Mobility Drills vs Flexibility Stretches (Which is MORE Important?)

Get your workouts, flexibility, mobility and nutrition in one program…

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. Today I want to talk to you about the difference between 2 words we hear a lot about. Flexibility and Mobility.

They are 2 different words, obviously, but they have 2 very different meanings when it comes to getting your body ready to train your best. The difference guys between flexibility and mobility is that flexibility is going to deal mostly with tissue length. And mobility is going to deal mostly with tissue temperature or how warm your body is and how loose you feel. So, let me show you exactly what the difference is with a couple of examples. First of all, let’s deal with flexibility.

When we talk about flexibility, you guys have heard me talk about dynamic and static flexibility. And we want to make sure that we’re doing most of our static flexibility and static stretching before we go to bed at night. As we heal, our muscles will tend to heal shorter. We want to make sure that we do that and we do that over the course of time because a consistent effort on our static flexibility will produce increases in length. So, if you have a muscle that runs from A to B here, the person that has the muscle that runs from A to B here, has a more flexible muscle.

The muscle length is longer. It’s literally longer. It’s more flexible. That is what you’re working on when you do those types of static stretching drills. You’re trying to get the muscle to slowly but surely increase its length so you have more available range of motion.

That is flexibility. When we talk about mobility, we’re really talking about the temperature of the joint. So, if you have a joint that has the flexibility from here to here, and another person has a flexibility from here to here, but his person is mobile, and this person is immobile. Ok, we’ll deal with that. Those are extreme ranges of motion, but this person may not move this far.

He may have the length that this guy has here at the muscle belly, but he can’t express that because he doesn’t have the mobility in the surrounding joint to express the full flexibility. So, perfect example, so he might wind up being more like this functionally. So, a good example of that would be with your lats, ok. I might have the flexibility in my lats to get all the way up through here, up to vertical and beyond with my arm. But I may not have the mobility in my shoulder to get up to this point.

So, my mobility is limiting my potential flexibility. And until I work on my mobility, I’m never going to realize or fully express the flexibility that I actually have. So, where’s mobility fit in with your training? Mobility is something that you could do before your workouts. It’s a great thing to do before your workouts.

And our dynamic stretching is a form of mobility work because you don’t just have mobility in joints. *** [3:15}You activate the tissue temperature or the warmth of the joint the more it starts to feel like you’re working through your mobility issues, the looser you feel. Remember, another differentiation between flexibility and mobility is going to be, what is our exact objective measurement, where another one is more of a subjective feeling. A flexibility deficit is going to show up in inches or centimeters, whereas a mobility deficit will feel like stiffness. Did you ever hear or feel like you know you have great flexibility through your arms and through your shoulders, but you feel stiff?

That feeling of stiffness regardless of what your flexibility is, is something that usually comes with the mobility issues. So, if you’re finding yourself feeling very stiff that you can work through as you warm up, you’ve got more mobility work that you have to do. And again, you could do that before your workout. Here’s my one last example. What I did was I took 2 bands because I want to show you that mobility doesn’t just isolate itself to joints.

It definitely applies. There’s a mobility component to tissue as well, to muscle tissue as well. This band here is a regular ATHLEANX XTREME Band. This band is actually starting to thaw out, but this one was in the freezer for awhile. So, this is a lot colder band.

This one, nice and warm. I could take it and stretch it very easily. You know, there’s some good motion here through this band. I’ve got some good movement. Whereas this cold band, I definitely am pulling, you know, harder to get almost as much as I can.

I still feel like I don’t get as much as I had on the other band. Matter of fact, this band is even fraying as I do this. An ice cold band is actually starting to fray on its edges. You can’t really see it from there, but the edges are actually starting to come up and fray. So, you can see that trying to take a cold muscle and work with it can be a bad idea.

So, you want to make sure that you’re properly warm, mobile, before you get into some of your lifting exercises and some of your other activities whether it be professional sports or just recreational sports. Mobility/Flexibility, 2 very different things. Mobility and flexibility are 2 things that you’re going to need if you want to perform at your highest level. Guys, the cool thing here with ATHLEANX is, there’s other ways to work on your mobility. We’re getting you more and more of these mobility type videos that we do so that you guys can learn from them, but at the same time properly written and properly devised exercise program, we’ll work on your mobility because it’s going to take you through ranges of motion you may not be used to going through.

And by going through those ranges of motion, either during the warm up or during the actual exercise itself, you’re going to be improving your mobility which will have an effect of improving your flexibility because if you have good flexibility, you’re finally going to be able to express it by having a more mobile joint that these muscles cross. So, I hope that makes sense, If you guys found that helpful, make sure you leave a comment and a thumb’s up below. And if you want a program that takes you through the nececssary ranges of motion to work on your mobility while you’re training so you’re getting the benefits of both at the same time, then head to ATHLEANX. COM right now and grab our 90-Day TrainingProgram. And as I said, leave your comments.

Whatever else you’d like to see me cover, I’ll make sure I do it here in these upcoming videos. Alright guys. Thanks a lot.