Introduction to mobility

Posted on March 8, 2024  •  5 minutes  • 995 words

Understanding our mobility problems

Mobility doesn’t sound as interesting as gaining muscle or losing fat.

But it’s one of the factors usually undervalued in the fitness world that can save you many years of suffering, give you more years of active life, and perhaps save you from more than one surgery.

Many people aren’t even aware of their limitations until mobility restrictions result in an injury or back pain becoming intolerable.

At that moment, the recommendation is usually to work on flexibility, but most people don’t see beyond that.

Flexibility is undoubtedly relevant, but it’s not the only thing, nor is it often the most important when it comes to improving our movement.

We are designed to move

In our early years of life, we develop an incredible capacity for movement.

We are born with full flexibility and complete ranges of motion.

Soon, we perfect motor control, adding stability and coordination.

Our first achievement is supporting the weight of our heads. From there, we move on to rolling, crawling, squatting, walking, running, jumping.

We master these movements with perfect technique, without anatomy books or personal trainers.

If you want to see what a natural exercise looks like, follow the example of a young child.

But this process of self-discovery is truncated in the first few years of life when the process of ‘domestication’ intensifies.

Continuous and free movement is replaced by long hours sitting, and passively listening to teachers' lessons.

In most cases, the hours sitting in school continue with more hours sitting at home, in front of the TV, or hooked to a video game.

School or university chairs are replaced by office chairs and car seats. The weight starts to increase, and you start to become aware of your restrictions.

When the mirror image doesn’t reflect what you want or back and knee pains interfere with your life, you look for solutions.

The problem with specialists

If you go to a good specialist to analyze your problem, they probably know the smallest detail about the part of your body that hurts, but few investigate the origin of the pain.

If a bad movement pattern generates problems in three parts, it’s possible that after visiting three specialists, you end up with three different treatments.

One diagnoses a structural problem that needs surgery, another sees inflammation that requires medication, and a third sees a mechanical aspect that requires rehabilitation.

When you specialize too much, all your solutions are biased toward your narrow field of knowledge.

These divisions are useful because they generate new perspectives, but they are also dangerous because they destroy others.

Our body is a whole. Each part is connected to the others, and few study these relationships in their entirety.

Of course, the work of all these specialists is useful and often necessary, but your first solution should be to attack the problem at its root.

At the root, we often find problems in movement patterns because movement is the component that integrates all parts.

Many of the limitations and pains that afflict us are caused by your body’s desperate attempts to protect you.

How your body protects itself

Your body does everything it can to obey you.

If you demand that it perform an action, it will try to comply.

For your body, the end justifies the means.

If it has to sacrifice quality of movement to carry out your order, it will.

This is a good survival tactic.

It allowed us to keep moving away from danger despite fracturing a foot or hip.

When your brain detects a physical restriction, it wires a new movement, such as a limp, that allows you to move despite that limitation. Survival in the present justifies any potential problem in the future.

This response of your body is called compensation.

Why does our body compensate?

Compensation is an excellent short-term strategy. The problem comes when the compensation becomes, without us realizing it, part of our “normal” movements.

Most of us drag compensations that severely limit our natural movements, often without being aware of them.

This not only damages our physical performance but also contributes to many common injuries.

If you force your body to perform certain physical activities without correcting movement limitations, compensation is its only option.

In other words, adding intensity to a dysfunction only reinforces that dysfunction.

Many people spend more than 8 hours sitting per day.

Among other problems, this can result in your hip flexors shortening or becoming stiffer.

If your flexors shorten, they tend to pull your pelvis down, causing it to tilt forward, and limiting hip mobility.

With this limitation, when you instruct your body to straighten up, the only way to achieve it is by arching the lumbar spine.

On the other hand, when the flexors pull the hip down, your glutes cannot fully engage.

Or if you instruct your body to lift a heavy object from the floor, this limitation will prevent it from recruiting the necessary force from the glutes, and your lower back ends up doing the work.

But the role of the lumbar spine is stabilization, not mobility, nor is it designed to withstand large forces, unlike your glutes.

Over time, the result is lower back pain.

You can massage that area all you want and take painkillers, but you won’t fix the problem unless you remove the movement restrictions.

Wear and tear or pain in one part of your body can be due to compensations occurring in another part.

Unfortunately, there is often no warning.

Your body simply compensates until it’s too late.

We can sit in the wrong position for years, run with an incorrect technique for years, and lift weights with poor technique for years.

Until one day you can’t anymore. Your body can tolerate a lot of torture, but eventually, it throws in the towel.

In the next blog posts, we will discuss how to determine how well our movement is and what we can do to improve it.