Mobility – What is it? How To Put It Into Your Workout
Mobility is most important!
Mobility is the single most defining and important factor in your fitness. It is not strength or flexibility that matters most— it is mobility. What is mobility? By a basic definition, it is the ability to move freely; in the fitness world, we would define this as the area where your strength and flexibility meet.
A visual example would be if I hold your leg up as high as your body allowed—that would be your flexibility. Your strength alone would be how much weight that leg can lift or push in a strength-based motion like a squat or lunge. But your mobility is the ability and height of that leg when you hold it up, using both flexibility and strength together (with no aid from anyone else).
This is important because in fitness, mobility is true health! Remember that your body can’t just be strong or just be flexible; the two are not complete without each other. Working toward mobility is working toward pain-free movement and the freedom to use your body at its best capacity.
How do you work your mobility?
The Kettlebell Kickboxing workout is full of drills that develop mobility. Just about every kick and swing you do will help develop that for you. Another way to help develop mobility is in your warm-ups and cool-downs, as well as sparring yourself minutes between busy days to isolate one or two mobility drills. You’ll see in the video above that the mobility work provided here from the squat is simple and can be done in 2-3 minutes tops.
Today’s MOBILITY drills (in the video above) for pre or post workout coming to you from the Ring Road Adventure in Iceland;
1. Sit in a deep squat and relax, heals on ground begin to rotate the elbows and wrists and even fingers. Take a variety of wrist stretches, if you can bringing the hands to the ground and working different wrist openings. The ankles will stretch simply by staying in the squat. Heals MUST be connected to ground, push the shoulders back and keep the abs tight to activate and open the back
and chest and alternate overhead arm motion to open up the back properly, don’t over tilt neck down
2. ADVANCED! Try wrist mobility 30sec a side from a fully loaded pistol squat – stay there and again work with the wrists and back and abs, also try overhead movement . .
Joint Mobility is the range of uninhibited movement around a joint… huh?
It is the degree to which an articulation (where two bones meet) is allowed to move before being restricted by surrounding tissues ( riddle meaning your ligaments/tendons/muscles.)… Many people think that they are restricted in movement by a lack of flexibility or a lack of strength, and while yes that is the case- think a lack of strength in a pull up or a back of flexibility when your are trying to force yourself into a slit, the MOBILITY is the part that matters most,
Think of it as your ability to move freely
As STRENGTH + FLEXIBILITY = MOBILITY
MOBILITY = Quality of life and motion
In our programs we do A LOT of ‘hidden’ mobility, as Dasha values this do highly and understands the real pain and limitations of a body that is locked up, even our non loaded and loaded and cardio-respiratory based movements all have a mobility component. .
The KB BODY 11disc program and THE COMPLEX Series 5 disc program have a mobility 17min workout built in separately
CHECK OUT OUR LINK IN BIO, then go to SHOP TAB to find out more!
Use code LIMITLESS at checkout for a major discount!!!
OKAY, so in the above, filmed in Iceland along the Southern part of the Ring Road, Dasha is emphasizing the SMALLER mobility motions
*Deep squat for the hips and back
*Wrists
*Fingers
*Ankles
they need love too!!!!
Without them gripping, squaring deep and other such motions would be impossible.
Checkout my typical MOBILITY Routine on the video here:
and if you LOVE it, checkout the Complex Series and the KB Body Series, both of which come with mobility programs as an ‘active rest day’
Not happy with your level of mobility and strength?
Continue to challenge yourself, as you did in your first week. You have to continue to discover yourself, as you did in your second and third weeks.
Accept yourself first, then work on what you need. This might actually be the hardest task of all. Accept yourself! You must accept yourself. Most people fail because they want the world to unfold for them in a week or two, but that is simply not the case. It can’t. It takes time. When people see changes in the first week or two they get excited. But by week four, too often I see people become discouraged because they can’t accept themselves—they want change to come in an instant. You didn’t gain all of your weight in four weeks. It took years to gain weight and lose mobility and strength. And now you want those years of poor habits to simply be wiped clean in four weeks. It’s the wrong attitude, and this type of thinking leads to failure.
