Let me answer that with Martin’s story.
Martin is a seasoned triathlete. He’s a manager in a recruitment company, has a wife and two kids. When I met him, he was trying to train for his first half Ironman race, which was a couple of months away.
Not only was Martin trying to fit all his training in around his busy work and family lives, but he was also trying to squeeze in all the “extras” into his schedule, like releasing muscle tightness (he was foam rolling), flexibility (he was doing yoga classes) and strength training in the gym.
To be honest, I think he was a bit frazzled. Especially as rather than improving his movement, he seemed to have more joint pain than he had before he started adding in all the “extras”.
Every way he turned there were demands on him and to top it all off he’d developed these annoying pains that wouldn’t seem to go away.
He felt like he was trapped in an endless cycle and was so frustrated.
A friend passed my name on to him and more out of desperation than real belief that I could do anything, he got in touch.
It became very apparent to me very quickly that Martin was naturally quite a flexible person. He’d never really been injured and didn’t seem to suffer from the same intensity of muscle soreness after training and racing that others did.
I saw that he was slightly hyper-mobile (too mobile), which meant that his joints were already very open and that through his yoga practice and foam rolling efforts, he’d been pushing himself to try to improve his flexibility because that was what everyone else seemed to be aiming for.
Unfortunately, hyper-mobile are much more sensitive to muscle tightness and pain than most, and by pushing his joints to go even further, his joints had started to ache and grumble about it.
While everyone else had been busy recommending more mobility and stretching, I recommended the complete opposite – do less.
Once I explained this to him, and he started to take into consideration his OWN body, his joint pain problems started to disappear.
I then started working with Martin to strengthen his joints using the huge range of movement that he already had, so that his joints were more stable and he was less likely to suffer a big injury such as joint dislocation.
It was funny, he went from so frustrated I thought he might hit something, to feeling much more relaxed and in control of what was happening to him in the space of about ten minutes.
And all because he started to consider what HIS body needed.
I see a lot of athletes who THINK that they’re doing what their body needs, but actually they’re just following instructions.
They do 3 sets of 10 reps of calf raises every day because somebody told them to strengthen their calves (for example), or they hold stretches for 30 seconds because that’s what they were taught to do.
But how do you know that’s right for YOU?
That’s one of the reasons I love SMARTT™ movements so much – you can infinitely tweak any given movement so that it targets the area that YOU need. I can give 20 people the same movement to do and all 20 people will feel it in a slightly different place, or would need to be positioned slightly differently so that they all felt it in the same place.
SMARTT™ movements also give you the opportunity to investigate for yourself where YOUR tightnesses are, and since we never “fight” for range of movement, or push our bodies past “comfortably uncomfortable”, we never have the situation that Martin found himself in.
Did I give Martin different movements than I would give you? No. Because it’s not the movement that’s important, it’s what you body is doing during that movement that’s the key.
Martin’s body would be strengthening his loose joints, whereas your or mine might welcome the opportunity to unwind some tightness. Same movement, same speed, different result.
I guess you could say it’s a bit like us all taking a multivitamin. Each of our body’s would take what they needed from it, and we’d get rid of the rest. We’d all take something slightly different from that vitamin, but we’d all be taking the same tablet.
So no matter how desperate your circumstances might seem right now, I can show you exactly how get the results YOU need for yourself. All you need to know is your starting point.
Find your starting point with my FREE Injury Predictor Assessment here. Let’s stop doing the mobility as everyone else and start making a real difference to you and your performance.