Seasoned triathletes are dedicated and friendly bunch of people. They’re super focused on their own training, but always happy to help anyone else who’s just starting out in the sport they love.
They’ll happily share advice, experience and tips with anyone who asks and many can probably talk for hours on the benefits of one set of wheels/brakes/pedals/shoes over another.
To them, details matter.
It matters what bike they have. It matters what GPS watch they have. It matters what race they’re doing. And it matters what time they do it in.
To them, time is everything.
They’ll obsess over the amount of hours training they’re doing, who’s king or queen of the hill on Strava and the majority have a “go hard, or go home” type attitude.
And because of this, they’re also lying to themselves.
They believe that it’s having all the right equipment that makes the biggest difference to their time, but it isn’t.
Mobility does.
The trouble is, doing mobility takes time. Time that triathletes would much rather spend either swimming, cycling or running.
So they tell themselves that mobility isn’t important.
After all, they can still swim, cycle and run with that nagging pain in their calf, so why stop?
And if the pain gets bad enough to stop them running, they’ll just cycle and swim instead until the pain goes away on it’s own.
After all, it appeared out of nowhere, so it’ll go away if they rest, right?
WRONG!
It’s believing that mobility training isn’t important that causes seasoned triathletes to reduce the amount of races they do each year, reduce the distances of those races, and eventually, withdraw completely from triathlon.
How?
Mobility reduces the muscle tightness that repetitive actions such as triathlon training creates.
Muscle tightness causes joint positions to shift, which in turn reduces range of motion, which then causes movement compensations.
Over time, these compensations start to fatigue the body, which then causes pain.
Ignoring the importance of mobility is like waiting to see if you have a car crash before putting your seatbelt on. Or waiting to see if you get tooth decay before starting to brush your teeth regularly.
Spending time on mobility training not only improves your performance, by taking less effort to move (meaning you can go for longer before getting tired), engaging more muscles with each movement (meaning you can produce more strength and power with each movement) and being able to move from one position to another more freely (meaning you can create a higher cadence or arm turnover), but it also prevents you from being injured.
Pain stops you moving.
Without pain free movement it really doesn’t matter what bike you have, or which cleats you use, or which GPS watch you use to record your times.
Because you won’t be training anyway.
Once you have pain, or are trying to manage your training through pain, the times you see on your fancy watch will only be disappointing anyway.
Unrestricted, pain free, joint movement is a fundamental requirement of any sport. Because sport requires movement.
If you don’t have that, you can’t participate.
Mobility is the ONE thing you can do to both exponentially boost your performance AND prevent injury and the great news is that it doesn’t have to take ages.
The first step to increasing your mobility quickly, is knowing the biggest thing that your body is dealing with right now. You can find out for FREE using my Injury Predictor Assessment.
I need to clarify though, before I get a barrage of complaints, I’m NOT saying that having the right equipment doesn’t make a difference – of course it does. But nowhere near as big as mobility.
You know the gains you can get from your equipment. Now add to that the gains you can get from mobility and you’ll be laughing all the way to the finish line.
Don’t believe the lie.
Or underestimate the power of mobility.