Mobility – June

Hello everyone, first off well done to all that have been making it down to mobility class. For those that are still trying but struggling to get out of bed keep up the good efforts. It has been a month now and we have been spending a lot of time working on expanding rotational capacity and strength of the joint,  particularly for shoulders & hips. This is step 1 into building a safer and healthier foundation.

–

For those that have been down you realise there is a lot of details to mention and cueing during the mobility class, counting reps and sets on top of that leaves little time to explain the benefits, reasons and how you can apply what we do independently. So here are 2 quick takeaways for you on how you can take what we do to improve your mobility outside of class.

–

1. CARS (controlled articular rotations), this is what we have been doing in the warm-ups for the first 5-10mins. These are the most bang for your buck exercises. They play a big role in maintaining & improving the range of motion of a joint. Think of CARS as the hard drive in a computer that saves the information or very much like how we brush our teeth regularly to reduce cavities, disease and the costly visits to the dentist. For this reason, I prescribe CARS as a daily morning routine. It is the best time to do them as it sets your body up for the rest of the day. If not as a warm-up before training works well too.

2. You will notice some stretches/ exercises to be harder than others but also very effective in that you notice a positive difference in how you feel and move afterwards. Definitely take those exercises and start applying them as your warm up/ cool down during classes. I normally sequence 2-3 exercises together that target the same muscle groups to really help open up range and build strength. So it is definitely worthwhile repeating those sequences in their particular order.

–

If you do feel unsure about what you should work on feel free to ask me after class and I will guide you on what to do based on what we did in class.

–

Now the next 4-week phase builds on top of the foundation we have been building. first 3 weeks will be full body classes continuing to introduce variety that will bring bigger muscles into the picture we are all the more familiar with such hip flexors, hamstrings, pecs and lats. Everything we do in this phase will still have a focus on improving big movements found in CrossFit, gymnastics & Olympic lifting like the squat, deadlift, pull up and overhead positions. But I will also be dropping some more spine work during those weeks which serves as a prep towards week 4 which will be focused on the spine. I wanted to dedicate a whole class just to spine because it is a complex beast to tackle properly. It takes a slower approach and needs some explaining/ practice for it to make sense. In my opinion, you guys will get more out of it this way and off the feedback of this particular week I will decide how I want to integrate more spine work into the months that follow.

Ant x