Tag Archives: mobility

Mobility City Baby

Fitness, Life Health, Training

Within the past year, mobility has become a large part of my training. It started to become very prominent when training legs, due to tight hips, and back issues. Once I noticed the difference I felt during and after my training sessions, I started incorporating more and more mobility prior to exercising. So why should anyone care that I do mobility, and why should others start adding mobility into their workouts? The main benefits you’ll gain from increasing mobility is a decrease in joint pain, reduce risk of injury, and allow you to move easier throughout your day. 

 

Joint pain is one of the leading work disabilities in the United States. This type of pain can be caused by an array of reasons; majority of it pertaining to inflammation of the joint, or overworking of the tendons surrounding a joint (tendinitis). So how does mobility fit into this? We’ll have to look into the definition of mobility first. Mobility can be defined as the ability to passively move your muscles and joints through their full range of motion. The fun thing about your muscles is that they can be conditioned through lengthening (stretching) and by contracting (shortening). Conditioning of these muscles and tendons surrounding your joints will drastically improve the way you move inside, and outside the gym. The best way of completing this is moving all your joints through their full range of motion. Resistance can be added as time goes on, as your mobility and flexibility increases, in order to strengthen the muscles surrounding your joints to encourage joint stability.

 

 When starting mobility, everyone should be referencing their end range of motion, or the length of your passive range of motion. To improve your passive range of motion, you can begin actively training to where your body’s specific end is. The important thing to remember is that every body is anatomically different from the next. My mobility can be completely different from everyone else in the gym due to how deep/shallow my hip or shoulder sockets are, how high of a valgus angle I have, and the amount of joint stability I have. Taking your muscles and joints through their full range of motion on a daily basis can decrease joint pain and risk of injury because it allows everything to become accustomed to this movement and that way whenever the unfortunate happens, it’s not as much of a shock to the affected muscles or joints.

 

I have listed a few mobility exercises that can be completed in the gym or at home below: 

 

Wall/ floor angles 

90/90 hip rotations

Hip airplanes

Open books to windmills 

3 way lunge 

Scapular pushups 

 

If anyone has any questions about mobility or any additional stretches/ exercises they can do to increase their mobility and strengthen their joints, feel free to ask me!

 

Miranda/ Randi/Randell/Gard

 

Knees Over Toes Mobility

Fitness

I wanted to talk to yinz about the importance of adding knees over toes exercises into your workouts. The main point about training knees over toes (KOT) exercises is that our bodies were made to move in triplanar movement, or movement in all three planes of the body. Incorporating these types of movements in your everyday workouts will increase your mobility and reduce your risk of injury. With KOT, specifically, we are looking to improve knee health by strengthening the tendons. To begin your KOT journey, I would recommend starting with increasing your ankle mobility. This can be done by rolling out the ankles, working on knee to wall exercises, and banded ankle mobility exercises. The knee to wall stretch would be the best way to get familiar with the idea of KOT: start facing a wall, with toes 2-3 inches from the wall, making a conscious effort to keep your foot flat, and begin to push your knee to the wall. If it’s too easy, slide your foot back, too hard slide your foot forward. I believe in a longer warm up prior to exercising, so I always include large amounts of mobility into my training. For KOT, I would add the ankle mobility into any warm up for any leg day, and depending on your familiarity with the gym, add some of the listed exercises in the next paragraph to your warm ups.

 

Once you have the basics of mobility, you can begin incorporating some KOT exercises into your workouts. These exercises can include: step downs, heels elevated squats, reverse nordic curl progression, and backwards sled drags. The main thing to remember during these workouts is that slow and controlled will give you the best results. Majority of these workouts can be used as either a warm up or as the workout by itself. Main points I would like to highlight are: be sure to keep your foot firmly plants for the stepdowns, the reverse nordic curl progression has a long list of progressions/ regressions so finding the perfect spot for your level is easy to find, and during backward sled drags make sure you’re holding a squat and being purposeful with your feet placement (placing toes first and rolling onto heels). Since we want to strengthen our knees and prevent any future injuries, the heavier and slower these exercises are the better!

 

If you’re interested in improving and maintaining your knee health, or possibly get rid of your knee pain, feel free to ask me any questions!

 

Miranda

CeJ’s Rock N Rolling Mobility

Life Health

Union Fam,

 

It’s chilly, it’s dark, you might be stranded inside your dojo for the time being slamming away on your keyboard, or falling down the rabbit hole of tik-tok conspiracy theories. Have no fear, CeJ is here with some mobility exercises that can fire your day up and get you moving, grooving, and feeling right!

 

Run through 3-4 Sets of 5-10 Repetitions of each exercises 1-5 and repeat. (Rest as needed)

 

1) Sun Salutations.

2) Squat to stretch , add in rotations, squat to stretch with push back and rotation.

3) Inchworm to spiderperson to figure 4 and walk back.

4) Glute bridge with reach across, single leg glute bridge, Iso glute bridge with leg chops, Iso glute bridge with leg abduction/adduction.

5) Cannonball to V-sit, Cannonball to butterfly.

 

Make sure you breathe well during these exercises. Breathe deep into your nose, smooth exhale out of your mouth. Take your time with each exercise and work to increase overall range of motion as you go. Turn your favorite tunes on and get to rocking with some fun flow mobility exercises.

 

Thank you for reading and if you’d like to see demos of these exercises, they will be on our Instagram or just let us know and we can send you the videos.

 

Cheers,

 

CeJ

 

P.S. Who would be down for a mobility class taught by the Rock n Roll Wizard himself? Drop your thoughts in the comments below and let us know how you enjoyed these mobility exercises.