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The heart of feeling good.

What even is mobility?

Mobility is your body's ability to move. Passively and actively are the two ways that your body will move. Both of these types are influenced by how your body interacts with tension. 

Your body needs to create tension to stand, stabilise and protect, yet it also has to let go of tension in order to move, relax or recover.

The end goal is to remove unwanted muscular tension to improve static (stationary) and dynamic (active/kinetic) movement.

How does one even become mobile?

There are two key factors that mostly influence your mobility.

  1. Musculoskeletal ‘stretchiness’ (the length of your muscles, fascia, flesh etc)

  2. Coordination - (the active control a person has over their body)

Musculoskeletal is simply a fancy word for muscles and bones. Muscles and flesh (fascia, skin etc) wrap around your bones. The shorter or tighter the meat around our bones, the more restricted they are to move.

Consider coordination to come from the master computer in your head, the brain. The brain has to send electrical signals (through the nervous system) to tell muscles to contract and relax. When you stand, certain muscles contract whilst others relax. The more coordinated people are, the better they are at learning how to relax muscles. A person's ability to contract and relax muscles is a skill that must be developed over time if mobility is a goal.

What are the most common ways to become more mobile?

  • Active mobility - Mobility practices that include deliberate contraction of muscles, such as walking, gymnastics, sport, and weighted stretches.

  • Movement practices - Yoga, pilates, martial arts such as tai chi

  • Static mobility - Classic stretching

  • Soft tissue work - Massages, physiotherapy.

  • Nervous system regulation - Activities that teach you how to calm your mind and body such as saunas, breathwork, and meditation.

Here is a further breakdown of examples:

Active mobility:

Active mobility is when you are deliberately creating range & movement within your body. The less time you spend in particular positions, the less ‘able’ the body is to get back into that position. Let’s use the ‘arms overhead’ position as an example. People commonly spend more of their time sitting down and looking down, which encourages slouching style positions. When the time comes for someone to stand up tall or lift their hands above their head, their mobility is restricted. Their shoulders and upper chest have stiffened over time which interferes with someones ability to stand up tall.  In turn, their spinal and back muscles are also weaker and unable to pull the spine up to sit tall. This weakness is referred to as a loss in ‘active range’ or a loss in ‘active mobility’.

A knock-on effect of this slouching posture is that people’s mood will follow the theme of the posture. Slouching style postures encourage more sad and lazy moods, where as tall posture will encourage more positive and uplifting moods. People are more likely to smile and celebrate when the head stands tall because that is the actual position that the body needs to be in order to fully express those positive feelings.


Common forms of active mobility are:

  • Walking (especially in nature, trails and hills)

  • Weighted mobility exercises (stretching with weights or resistance, banded work) 

  • Mobility involving deliberate contraction of muscles 

  • Isometric stretching with breathing


Daily CAR’s (Capsular Articulated Rotations) are a great example of active mobility work:




Walking (especially in nature, trails and hills)

Whether it is walking regularly, or hitting a daily step target of 5-10k, the body will start to loosen up when a person takes up this habit. They won’t get massive improvements in range, or be doing the splits, but their body will notice more ease of movement, with fewer aches.




Mental well-being and bodily coordination also improve. Taking time in the morning to walk as part of a morning routine is recommended and beneficial, along with the added recommendation of listening to music, audiobooks, podcasts, or philosophy to feed the mind good ‘nutrition’ in the form of healthy information.



Walking regularly reaffirms a person's confidence and self-belief when they see themselves successfully taking steps to be a better version of themselves.




Starting recommendations:

  • Commit to a morning routine where you go for a 5-minute walk every day. If you need encouragement, take the dog, a coffee, and your earphones and listen to things that uplift or excite you. Consistency is key here, it must be achievable and you must stop rushing when you wake up.

  • Start organizing bushwalks or hikes with friends on the weekend. Go find a trail you’ve never been to and go breathe some fresh air.




Weighted mobility exercises (stretching with weights or resistance, banded work) 

Weighted mobility exercises are when weights or resistance are added. Using weights or bands, you can start to stretch the body in weird and wonderful ways, whilst simultaneously building strength in those positions.




Remember, the body will always feel anxious in positions that it feels weak or unfamiliar in. If you never sit in the bottom of a squat, when you finally do, it’ll feel strange. The more you spend time sitting in the bottom of a squat, you will feel more comfortable and familiar. Once you start holding onto a weight into the bottom of a squat, then your body will feel more confident in the bottom of a squat. Once you feel confident in the bottom of a squat, your body can relax more into that squat, thus improving your squat mobility.



Recommended weighted mobility exercises are:





Mobility involving deliberate contraction of muscles 

Very similar to weighted mobility, this style has been popularised by Functional Range Conditioning, most notably, their PAILS & RAILS protocol. A sequence in which a muscle is stretched for a short period, then progressively contracted, followed by the deliberate contraction of it’s agonistic  (opposing) muscle.

For example, the hamstrings and hip flexors work opposite to each other to move the leg forward and rearward. Stretching the hamstrings, then contracting them whilst holding the stretch, followed by a leg raise to strengthen the hip flexors is a commonly used example.



Isometric stretching with breathing

Isometric stretching is when an elongated muscle that is held for a period of time, whilst under load. For example, holding the bottom of a lunge/split squat, or a dead hang. Imagining a dead hang, the person is hanging from a bar, which lengthens muscles around the arms, spine and torso. Because of the hang, many of those muscles are still being contracted to maintain the hang.

In this position, the person would engage in deep breathing to move the ribs, which would then amplify the stretch on many of the torso muscles such as the abdominals and lats.

Movement practices:

  • Vinyasa Yoga & more ‘faster’ styles of yoga where poses change frequently

  • Pilates

  • Functional patterns & anatomy trains work

  • Thai Chi & martial arts

  • Animal flows, primitive movement, rockclimbing, calisthenics etc


Static mobility:

  • Stretching

  • Ashtanga yoga & similar styles where positions are held for longer


Soft tissue work:

  • Foam rolling

  • Massage & physical therapy

Upper Body Foam Rolling Routine with Coach Josh Hardy:

 

Lower Body Foam Rolling Routine with Coach Josh Hardy:

Nervous system regulation:

  • Deep breathing

  • Breathwork

  • Meditation

  • Recovery therapy (ice baths, float tanks, saunas)

  • Cold exposure (Cold showers, cold plunging, ice baths, river/ocean dips, dusk and dawn swimming).