Strength Training = Mobility Training
Are you among the many people who treat strength training and mobility work as separate entities? If so, then you are missing out on a significant aspect of physical fitness. While weight training can help you build strength, treating mobility work as a pre-hab routine can make one susceptible to typical “overuse” injury and pain. Instead, it is essential to recognize the interconnected relationship between mobility and strength and treat them as such.
Remember, one cannot achieve optimal physical fitness by focusing solely on strength-building exercises or by treating mobility as unweighted movements. Without sounding like an infomercial, you’ll be amazed at the difference it can make when you change your approach.
An Example
The New Year is approaching and you hire a personal trainer who teaches you the “correct way” to deadlift.
You get positive reinforcement and continue to increase weight in this specific movement pattern.
One day, you bend down to pick up the barbell and get a twinge in your lower back. You ignore it and finish your workout. The following morning, you have trouble getting out of bed, and sneezing sends you through the roof. You take some time off, figuring poor technique might be have been the cause of this issue. You decide to focus on core strengthening and learn some mobility drills. Finally, things start to settle down and you get back to your regular training routine, but unfortunately, after a year, you experience the same issue again.
This example only considers the frequent bending over one specific line, the environment likely played a role as well. For this example, we’ll keep to a singular focus on mechanical stress across a tissue.
Changing Your Perspective
What I described is the hamster wheel so many active individuals find themselves in.
When you deadlift (or insert any physical activity), you can only produce force and get stiff in one particular position of +/- 15°. So what happens when you’re mid-lift and you deviate? Well, you are currently exposing your tissues to a new stress, a heavy one at that. Is it any wonder you got hurt when you only allowed yourself to get strong in one line of stress?
This phenomenon is known as accommodation. This is defined biologically as a convenient arrangement, settlement, or compromise of our tissues. Our goal as movement professionals should be to prevent internal accommodation. Simply stated, all external-based movement goals will lead to accommodation as they’re a reflection of disorganization at an internal level.
Mobility is your ability to physically get into positions and accurately move in an intended pattern. A pigeon pose decreases low back discomfort like static stretching prevents injuries in runners ( it doesn’t). What all these drills lack is specificity to the demands of loading.
Eg: when performing a stretch at length, you are loading the connective tissues due to the length-tension properties of musculoskeletal tissues tapering off and that tension gets funneled somewhere.
When was the last time you trained this, if ever?
So What to Do?
Ask any strength and conditioning coach, and they’ll be well-versed in periodization (organized training focusing on different aspects of training). But when you discuss the concept of mobility, you get some cookie-cutter bodyweight drills that are supposed to carry over to training. More forward-thinking coaches may use dynamic stretches or plyometric-looking drills.
But where’s the specificity? What drills focus on building qualities of endurance, strength, or power at all tissue levels? Because after the warm-up, you go right into patterned training (eg: deadlift).
If you’re looking to increase your functional mobility shouldn’t you periodically increase the demand? When we focus too much on increasing complexity but not the load (e.g., more tension), we leave a lot on the table regarding our ability to handle stress in our joints out in positions that are considered vulnerable. The human body is a system, and systems theory tells us that for said system (the human body) to handle more, we cannot redistribute the stress but there is a need to build depth (capacity) instead.
If you need help scaling your training to handle the demands of life, click on the button below to work with me online. Together we can go over the concepts to keep yourself running optimally and handle all that life can throw at you.