Why Your Mobility Work May Be Harming You

Over the last few years, I’ve watched happily as people have started to come to terms with the importance of mobility work. Of course, given the pendulum that is the fitness industry, now everything that doesn’t work is thought of as a mobility problem.

Erm, no.

Can't Squat or Won't Squat?

Let’s try this as a test. If you know someone who says he can’t squat, tell him to lie on his back and pull his knees to his chest, keeping his tailbone on the ground. It might even be you saying you can’t squat. If so, try this drill yourself.

Being able to get into this position demonstrates that you actually have adequate range to squat. In other words, even though you can’t squat, you do have the requisite mobility.Your inability to squat is not mobility related. Instead, it’s a problem between your ears.

The Cause of Pain Is Poor Movement

Recently I sat in on a workshop led by Dr. Perry Nickleston at the Strength Matters Summit.I was reminded how the body works as a system, not as a sum of its parts, as many still insist upon telling us. The boiled-down version of the workshop goes like this: stiffness at a joint or pain in a muscle is because of a lack of stability elsewhere.

I’m not prone to one-size-fits-all statements, but barring impact injuries, the cause of pain is poor movement. The thing most people miss when using the joint-by-joint approach is that mobile joints need the stiffness from stable joints to function correctly. Imagine holding a bow in your hands. The front hand needs to be stable so that the back hand is free to move. If the front hand waves all over the place, then the back hand will never move to where it is supposed to go and the whole system is inefficient.

"The thing most people miss when using the joint-by-joint approach is that mobile joints need the stiffness from stable joints to function correctly."

Following this logic through, what we see is that an ankle that should be mobile could become tighter and immobile if the core isn’t working well. Distal stiffness is caused by proximal weakness. So the runner who has started suffering from plantar fasciitis or Achilles tendon issues is creating stiffness in that area to deal with the lack of stiffness required elsewhere.

Release and Activate

This is exactly why the idea of just doing some mobility work is flawed. It’s no good just to smash this, floss that, or roll this. Nickleston has an acronym for his system that sums it up brilliantly: RAIL. Release, activate, integrate, locomote.

Most avid fitness buffs are good at the release part. Through using a variety of tools including balls, rollers, and massage itself, it seems everyone has grasped that some kind of release work is vital to tissue quality before any form of corrective or load is added.

But most people fall down in the other sections. It’s no good to get new range from a muscle if you still end up right back where you started - with a problem between the ears. It’s the brain that ultimately controls how much movement you get from a joint. A muscle that is bound up is usually that way because it is working more, not less, than the surrounding muscles.

The muscle that decided to stop working needs to be reprogrammed to do its job properly. Range of motion on its own does nothing to help you. In fact, it may put you at greater risk for injury as now you have more space to control. So don’t just mobilize, re-pattern your movement as well.

Integrate and Locomote

But the road shouldn’t end there, either. Reminding the body of the motor pattern is only part of it. Now you need to integrate this all back into compound movements. This is where you start to see a sequence emerging. Release, activate, and then integrate. You can use primitive pattern work such as crawling and rolling because most of your misfiring muscles will be hit by these.

But that’s still not the end of it all. Because only in standing are we truly in a functional posture, so only in standing can the final work be done. RAIL says that the final step is in locomotion. We spend so much time these days on rolling and mobility work that we forget the final step of the puzzle is always to make sure our movement works in walking and running.

I’m always amazed at how much lip service gets paid to primitive patterns while ignoring the most primitive pattern, and the one that dictated most of our evolution as a species. If your body works right in running, it’ll do everything else properly for you too, as it’s the hardest pattern for the body to get right.

An Example of the RAIL System

Using myself as an example, I came home last week from three weeks away due to work. At the end of this week, I have a half-Ironman distance race (Challenge Shepparton). In an effort to get my bike legs back quickly, I’ve done five hard rides in five days. At the end of the Sunday ride, I noticed my left kneecap was starting to get sore on the top outer edge - a typical symptom of impending IT band troubles.

"The muscle that decided to stop working needs to be reprogrammed to do its job properly. Range of motion on its own does nothing to help you."

The first thing I needed to do was to remove the problem, so there was no riding on Monday, even though the plan said there should be. Second, I spent a lot of time doing release work on my IT band with a roller, as well as the hamstring, quad, calf, and glute on the same side. After each of these sessions, I would go for a walk and see if things had improved. While attacking the ITB made it a little better, the thing that really helped was doing trigger point work on the glute. When I added stretching the glute in pigeon, the situation improved the most.

But you can’t stop there. I’d done release and now needed to activate. Lying prone I did some thigh extension, external rotation, and abduction work to fire up the glutes. Another quick walk around showed that things had improved a little more. The integration aspect came by doing some single-leg deadlifts, which improved the pain again, to the point of almost being completely gone.

The final step in the process was to run again and make sure I was pain free. I did another three rounds of release, activate, and integrate during the day (with a walk test after each time) before heading out the door for a trial run. The result? I was completely pain free.

The Take-Home

Remember, it’s no good to just seek mobility unless you have the follow-up steps in place. Mobility without motor control is just another injury waiting to happen. 

Stretching Doesn't Work (the Way You Think It Does)

Does stretching make you more flexible? I know the obvious answer to this question, based on what we’ve all been told about the merits of stretching, is, “Duh! Yes!” But it turns out that might not be the case. But it might be the case. At least a little. But not totally. Okay, let me explain.

Stretch Your Bits or Stretch Your Mind?

I’ve had a few things come up recently that have me rethinking the common stretching belief that goes something like this: stretch tight bits in your body and they will get longer/more flexible/more supple.

The things that have me rethinking this are:

1. An interview I did on the Liberated Body Podcast with Jules Mitchell who is writing a book (and just finished a thesis) on the science of stretching.
2. A guide I am putting together on how to resolve short hamstrings (it’s out on Liberated Body in October), which had me immersed in the research about how hamstrings specifically manage to return to a more functional length.
3. And last but not least, I am reading Katy Bowman’s new book Move Your DNA where her insights on sarcomeres have my attention (plenty of other things too, but I’m already trying to keep this post from becoming epically long).

I’ll do my best to summarize the a-ha moments that have sprung out of these three things.

Your Nervous System Runs the Show

In her interview with me, Jules Mitchell* talked about how she began her thesis with the intention of taking a biomechanical view into yoga asana, which is exactly what she does. However, because she started her work from the perspective of a yoga teacher- with all the training that had told her that stretching leads to increased flexibility, she was surprised to discover that the research on stretching did not bear this idea out.

She discovered this idea - that if we stretch more and stretch harder that our tissue will change - was untrue. In reality, we are not lumps of clay that can be molded by persistently tugging on things. This is because our nervous systems are running the show.

So what does that mean? That means that unless you are under anesthesia (where you will miraculously gain full and even excessive range of motion, but I do not recommend attempting to go through life under full anesthesia simply for its flexibility gains), your ability to stretch at any range is determined by your nervous system’s tolerance to that range.

As in, when you have super short hamstrings and you try to forward fold and meet rigid resistance, it is not that you need to pull on your hamstrings like they are inanimate taffy, because you can’t. Your nervous system is the thing giving you that firm end range, and it’s basically saying, “Nope. Sorry buddy. I don’t feel safe there, so I’m not going to let you go there.”

Getting pushy about it and trying to force your hamstrings into ever deeper end ranges will have one of three outcomes:

1. Nothing will change
2. Your hamstrings will get shorter
3. You will injure your tissue (which, P.S., has about a two-year healing period if we’re talking about a tendon injury).

I recommend not trying to force override your nervous system on issues of flexibility. It will win. It will be unpleasant.

Your Body's Emergency Brake

Why would the nervous system not feel safe and therefore limit your mobility? Because that range is unfamiliar, or because compensatory patterns in your body have determined that certain parts of you need to function as an emergency brake in order to hold it all together (and of course these two things are not mutually exclusive). Both boil down to issues of motor control (plenty more to chew on here) and of Davis’ Law, which can be (over) simplified to, “use it or lose it.”

While working on the Liberated Body Short Hamstrings Guide, I kept coming back to the issue of how the hamstrings function, in some chronically short-hamstringed people, as an emergency brake. This kind of compensatory pattern happens for plenty of reasons, but top among them might be under active deep core musculature, too rigid core musculature (yes, underactive and too rigid can come together), weakened adductors, and more. If these or other key stability structures can’t fully do their job, the hamstrings are at the ready. They sub in for a lack of support elsewhere by battening down the hatches.

To go back to the emergency brake analogy - if your car were parked on the edge of a cliff and was held there only by its emergency brake, would you release it? Not if you are sane.This is the same decision your nervous system is making when you attempt a forward fold and are stopped prematurely.

Those Naughty Sarcomeres

In regards to the use-it-or-lose-it part of the flexibility equation, let’s talk Katy Bowman**, moving your DNA, and the sarcomeres. Bowman has been a champion of getting people to understand the difference between frequency and intensity. In short, that what we are doing with our bodies most of the time thoroughly trumps how hard we may be capable of working out (or stretching) for a small portion of our day. In relationship to flexibility, this means that if we, for example, sit in a chair with our hamstrings contracted from both ends all day long, we will gradually develop short hamstrings.

Here is an extremely pared down, Cliff’s Notes version of Bowman’s writing inMove Your DNA and also here on her blog on the role the sarcomeres play:Sarcomeres are the basic contractile units of our muscles. Muscles move because sarcomeres generate force and move. When you are often in the same position - as with our contracted-hamstrings-in-the-chair example - your sarcomeres change on the cellular level in a way that makes it easier for you to do more of what you are already doing. Yes, those naughty sarcomeres will actually cannibalize themselves and grow themselves to set your chair-shape as your new normal.

That said, the way to approach rehabilitating this would be to move with more normal hamstrings length more frequently. For example: to use a standing desk for all or part of the day, to sit on the floor with our legs outstretched in front of us (if we can accomplish that without rounding our backs, another symptom of short hamstrings), wearing neutral-heeled shoes, and to walk and to take frequent movement breaks, among other things.

The road to rehabilitation would not look like stretching the bejeezus out of your hamstrings at their absolute maximum end range for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty and ninety seconds per day.

Bringing Mitchell’s and Bowman’s work together, this kind of rehabilitation accomplishes a few key things. First, it reminds your little sarcomeres what length you would like things to be by gradual, incremental loading of your body in healthier ranges of movement. Second, taking more opportunities for natural movement more frequently (oversimplified definition alert: natural movement = accomplishing the movements that our ancestors used to need to do to survive - like walking, or bending, or climbing - with proper alignment) develops strength and adaptability. This allows your nervous system to feel safe about testing out new ranges of motion, while simultaneously unraveling the compensatory patterns that make your nervous system put on the brakes in the first place.

A Tale of Two Feet

What might this look like in practice? Let me tell you about my feet. Last summer I still had to slap on my rigid hiking shoes in order to get out on the rocky trails here in New England. Whenever I attempted to wear a more flexible-soled shoe, I was one sore-footed girl. Determined that my feet could be more supple, I spent the year wearing only neutral-heeled, flexible-soled shoes, taking plenty of barefoot time, increasing my walking mileage, and intentionally seeking out as much diverse terrain as I could find.

Fast forward to the end of this summer and I have been hiking daily - up steep inclines, on slick shale, on rocky ground and tangled stumps - only in my Unshoes. And what’s amazing is that these hikes also manage to feel like a delicious foot massage no matter how long I’m out on the trail. I find myself intentionally stepping on the rockier areas of the trail because it feels good on my feet. What happened there?

I incrementally - over one year - loaded my feet differently, and as a result the 33 joints that live in my tootsies are now much more supple and flexible. My feet are also stronger. Flexible and strong like to show up to the party together. Go figure.

Some Stretching Movement Rules to Live By

So is stretching the devil? Nah. Frequent, intermittent stretching that is within your range and not red-lining it for your abilities helps you to explore your movement ranges and therefore helps you to (very gradually) remodel yourself at the cellular level to a more mobile version of yourself.

This is a complex issue for which much more could be said, but I have already written a short novel, so in closing here are a few bullet points that we might want to consider so that we can re-frame how to become more flexible. Perhaps we should:

• Stop with the no-pain-no-gain crap and instead accept that The Goldilocks Principle holds true for human tissue: not too much, not too little, but just right amounts of input keep us healthy and mobile.
• Stop with the “stretch tight bits to make them looser” and “we are inanimate lumps of clay” models. We are alive. Our nervous systems are in charge. We need to have a long-term dialogue with it, not pretend we can boss the CNS around.
• Stop pretending we can put movement into a bento box of “exercising” and “non-exercising” time when what we are doing all the time - movement not exercising -is what is determining our shape and mobility.
• Stop stretching at extreme maximum capacity at rare intervals and instead take kinder intermittent stretch breaks.
• And while we’re at it, let’s altogether drop the idea that being bendy is somehow better. Functional length is better; hypermobile is trouble.