MOBILITY

MO*BILITY: the ability to move more through your range of motion; under control. See also active control.

What is “mobility” anyway…..and isn’t it the same thing as flexibility? Not at all.

Flexibility is what we define at the total length you can move through either passively. As in, I can’t really raise my arm overhead, but when my friend pushes it up for me it goes all the way up. Having flexibility is nice, but its not going to let you reach the cookie jar on top the fridge unless your friend is there to raise your arm up for you. Without active control of your range of motion you are dependent on some external force to move your body.

The key thing that separates FLEXIBILITY from MOBILITY is the word ACTIVE. Mobility means how high can you raise your shoulder on your own. This means not only do you have the motion, but more importantly you have ACCESS to use and CONTROL this motion. If you have good shoulder mobility you can reach your arm overhead on your own, and those cookie jar off the fridge.

You can see how critical this is for the things we love to do. But how does it affect your feet?

There are 26 bones in the foot, and a lot of soft tissue structure around it. When people show up with a history of foot problems, they aren’t just weak, they typically can’t even access their normal range of motion on their own. Then take all that stiffness and throw it into a training plan. I’ve always told my patients that “stiffness always wins” - you can’t take that overly stiff foot and put it into a program to improve it. Its better to take a supple foot, and put it into a solid program. This will train you to MOVE under control the BUILD better MOBILITY through your feet.

Pro Tip: to ensure you put a supple foot into your training, take the “is your foot locked” test at the bottom of the FOOT exercises page. It will take about 5 seconds on each foot to see what kind of foot you are bringing to the table. If you are someone with a stiff foot that is causing you to drift to the outer foot in single leg stance, we highly encourage you to mobilize your foot with a WEDGE right before you do any footwork training to improve the mobility in your foot. Supple feet train better for better results on your MOBO! After you do the mobility releases, try standing on one leg again. You’ll be shocked at the difference.