It’s finally becoming common practice for sports people to be more proactive in developing their mobility, but there’s one huge mistake that we’re all making, and it’s the undoing of everything.
It’s not going at it too hard (although that won’t help).
It’s not trying to push too far (although that won’t help either).
Actually, it starts even before you position your body for the first movement.
It’s thinking of mobility as a separate entity to your training.
Current Practice
Ever since I can remember, there’s been a warm up before training, and then more recently, there’s been the addition of a cool down.
Since the cool down is the most recent addition, and it’s pitched as bringing your heart rate down, in reality, it’s often missed from most people’s training, especially when athletes are doing their own training at home.
Well, if its sole purpose is to bring your heart rate down, you can do that by getting changed and having a shower can’t you? (No, but that’s not the subject here)
A warm up, on the other hand, is a thoroughly integrated part of training these days. You won’t find many athletes now who don’t do at least a minute or two of light jogging or stretching before they start their workout.
Mobility, however, is seen as an entirely separate thing. Something that needs extra time dedicating to it – but that’s where it all starts to go wrong. And it goes wrong for 3 good reasons:
- Mobility isn’t usually considered until someone has a problem
- People don’t like sacrificing training time for mobility
- Because of the first two reasons, not enough time is spent on the issues in question and the demands of training are not sufficiently reduced in order to get on top of these issues either. As a result, the issues are simply “managed” until a more convenient time to reduce training (which is usually when the pain is stopping the training anyway).
These are some of the factors at play in the phenomenon that I like to call the Adaptation Disintegration.
Here’s a video explaining more about it
To avoid this disintegration, mobility MUST be seen as an integral part of training. Not only through the warm up, but also throughout the training session to avoid the repetition that causes the muscle tightness in the first place.
Yes, doing some mobility work is better (much better) than doing nothing, but true freedom from injury will only come with this full integration.
Oh, and as a bonus feature, not only will athletes be less injured, but technique will improve and with that will come exponentially better performance.
So, whether you’re an athlete or a coach, click here to find my FREE Interactive video to help you get started adding more mobility into your day