Here’s a great video about flexibility by mobility expert Tom Merrick, really covering much of the aspects of a round mobility block. Which is just what you need if you move very little throughout the day or want to restore or improve your range of motion before a workout — should be one major goal of your routine.
15 minute might not sound much, but I know there are a lot of you who probably won’t stick with such a routine for long, or will just start skimp on these exercises. Believe me, I know best, when you get home and just want to get done with your workout, there are few more frustrating things than spending whatever amount of time not focusing on your favorite „money-maker” exercises. And that is just somehow irrespective of whether you workout in a gym or at your home. It just doesn’t matter, unless you fell in love with yoga or look forward to becoming a gymnast.
But you cannot skip on mobility work, the importance of staying flexible and maintaining your muscles’ elasticity goes a long way. Especially if you already had that day a rigorous 8+ hour ”polishing chair with your butt WOD”.
So, as easy as it sounds, just cut your weight workout a little and spend more time with movement preparation.
Since my mobility routine is the same priority as my heavy workout, I no longer feel that it’s something worth skipping. The latter just cannot work long term without the former.
That’s the psychological twist you should favor. Dedicate the same quality of attention and importance to taking care of resetting your body as you do to training. Once it becomes a habit, you’ll experience improved mind-muscle connection, proprioception, and that way more effective weight training. Concern it as an inseparable part of weight training.
In case you would like to understand the logic behind the exercise scheme in the video, I’ll give an explanation below in a nutshell.
The Neck Stretch
If you sit a lot, watch your phone, or stressful, your neck can become very stiff. Also, there is a so-called Startle Reflex which is activated subconsciously when you are frightened. For example, when you hear a sudden loud noise. When this happens, you may or may not feel it, but your body perceives it as danger. It results in your body tightening up your muscles for protection, causing a forward slouching posture, part of which your head will move forward and your shoulders shrug up and forward as well.
If these reactions add up throughout your day it can lead to chronic tightness around your neck and shoulders, which is by default a very complex area of your body by default.
Most of the muscles responsible for this action are located on the side of your neck hence the stretch in the video. Although slow head circles, looking up-and-down motions should also be a base of your routine daily. Not just because of the surrounding muscles, but also because of the fact that your cervical spine is a part of your body that needs to stay mobile, withstanding flexion, extension, and rotation.
Shoulder Extension
Up next the kneeling shoulder extension comes handy to restore a rounded posture. It also stretches the muscles around your clavicle that often get tight, a few of which are the pectoralis major, sternocleidomastoid – this one can cause a host of problems – the trapezius and deltoid muscles.
Child’s Pose
After opening and extending the chest/shoulders comes a global folding and flexion of the shoulders. The rounded lower back of the Child’s pose stretches the fascia, also the buttocks area and gives a relief to your lumbar vertebrae.
I really like this stretch, because it compresses your belly giving you great feedback of your diaphragm moving, the proper use of which is an essential part of lifting weights or staying healthy.
Chest Stretch
Staying in this position, but moving the hips higher enables you to push the chest further towards the floor that way stretching the latissimus dorsi muscle, (back muscle), which runs through from your lower back all the way to the front of your humerus.
You want to keep this muscle flexible as it is one of the primary stabilizers of the humerus, centralizing its head in the shoulder socket. By flexible I mean this muscle needs to be strong, but at the same time loose enough to allow your arm to travel overhead for exercises like pull ups or military presses.
Together with the chest stretch, you can counterbalance that internal rotation of the arms as a result of a rounded posture and shoulders rolled forward.
Upward Facing Dog
Pushing away from the floor and extending your back up is called the upward facing dog aka Urdhva Mukha Svanasana in yoga and it helps to stretch the front part of your whole body, this time with the hips/knees extended. Since this stretch runs through from your feet to your chin, it gives you an opportunity to identify week/tight areas along the front and back chain of your body.
Breathing out magnifies the feedback from these areas. Pay attention. If it hurts somewhere, try to work around it, see what you need to do to ease the discomfort. Do slight rotation of your pelvis backward and pulling your shoulders down help?
Knee Tuck
Laying supine, with arms around tucked knees stretches the lower back, and the floor also sort of irons out your spine. With the back against the ground, it’s easy to focus on posture correction as the big contact surface gives you plenty of stability and also feedback about your spinal curvatures. Rocking with the leg helps to create space between the lumbar vertebraes which are often exposed to high pressure as a result of a weak core.
Spinal Flossing
Still laying supine and rolling bent legs side to side helps to further release tension in the lower back. It achieves a so-called spinal flossing, or neural flossing, which basically means freeing up nerve entrapment, as a result of — most commonly — poor posture or overtraining. Releasing the nerve from the tension of the surrounding muscles results in more effective nerve signaling.
Glute stretch
Knee to opposite shoulder stretches the glutes and muscles around the outside of the hip, like the often tight piriformis muscle. These muscles are strong external rotators of the femur, this way often inhibiting internal rotation in the hips. However, a healthy squat needs a certain amount of hip internal rotation.
Hip Swivel
The next exercise, the hip swivel does just that, and more. Freeing up the external rotators helps to deepen internal rotation, that is dropping the knees to the middle while sitting. On one leg it achieves full internal rotation while on the other leg a decent amount of external rotation. With this opposite, scissor-like action you can achieve greater range of motion, just think about the classic, dynamic arm stretches from elementary school.
Squat to Pike
Squat to pike raises the bar a bit higher. While the previous stretches were general in nature if your goal is to loosen up the hips for squats you need to do squat specific drills as well – meaning that the movement is very similar to a squat, or it is the squat itself like in the video.
Reaching towards the ground with the arms engages the front chain of your body (abs/hip flexors) which deepens the stretch in the posterior chain (reciprocal inhibition).
Spiderman
Next is a lunging spiderman type of stretch. It is one of the best complex stretches which means that if you are in a hurry you might want to get familiar with this exercise. Two opposite muscle groups are being targeted here. On the front leg side the glute and hamstring are the primary muscles under stretch while the rear leg stretch has dual function. Voluntary glute activation on the back side and this way a great hip flexor stretch on the front side of your thigh (again, activating a muscle on one side of the joint relaxes the muscles with opposite function—aka antagonist muscles).
The hip flexors are then even more targeted with the torso vertical and bent towards the opposite side. On the same side bringing the arm overhead makes this stretch run through your whole body, also targeting the often problematic area, the muscles around the armpit, like the pecs, lats and the triceps.
Frog
To not only stretch the hip in a horizontal plane, the frog position activates muscles that are responsible for abduction, that is moving a limb away from the center. With the muscles outside of the hip activated, again, the inside is going to be stretched more effectively, your adductors, that often cause your knees to collapse during the squat.
To Wrap it Up
This mobility routine can be used either to promote flexibility or to restore/reset range of motion in your joints prior to training.
This latter is the reason why you can’t just jump into exercising without greasing the movement patterns first. You want to have your general range of motion available in your joints by the time you hit the weights.
Take for example the chain in your bicycle (one that has a shift). If it’s not centered properly between the front and rear cogwheels you’ll hear cracking noises, however, you’ll still be able to pedal, it’s just not optimal and the chain is gonna break eventually.
Screwing in all the bolts and pins into place in your body, helps your brain memorize how the proper execution of the exercise feels, how the joints are aligned in relation to each other. You can only build up the volume on solid technique, otherwise, you are just ingraining a wrong pattern that can do harm for years before noticed.
Think about these stretches as a window of opportunity. So in this sequence, Tom makes sure that before he squats, he has the windows open, aka the available muscle length and plasticity. For example, with a squat to pike squat drill, he integrates a new range of motion in the actual movement.
Set yourself up a flexibility strategy like the above, create a sequence when the former drill enhances the subsequent one, and the movement gradually mimics the main weighted exercise you are warming up to.
Make it a routine, and hit it every time before your training and see how your body responds. Later you might cut the time by identifying areas that don’t need as much attention.
To wrap it up, if you take a look at the sequence of the exercises you’ll see that the first half of the drills revolves around restoring optimal spinal alignment and function, starting with the neck then chest and lastly the lumbar area. Only after comes the loosening up of the hip.
While there are endless exercises to stretch each body part and individual muscle, you will always want to start with resetting your spine for optimal signaling and mechanical load as that forms the base of all your complex movements later on. Yes, you can stretch your chest/triceps/calves and all your muscles in a more targeted way, but if your central console is sleeping you’ll just stretch to have loose ends.
I hope it makes sense, give it a try for a few days and see if you feel better.
