Mobility Vs. Flexibility

My title really should have been Mobility Vs. Flexibility Vs. Stability because you need to have a good understanding of all three to really understand any of them.

When people refer to mobility generally speaking we are talking about the joint and the joints ability to move through all of its desired range of motion.

When we refer to flexibility we are talking about the muscle and its ability to allow the joint to move to little or to much.

Let me give you some examples.  For instance, I had an ankle injury in high school, because of the injury I do not have full range of motion in that ankle, a bony impingement will not allow it to flex all the way.  The muscles surrounding the area have nothing to do with that problem.  This problem is not correctable.

On the other hand my shoulders will not move through a full range of motion.  In this case my external rotators are extremely tight.  The joints are fine.  With a good foam roller/stretching program this problem could be greatly reduced if not fixed all together.

Hopefully you are with me so far because I am going to take it a step further and talk about stability now.  Stability is anti-movement it is the ability to keep a body part from moving in way we do not want it to.

The 3 words are all interrelated and very important to each other.  Gray Cook was the first person to really break down mobility and stability.  He discovered that certain joints in the body had to be very stable and limit movement while other joints had to be very mobile.  Mike Boyle was the second person to really piggy back off of Gray and develop some real solutions to the problem.

Basically he said your body is like a stack of blocks starting at the ankles and working up:

• ankles – mobile
• knees – stable
• hips – mobile
• lumber spine - stable
• thoracic spine – mobile
• cervical spine – stable

With that information they both came to the same conclusion, that the majority of us live opposite.  Ankles in-mobile, knees unstable and etc all the way up.  If the hips are in-mobile you may have knee pain, but almost always have low back pain.  An in-mobile thoracic spine will almost always cause pain in the cervical area.

The answer to all of this is really pretty simple make the in-mobile, mobile and the unstable, stable.  How you accomplish this is also pretty simple.  Use various mobility drills to add some mobility to the in-mobile joint and add in some stability work to the unstable areas.

Over the next few weeks in my upcoming posts I am going to give you some of my favorite mobility drills, I am going to try and give you one for at least each area where mobility is needed.

If you want stability drills for each of the unstable areas you will have to let me know in the comment box.

Stay Motivated,

Karen

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