Mobility and Flexibility

People use the words mobility and flexibility interchangeably, but they are not quite the same thing. There’s a slight difference that is important in the realm of fitness; flexibility is the ability of a muscle group to lengthen passively through a range of motion, whereas mobility is the ability of a joint to move actively through a range of motion. In simpler terms, it’s the difference between someone pushing your knees to your chest while you relax, versus how high you can actively pull your knee to your chest without assistance. When it comes to lifting weights, mobility is much more important, you may have the flexibility to move through a certain range of motion such as a squat, but if you don’t have enough mobility or strength at those end ranges then you will have problems.

Mobility work is more than just stretching (not to completely disregard stretching, it is an important tool). Mobility work it is actively taking your joints through a range of motion that you want to be able to control, for example, you can sit in the bottom of a bodyweight squat and just stay relaxed, or you can focus on actively driving your knees out, pulling your toes towards your knees, keeping your chest up etc and try to squat as low as possible while maintaining these positions.

To really improve your mobility, not only is it important to work on it in isolation, but you should also be actively thinking about taking your body through the joints end ranges with load, that means when your doing your warm up sets for back squats, you should be focusing on squatting as low as possible, driving your knees out, keeping your chest up, all those cues that we drill every week.

All that being said, if you don’t have the flexibility to reach these ranges in the first place, your first point of call is to stretch often so that you can gain access to these ranges and then you can begin to build strength in those end ranges that you need to move well.

Improving your mobility and flexibility will not only help prevent injuries, and help you feel better when exercising, it will also improve your fitness (kind of). By being able to comfortably move through the movements we commonly do in the gym and not being limited by your lack of mobility,, it allows you to use less energy when going through those ranges of motion, as well as allowing you to breathe easier while moving, for example, in the bottom of a squat , if you are struggling to keep your chest up, it will put pressure on your diaphragm making it harder to breathe, if you are comfortable in that position and you can keep your chest up easily, it will be much easier to maintain your breathing, which will help you keep your heart rate down and therefore move faster in a metcon.

So try implementing some extra mobility work, or focus more on it during your warm ups and see how much of a difference it makes in your training.