Mobility: So what do I do?

Here it is.  The final mobility post (for now).

What can you do?

Just as you would practice stability exercises for stability. And you would practice strength exercises for strength.

You need to practice mobility exercises if you would like to improve your mobility.

At a basic level, joint rolls.  Circling your arms and legs, wrists and ankels gradually increasing the range of motion, making sure you do clockwise and anticlockwise, working all the planes of motion. Light (or heavier) weights can help if your movements are performed correctly.

Specific and dynamic work.

Then there are more complex patterns you can practice.  Things like clubs, kettlebells and bulgarian bags can help.  But remember that they are but tools.

Of course bodyweight is the most simple and accessible option, and in the long run can probably teach you a lot more as you are forced to focus on principle rather than form.  But I digress.

Ultimately, practice mobility to gain mobility.  SAID. Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand.

Eventually the mobility and the strength exercises will blur together as you cannot have one without the other.

That is true strength.

Think flexible steel, bamboo rather than rigid oak or stiff stone.

Passive Therapies

My last post on the topic of crutches is something that is close to my heart.  I generally dislike passive therapies if they are not followed up by active remedies/practices.

Some technical sounding words, but what does it mean?

Let me clarify.  Health care I believe is a process involving education, inspiration and empowerment.  Of the client.

That may not sit well with some of my colleagues for I have already had this discussion numerous times with friends, family and others in the profession.

So if the only treatment that is provided by a therapist, by whatever name and in whatever shape or from, requires the client to do nothing and make no changes to his/her life then will that really fix the problem?  By which I mean the source of the problem.  So for example if massage, foam rolling or even assisted stretching is utilised to increase mobility, then I would consider that passive therapy.  The client has something done to him or her.  It probably feels good too but if the real problem of inefficient patterns that lead to the reduced mobility is not addressed then the client soon becomes dependent.  Only temporary relief is provided with no long term changes.  Because the client is not empowered, not educated and probably not inspired.

However, this temporary increase in mobility from this passive therapy is a powerful time for change.  This is the time to educate, empower and inspire the client to clean up movement patterns and address the source of the problem.  Because now the client has probably developed some trust and rapport with the therapist and is feeling a little bit better about him/herself.

Used in this manner, passive therapies can be a powerful precursor to corrective work.

However, this is too often the ending point of a session.  Or simple and ineffective muscle based exercises are prescribed.  They are not totally ineffective as they build some armouring but they are ineffective in the sense that they do not address the underlying movement problem.  So called rotator cuff exercises are a good example, as my current focus is on shoulders.

On top of this, clients are often urged to not mobilise their shoulders.  You read it right.  It makes sense in a way too.

“Oh, your shoulder hurts when you lift it up? Then don’t do it!”

Ok, nothing wrong there.  But now you have a client with a shoulder that is non functional in that it can only perform within a very limited range.  And if you believe in the old adage of “use it or lose it”, then you will eventually lose that range of motion altogether.  How can that be a good thing?  Now you can no longer raise your arm above a certain height! (often prescribed as horizontal).

So what is the solution?  Retrain the pattern so that the client can safely raise the arm.  Sure it is a process and may be difficult at first but everything is difficult at first.  And the benefits are long term and powerful.  That is what I mean by an active therapy.  First, the client is educated on what to do, why they are doing it (it has nothing to do with muscle strength in most cases), then because they can feel the benefits they are inspired to keep doing them.  Rather than being a simply patch job, they now have a cure.  And most importantly, they are empowered in that they are not reliant on their therapist.  When they are ready for more work or if they would prefer more guidance or assistance then they can opt for more.  Because freedom requires choice.

That is health care, otherwise it is just sick care.

One is a solution, one is a simple bandaid.

So the problem is not with passive therapies per se as they can be very useful.  But if therapy becomes a crutch, a dependence then that is not a good outcome.

Passive therapy must be followed by genuine corrective strategies that addresses the underlying problem.

Massage to mobility

So I’ve looked at foam rolling, stretching, and yoga as the main ‘mobility aids’ so far.  Next is massage.

Firstly, like the other modalities, I believe massage can have the potential to unlock blockages in the body so it can be beneficial in that sense.  However, again if it is abused and utilised as the main form of corrective work then it too becomes a crutch.

The main point of these corrective and restorative practices is so that they can enable you to move better.  Which includes movement retraining/practice.  It is about movement not just muscles.  The nervous system is responsible for coordinating and producing movements.  If this is done efficiently, then the muscles will do their jobs efficiently too.  If not, well…

It is a matter of motor patterns and neural pathways not simply muscles.

But back to massage, yes it can be beneficial if you are really bound up.  So long as you can clean up your movement.  But if you simply keep returning to it again and again then it becomes a matter of dependency.  Massage then becomes a crutch.  And you already know what I think of those!

Yoga, the elephant in the room

It is clear watching people attempt to stretch their muscles that stretching is like any movement or skill.  Do it wrong and at best you get nothing out of it.  Do it wrong and worse things can happen.  I have been observing over the last few weeks and it’s scary what I have seen people do to themselves.

It seems the hardest thing to do is maintaining the natural curve of the spine.  Most will compromise this to try to get deeper in the stretch when in fact all they are doing is destroy their spines.

And here I’d like to segue into the practice of modern Indian yoga.

Because it is here, in the individual’s quest to get deeper into a pose, that I often see injuries.  First thing, lack of spinal integrity. Which carries over into other joints.  No benefit for the muscles you are attempting to stretch or the joints you are damaging.

And this is mainly because yoga has been mostly watered down today for general consumption.  Rather than a holistic path of inner and outer transformation, it is often no more than a stretch class.

Yoga is really a path of alignment.  Align the outer to align the inner.  It is the same in martial arts and other spiritual paths that call for wholeness not parts.

The stretch is a consequence of the alignment not the cause or even goal.  And often just working on the body will not work.  That is why I do not use simple passive stretching by itself.  I use mobility drills and would only use stretching sensations as feedback for alignments.

Because if you can get the alignment right, the muscles will work properly and also rest properly when they are supposed to.  And often the issue is not even in the body.  That is why continual tugging on the muscle to stretch it does not work.

Instead learn to align things in the body.  Alignment matters.  Put the joints in the right position and good things happen.

Not only that, but our physical alignment affects our inner alignments.  Spiritual practitioners have known this through the ages.

I have been saying this for a while now.  But not many listen.

Let us look at the physical side for now.

How alignment affects muscles.  Because that is what most people think of first and care about when it comes to the physical body.

The term I have discovered is ‘arthrokinetic reflex’.  And surprise, surprise, is nothing new.

It was a term used by medical researchers back in 1956 to refer to the way in which joint movement can reflexively cause muscle activation or inhibition.

Joint movement.  Joint positioning.

Does that sound familiar at all?

Because that is at the heart of why so many poorly performed stretching routines simply do not work.  Because you are not giving your poor muscles a chance to let go.

But yoga is not meant to be a static practice.  That is just one aspect of it.  In both Indian and other styles of yoga, practice is used as a dynamic practice and a spiritual one too.  The practice is aimed at strengthening, connecting and developing both the physical and other bodies.

Because being a floppy, flexible noodle is no good for anyone.  Lax joints are not strong or healthy.  It is simply at the opposite end of the spectrum.  Without control of joint range of motion, injury awaits.  At the end of the day, strength and mobility go hand in hand.  So I still maintain that the best way to achieve it is through dynamic mobility and strength exercises.

But more on that next time.

The futility of simply stretching (and foam rolling)

Now I know that this post is going to annoy certain people but I simply must get it out there. So here goes.

There is a misguided notion within the health and fitness industries that sensations of tightness in the body are caused by tight muscles.  So the obvious answer is simply stretch that muscle.  Until (for some reason they cannot explain) the muscle/s just tightens up again and so you simply stretch it.  Repeat until (or if) you realise it simply is not working.  It probably just means that you just have tight “muscle X”.  Because it couldn’t be that simply stretching out a tight muscle is not working.

There is research out there that states passive stretching (or what most people associate with stretching) does NOT increase muscle length.  It may reorganise muscle fiber orientation and increase what is known as stretch tolerance, but the muscle fiber does not actually lengthen.  I’m not even going to go into stretch reflexes here.  There are also more advanced methods of ‘stretching’ out there but they do not belong in this category of simple passive stretching so I will not touch on them for now.  I repeat, this piece is about so called ‘passive stretching’ and foam rolling (and associated techniques).

In recent times, this simple stretching phenomenon has branched out with the advent of ‘toys and products’ ,ie there is money to be made, that aid in releasing these same tight muscles.  Call it self myofascial release, foam rolling, trigger point therapy, it doesn’t matter.

You are still simply chasing the pain.  It is reliance on an external crutch.  It is self inflicted violence.

I was absolutely horrified to see books written, published and bought by people that talked about nothing more than using these toys to ‘release’ tight spots.  And even worse that many people who put themselves out as health and fitness ‘professionals’ were saying things like this was one of the great modern books in this genre!

Don’t get me wrong.  These forms of ‘release’ do improve short term mobility but it disappears quickly.  This is why people keep having to repeat it either throughout the day or every few days.  The active range of motion can also increase in the short term but often it does not stay or increase over time.  Because you are not training that aspect.  These forms of release can be helpful IF you then go and repattern your alignments and your movement patterns to remove the real cause of the tightness.

I know because I tried it myself for a while.  It felt good too but it was just masking the problem.  Tight, roll, stretch, tight, roll stretch.

And what is the real problem?  Tension, holding patterns and poor alignments that are all intimately related.  Perhaps I can write a book on that.

Our so called tight spots are either contracted places of holding, or places we are overstretched in.  The former is tight from unnecessary contraction.  The latter from being taken to or near end range.  The former is subconscious tying up of ourselves into knots, the latter a resistance to being pulled apart.  Hamstrings, calves, necks, shoulders and backs are the most common examples I see. And because people do not like to take responsibility for their own problems they will just blame it on genetics.  But if you look more closely it is often in the way we hold ourselves. Because I can adjust someone or show someone an alignment in seconds that immediately takes away their tension, that nullifies their “my hamstrings (or some other muscles) are always tight” theory.  That is the easy part.

We all slip back into our most commonly used patterns.  That is why they are called habits.   But just as we have created inefficient patterns in the past, we can learn to create new patterns.  Or at least give ourselves the choice and freedom to choose different ways of holding and moving our bodies.

That is also why it is hard.  It’s more difficult to pay attention than it is to simply stretch “x minutes, x times a day”.  It is not the answer.  You must relearn how to move more efficiently.

Otherwise it is just like hitting yourself on the head with a brick and then complaining about a sore head.  And then simply taking a pain killer.  And then doing it all over again.  Doesn’t make sense does it?

 

Instead, learn to inhabit your own body.  It is your home.  Then you don’t get (as) sore and tight in the first place. It is a continual refining process.  And it gets easier and easier.  But it is still an ongoing process, just like any worthwhile practice.

I didn’t say it would be easy but you can do it.

As always, the choice is yours.

 

Remember ABC?

Align Breathe Connect.

It’s in there somewhere.

(Keep posted for more details)

Every tree, every growing thing as it grows, says this truth, you harvest what you sow.

-Rumi