Increasing Your Functional Mobility

If you’re active and exercising regularly, the reason you may not be reaching your goals isn’t for lack of activity, but rather the lack of mobility. Flexibility helps your joints to move through their full range of motion without pain or stiffness. The muscles that support the joints also become easier to bend while keeping quality. Flexible muscles and tendons allow for greater range of motion during activities.

Stretching is an awesome way of improving your flexabiltiy. Static stretching, or holding one position for an extended period, is a great method of warming up before a workout but can take some time away from training if your in a hurry. If so i would dedicate 2 workouts per week that you sacrifice some time for stretching – it really does help.

How can it help?

Most goal physiques look great but in reality they are far from functional. The usual stigma of bodybuilding is to stick to the robotic type plain of movements that are limited in our general environment. For example playing almost any sport, surfing/swimming or even just getting in and out of your car all use a vast amount of different muscles along with multiple joints at the same time, far from any robotic type movement although well at recruiting muscle fibres and building mass.

When functional training is incorperated into your workouts it can help decrease the risk of injuries by increasing the flexibilty of your body. Not performing each exercise with the correct technique could leave your ligaments vulnerable and open for un wanted tension and cost you time in the gym or even worse permentatly take you away from any type of activity and the muscles could be significantly weakened from not being used which will effectively decrease their functional mobility. For example opening your car door with the wrong action could pull a very neglected muscle in the rear of your shoulder called the teres major or twisting your torso in an abnormal position while under load could pinch discs in your spine and drop you like a bag of sand.

My fun workout to help increase functionality and strength.

If you have difficulty with mobility following an injury or you’re experiencing dizziness that affects your day to day activities, you should consult a physical therapist immediately. The therapist can administer a series of tests that measure your functionality to find out which part of your body is causing the limited mobility.

Here is a list of the exercises that help me stay strong:

World-class Extensions

One Leg Flying Squats

Spin Outs

Contralateral Plank

Side Plank Rotations

Rollout Push Ups