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What’s the Most Beneficial Area to Focus on For Improving Mobility. Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with another Frustration Friday episode for every sports and fitness coach who is trying to improve the movement and avoid injury for their clients. So what is the best area to focus on, to improve mobility? Now, before we get going, I need to tell you, this is not about doing the minimum possible. It’s not about that. It’s just simply about the fact that we are all really pushed for time these days. And sometimes despite our best intentions, we don’t get chance to do everything we’d like to. So if we can narrow it down to one particular thing to focus on, that would be better than doing nothing, then what gives you the best results? So most coaches would expect me to say at this point, the hip flexors, because the hips are flexed in a lot of things we do…sitting, driving, working at the computer, cycling, all that kind of stuff that we do a lot of, but actually the spine is the most important area for you to focus on when it comes to improving your mobility for your clients.
It’s the thing that’s going to give you the fastest results. Why? Because it’s the one thing that connects the upper and the lower body. So if you have clients who have got very stiff bodies, they’re just tight everywhere or they’re having little nagging injuries or aches and pains in both upper and lower body places, then your best bet is to start with the spine. One of the other reasons for that is because your nerves travel down your spinal column. So if there’s any tightness around your spine, the chances are that your nerves are going to get squashed a little bit. And when they’re squashed a little bit, then the muscle tightness around the whole body increases. And when your spine is tight, your brain, the early warning system in your brain feels like there’s a threat to the body. And it increases the awareness puts you back in that fight or flight nervous system, which increases muscle tightness as well.
So if we don’t deal with the spine first, then it doesn’t really matter what we do in terms of hips or quads or anywhere else that you might feel is more important. If we don’t deal with the spine, first, your results in those areas won’t be as effective. So what do I mean by spine mobility? I mean, move it in any direction that it’s possible to move it in. And that doesn’t mean just their regular planes of motion, like flexion, extension, lateral flexion, extension, and rotation. Your body and your clients’ bodies are way more capable than that. And we need to take advantage of that. So we need to combine a lot of those planes of motion all in one go, . So next time you’re thinking about giving your clients something to do to improve their movement. Make sure you focus on the spine, in particular rotation, because that will help to open the body out, calm the nervous system down, reduce the muscle tightness.
And then when you get into areas like the hip flexor, then you’re going to get better results. So that was a question from Matt. He’s a member of the SMARTT® Folks Facebook group. If you’re not in there that yet, then you should be! Come over and join smarttfolks.com. That’s S M A R T T F O L K S.com. You can ask me anything you like, we’ll answer the questions on these Friday episodes and thanks for watching and I’ll see you again next time. Oh, make sure you don’t forget to comment below and if you like this video, make sure you comment and on there, give me the hearts, give me the likes on everything that you did enjoy, what you didn’t enjoy. And it will help me to improve for next time. So again, thanks for watching. I’ll see you again next time.