This past fall we launched a new workout at the studio- Mobility Worx. The inspiration for me was to create a workout for our members that would help them to move better. It’s been a hit. I recently watched a group go through a session. At the outset of the workout, they could not squat to parallel. By the completion of the workout, they were squatting below parallel. I wanted to share the four steps we used to get to that outcome.
The fitness world has evolved. The current trend and research have proven it’s better to adopt a movement pattern approach to your workout, opposed to the muscle by muscle stance taken in the past. The patterns we structure our full-body workouts around are:
1. Squat
2. Hip-hinge
3. Lunge
4. Knee dominate (both flexion and extension) movements
5. Horizontal pushing and pulling
6. Vertical pushing and pulling
7. Bracing
Most people recognize bracing as core work. A simple way to explain bracing is to maintain stiffness in your trunk as you move. What I’ve been able to observe in our mobility workouts is that if we focus on a single specific pattern then we can improve mobility within that single session. I chose to eliminate the “little bit of everything” and opted to go in the direction of saturation in a specific area. It’s not efficient to attempt to improve movement in each of the mentioned patterns, unless you want to spend 9 hours in the gym. I’ve had success addressing a single pattern while breaking it down into 4 components. The four components are as follows:
• Breathing exercises
• Tissue work
• Mobility drills
• Muscle activation
Taking a tip from the yoga world, strength and conditioning coaches have learned that if we want to put people in positions where muscles are elongated, we need to trigger their parasympathetic nervous system to get a better outcome. The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) controls homeostasis and the body at rest and is responsible for the body's "rest and digest" function. This can be controlled by breathing exercises. We start every Mobility session with 3 minutes of breathing. There’s a specific way we breathe using a designated cadence.
After this, we proceed to tissue work. Learning from Thomas Meyers’ Anatomy Trains, the body has myofascia meridians which determine how we move.
We use tools, such as rollers and balls, to change and improve tissue quality. The research has proven that it takes a minimum of 2 minutes of foam rolling in an area to change tissue quality. This explains why we take 12-15 minutes to roll 3-4 muscle groups.
Once we address tissue restrictions, we move on to mobility drills. In our drills, we engage the core first. This is an important step. If your body lacks adequate mobility in a pattern it will shut down the core in order to achieve that mobility. This explains why people frequently struggle with a toe touch. The common assumption is that they have tight hamstrings. This assumption is wrong. It’s their lack of core strength that sends signals to the brain to create stiffness in the hamstrings. Part of the magic in this workout is that we attempt to re-wire a pattern that your body may have adopted from an injury or out of necessity. Mobility sticks have been instrumental in this step.
The sticks allow you to irradiate tension throughout your core by driving them into the ground as you position your body in stretched positions. This allows you to maintain core “stiffness” as you work on mobility. This key step has been instrumental in resetting the motor control that many people lack.
The final step after we get someone opened, is to activate the muscles we just worked on. The goal is to make the corrections we just worked on to “stick”. In this final step, the Ultimate sandbag and TRX suspension system have been ideal tools. The combination of these four steps have been a game changer in the studio.