How to improve your mobility:

First thing first, we need to address, what are the barriers to our mobility: Is it muscle? Is it joint capsule/ligaments? Is it nerve? Is a bony block that won’t improve? In order to get those answers, we need to do a good job testing? That’s where a good physical therapist comes in. They not only cans what your building blocks are but they can document where you at so we can track for improvement. That’s an important step because if we don’t know where we start, we won’t know if we’re getting better, and more specifically what is helping. Often times I see physical therapists just encouraging their patients to stretch without doing two big things: 1) Determining if their mobility is limited by something that needs stretching. 2) Measuring their baseline to know if that stretch is making improvements. Let’s talk about the first problem. 1) Your mobility may not purely be muscular. Often time’s it’s the joint capsule and if you don’t address that first, stretching may make things worse. The second problem 2) If you’re not getting baseline, then you don’t know if you’re making a change, wasting your time, and then inevitably give up. You know what motivates people? Results! If you can measure a baseline, do a treatment and get results, then that gets people excited to keep working harder. 

Once we determine what is the building blocks needed, and what our baseline is. Then it’s time to get into treatment. I always like to do hands on therapy to my patients in the clinic so I can get some dramatic changes in the session and also recheck their levels so I know their home exercise program is going to work instead of guessing. If they have a home exercise stretching program all I ask for is 2 sets of 30 seconds because the research says 1 min a day is sufficient and sometimes you actually plateau afterwards. That’s not a lot of time but what I think is the hard part is the daily discipline to do it everyday. But that’s where solving those two problems I mentioned earlier come in. If you can get down to the root cause of their mobility you will get results faster and that will motivate. If you can prove you’re making improvement that will also motivate to do it everyday. No one wants to waste time. But that means let’s spend the time to get really good answers about what is holding your mobility back so we can make improvements. 

If you want a little extra after a stretching session, I suggest exercising in that new range of motion. An example can look like: You’re working on hamstring flexibility. After your minute of stretching practice some light deadlifts, and leg raises to teach those muscles how to activate in that new range of motion. Remember, before starting an exercise plan I highly recommend you to visit a physical therapist. This is not just a disclaimer, it’s also so you get better results faster.