#46: Why Mobility Matters

Hey Friends,

Mobility is an often overlooked part of a fitness routine.

You can’t see mobility in the mirror, so very few people have a goal of maintaining and improving mobility.

I’ve been a personal trainer for over 4 years now, and when I ask people about what their goals are, they almost never tell me they are trying to improve mobility.

The most common goals in the fitness industry are fat loss or muscle gain.

This week I’m going to shed some light on why I think mobility work is an essential component of every fitness routine.

I’ll also talk about how improving your mobility can actually help you with your muscle building and fat loss goals as well.

Weekly Action Point

⭐️ Commit to 5 minutes of dedicated mobility work each day this week ⭐️ 

I figured I’d keep the action point in line with the topic of this week’s newsletter. I’ll give tips about how to get started with mobility if you’re unsure of where to start or what movements to be doing, so keep reading.

5 minutes per day is an extremely small commitment to see a huge amount of benefit.

What is Mobility?

Before I talk about all the benefits of mobility, I feel like I should define what I’m talking about.

Mainly, I’d like to differentiate mobility from flexibility.

When people think about flexibility, touching your toes or holding long stretches are typically what comes to mind.

Mobility on the other hand involves actively moving your joints through their full range of motion. Simply put, mobility is about improving how your body actually moves and functions.

People often turn to stretching and flexibility after they are already sore and achey.

In my eyes, mobility is done before you get sore and achey as a preventative measure. It’s like proactively getting ahead of the curve to help you avoid feeling sore and achey altogether, or at least significantly reduce those feelings.

Benefits of Mobility

Now that you know what I’m talking about, why should you care?

Enhanced Movement Quality

Moving your joints through their full range of motion allows them to move freely and smoothly. Which allows you to feel better completing the activities of daily living. It also helps to improve your form and movement patterns while lifting weights in movements like the squat, shoulder press, or lunges (and every other weighted exercise).

Injury Prevention

This is one of the biggest benefits in my eyes. When your mobility is restricted, your body compensates in ways that are not ideal to complete various movements. These compensations increase the risk of minor tweaks and more severe chronic injuries. Strains and overuse injuries as well as major injuries like throwing out your back or tearing a rotator cuff are less likely when you are able to move properly.

Being injured makes it substantially more difficult to lose fat or build muscle - you need to be healthy to be making progress on those goals.

Improved Strength

When your joints are able to move through their full range of motion, your muscles are able to activate better, improving muscular strength. Increased strength helps both with building muscle or losing fat via the metabolic benefits of increased muscle tissue.

Faster Recovery

Mobility improves blood flow and helps to generally reduce stiffness, allowing you to recover from your workouts faster. In turn, you have better performance on your subsequent workouts and will be better equipped to build muscle or lose fat.

Long term health

Mobility decreases as you age if you don’t do something about it. Restricted mobility in older ages is one of the biggest things that contributes to the decline in your quality of life. If you want to stay healthy and doing the things you enjoy later into life, dedicated mobility work is imperative.

And guess what, if you wait until you can’t move when you’re 70 or 80 to start doing mobility work, you’re too late. It’s something that you need to be maintaining and improving throughout your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s to set yourself up for success. In short: start now.

How to get started

Like anything new that you take on in fitness (or in life in general), it’s best to start small.

You don’t need some elaborate, hour-long daily mobility routine to see benefit.

5-10 mins done consistently every single day goes a LONG ways in your overall function and mobility.

The best way to start? Use YouTube.

There are thousands of mobility videos on YouTube that anyone has access to completely for free. You don’t need to know what you’re doing or what exercises to do.

Just follow along with a video. In fact, that’s actually what I do. Even though I’m very knowledgeable about different movement patterns and how to improve mobility, I still follow along with a YouTube video almost every time I do my mobility work.

Just search “5 minute daily mobility” as a start and you’ll get tons of videos.

The key is using the word “mobility” in your search instead of “flexibility” (though you’d see a bunch of benefit from flexibility work and could implement that also).

I love Tom Merrick on YouTube. He has a huge variety of both mobility and flexibility videos, but there are a bunch of people that are great.

You could do your mobility work right when you get out of bed in the morning or in the evening before you go to bed.

My personal favorite is to implement mobility into the warm up before a workout. I do 5-10 minutes of dedicated mobility work every time before I lift weights.

It’s an awesome way to dynamically warm up the body, prevent injury, and maximize the benefits of your weight training.

Like anything in fitness, the key is being consistent over the long term.

You won’t see a huge difference after doing one or two mobility sessions.

Doing it consistently for years will have huge benefits for your health. Imagine you and your friends in your 70s/80s. If you do mobility work your whole life and they don’t, the difference will be night and day.

Your body deserves to move well, recover faster, and live better. Mobility is the way there in my eyes, and the best time to start is now.

Ben’s Best

I loved this video about the impacts alcohol has on your health. Extremely insightful if you are someone who drinks alcohol. It’s also available as a podcast if you prefer the audio only version. Search “How alcohol rewires your brain Diary of a CEO” wherever you listen to podcasts.

Recipe of the week:

Peanut butter berry overnight oats. This is one of my creations, so no instagram video for you to watch.

• 80g frozen mixed berries

• 40g of oats

• 75g of unsweetened almond milk

• 16g of peanut butter

• 1 scoop of RYSE Skippy Peanut Butter protein powder (The coach I work with has a code, “QP”, if you want a discount on that. My favorite protein powder)

• 15g maple syrup

• 150g plain, nonfat greek yogurt

Directions: combine everything in a jar and let it sit in the fridge overnight.

That’s all I have for you guys this week.

Remind yourself that you are doing awesome. As always, let me know if you have any questions or if there is any way I can support you.

Ben