How much mobility do you actually need?
So much mobility. All of it. Give me all the mobilities.
Tl;dr:
Mobility is a vague word. It gets misconstrued as extreme flexibility or some kind of magic injury prevention, but in reality it just means the ability to move with relative ease. What “move” and “relative ease” means is wholly dependent on you, your needs, and wants.
The in-depth:
A common request I get from clients is “more mobility.” I follow up that request with a “mobility for what?” Responses I get range from trouble with everyday life positions to joint pain to a desire to do some kind of cool physical trick (handstand, split, etc).
All of these are valid, but the wide range highlights the murkiness of the word “mobility” - what is it, exactly, and how much of it do we actually need?
I just googled “mobility definition” to do that boring thing where a writer goes “the definition of x is blah blah blah” but I discovered an interesting thing: the definition of mobility (from the Oxford Dictionary by way of Google) is different than I remember. We can chalk that up to the distortion of memory (or Mandela Efffect), but historically mobility is defined as the ability to move, usually in relation to locomotion.
It used to be a word that was commonly spoken in terms of the elderly being able to walk - in fact, I used to teach “mobility” classes in the late ‘00s and more than once I had people misunderstand the class to be for seniors. But now the definition is written as:
“The ability to move or be moved freely and easily” with the sentence usage example written as “this exercise helps retain mobility in the damaged joints.”
Seems pretty exercise-oriented to me.
So the definition of mobility has shifted over time - or perhaps this is the algorithm at work, giving me a definition that it thinks is more relevant to me?
Hail to the Great Algorithm, arbiter of thought.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile, you’ve probably already been privy to my ramblings on the vague nature of strength and its definition (I even did one last week).
Mobility is much the same: it has no real meaning other than the one we ascribe to it.
Analyzing and deconstructing concepts like strength and mobility is important because it helps clear away the ideological detritus that clutters the fitness world: well-composed instagram images of extreme positions, instructional videos on complex, high level movements, and fear-mongering blog posts describing highly specific, highly necessary “prehab” movements, all fighting for our attention and claiming necessity. If we don’t have a clear understanding of what mobility is, it becomes an immaterial concept, blown about on the winds of fad.
So what, then, is mobility?
Well, the Almighty Internet has already told us it’s “the ability to move or be moved freely and easily.” So we got that: moving freely and easily. Easy enough.
But what kind of movement?
Walking?
Standing up?
Doing the splits?
Squatting twice bodyweight?
Being able to do all those things and run 10 miles immediately after?
The tricky part is prioritizing: it’s easy to get lost in internet rabbit holes and find footage of people doing incredible things and saying “That. I want to do that.” Happens to me all the time. But exposure to extreme examples leads to the conflation of skills and tricks with health and necessity.
Sure, a hollowback handstand looks really cool, but does it actually help improve health? Maybe, but not by virtue of having the shoulder mobility required to do it. If there are any health benefits to doing it, they’re probably more centered around the increased level of activity it would take to practice such a maneuver than the move itself.
But how much time does the average person need to devote to mobility? The answer is (YOU KNOW WHAT’S COMING!):
It depends.
There it is.
The level of mobility needed for each person varies based on their current condition, injury history, daily needs, and their goals. If you’re a professional dancer you’re going to have different mobility needs than an office worker. If you’ve had a catastrophic shoulder injury you’re probably going to need a different type of mobility work than a 20 year old with no history of injury.
Again, the fitness industry is a place where people make some specious AF claims: about assessments being able to predict injury (not possible); certain positions being the direct cause of pain (not true); about extreme positions and movements being the cure for pain, weakness, and the preventions for future injury and pain (also impossible).
Being able to pass a series of mobility tests (sorry, ACE) doesn’t mean you’re never going to get hurt. It’s an entirely arbitrary way to judge whether or not someone has “enough” mobility - without every finding out what “enough” means for that person in your life.
It’s just a shot in the dark that trainers use as a jumping off point. I’m not going to shit on them entirely - it’s something - but these types of assessments become moral judgements: being able to do them is “good” and if you can’t do them then you’re “bad” or weak, immobile, etc- some type of judgement that says you’re doing something wrong. Not to mention that they are tests, and just like any other test, once you’ve taken it, you have a better idea of how to pass it next time - yes, it is common for people to improve immediately upon doing an assessment subsequent times, even on the same day and in the same hour.
Ultimately, mobility needs change over life, as does our ability to move.
Yeah, it’s good to have movement options, but thinking that you can and should be able to do everything is destructive thinking, mostly because it’s impossible to do everything.
If there’s a specific skill you want to do, great. Do it. Mobility training to a specific goal is a great hobby, but it’s not the same as health or necessity. If you can’t do something you saw someone else do, or something a trainer told you that you should be able to do, consider if it’s relevant to your life (how often do you do that movement and do you currently experience pain performing it?), and also remember that trainers aren’t doctors and we’re not supposed to diagnose people with any physical or mental conditions, no matter how many certifications or letters we have after our names.