in price. This is a steal of a deal, and with the information in this video series I know you’ll see some immediate responses. You just have to act quickly to take advantage of it.

—> Click HERE to get more info and your copy of Ruthless Mobility <—

Hurry, the sale ends at midnight on July 4th, 2016.