Mobility and how it may be limiting your stability.
Let’s talk progress.
Mobility is the ability to move freely and easily. Mobility is often confused with easy exercises that are more for rehab than actually making progress towards your goals. Lack of mobility prevents proper alignment leading to a decrease in biomechanics efficiency. So what is biomechanics?
Biomechanics is the coordination of bones, muscles, tendons and ligaments and how they work together to produce movement. You can consider this to be how your body moves through space. When your alignment is off, all of the tissues that are meant to work together will make their own mechanics that can lack efficiency and strength.
Biomechanics principles consider all the factors that could effect how one moves throughout space:
Producing Forces & Torque (Push, Pull & Joint Rotation)
Inertia (Rate to start or stop a movement)
Acceleration
Force in relation to the ground
Momentum
Center of Gravity (Alignment)
Balance/Stability (Static & Dynamic)
Although these principles affect how we move throughout space, we can also use each of these principles to help improve the others. Lets look at an example that considers Center of Gravity and its relation to the other 6 principles. When we are working on mobility we are effectively paying attention to how your body responds to outside forces, including gravity.
Let’s keep it simple and consider standing posture. If you feel that your shoulders round forward when you are trying to stand up straight, you may be working really hard to pull yourself into an incorrect biomechanics position. Instead, first look at the angle of the rib cage by looking at yourself in a mirror from the side and notice if your upper back is also rounded forward, not just your shoulders. If you realize the collar bone and the top of your rib cage is angled forward, establish a proud chest or rib cage, and just notice what your shoulder blades do. This should automatically make it a bit easier to keep your shoulder blades back and down your back. Sticking with this example, no matter how many rows or chest stretches you do, it won’t change the angle of your rib cage, so until you fix this, you are constantly battling gravity, bleeding energy out of the system. When energy is bled out of the system, it means that you have to work harder to meet your baseline, but it is also harder to push your body and will be impossible to manage ideal form at its max expression of a movement, preventing progression towards your goals.
In conclusion, if you are looking to make your day to day life easier or you feel like you are hitting a plateau as you are trying to advance, you may want to take a peak at your mobility and biomechanics.
