Are you finished yet?
We interrupt this excessively long mobility instruction routine, to get you back to your
regularly scheduled workout.
Alright! Good! You're good, you're loose. I promise you're as loose as you're going
to be today for this workout.
The problem is a lot of guys are actually turning their warm ups into workouts.
And I wanted to address that here today.
Yes we're poking a little bit of fun at it because it's something you probably see in
the gym.
Some guys will literally show up now an hour before their workout or at least 30 minutes
before their workout, just to get ready for their workout.
Meanwhile, 4-5 years ago that didn't exist at all.
So where is the happy medium? What should we be doing? What should you be doing when
you get to the gym to get ready for your workout?
Now as a physical therapist, believe me, I value mobility and flexibility.
You have to make sure that you're attending to your joints just as much as your attending
to the show muscles that you're all here in the gym trying to develop.
As athletes we need to make sure that we're moving as well as we can and that starts with
the mobility of our joints.
But I'll tell you this, if you think that you need to go through a 30 minute, a 20 minute,
sometimes guys do it for an hour, routine to get ready for a workout,
then you might be doing the wrong workouts.
One of the bigger issues I see today is not that guys are not mobile enough to attack
a workout,
it's that their range of motion sucks so bad, that when they go to train their losing a
great opportunity to work on the mobility.
If you take your exercises through a full range of motion, and I mean a full range of
motion.
So if we're talking about a Lat Pulldown, that bar is going all the way up which guess
what, is great for shoulder and thoracic mobility.
And you bring it all the way down, you're now taking your body through a full range
of motion.
Yes, you're working your muscles through their full range of motion which is good, you'll
actually probably see better muscle gains by doing that.
But more so it's those other benefits of actually taking the joints and getting your shoulders
through full elevation
and tying in shoulder elevation with thoracic extension, so that we're getting the functional
carryover that we need, that we probably could avoid with all the extra stuff.
Now, granted, some guys have individual orthopedic concerns. They've got to break out a foam
roller because they have such bad kyphosus in their back, right, this kind of positioning,
that they need to work on mobility. And they don't have a physical therapist, like me around
that could actually do manual mobilization down their spine,
so a foam roller is a great tool to do that. But does that mean you have to do the Pec
stretch as well?
Could be! Because a Pec could actually get tight because you're in a kyphosus. So yeah
maybe that.
And then you're rolling out your hamstring, you're rolling out your calves, then someone
told you it's good to roll out your I T Band (Iliotibial Band).
Someone said it's really good to roll out your adductors. Right, then make sure you've
got to take out the rolling stick, I didn't even show you that.
A rolling stick and start massaging your thighs, and massaging your arms and your shoulders.
And then you've got your stretches. You've got to make sure you do all your stretches.
That's not how it goes guys.
Don't start turning, just because you've seen other people do these things, you keep adding
to your routine and adding to your routine.
And before you know it, you're not even spending any time working out and that's where you're
going to be able to have the most impact.
I'll leave you with this one thought. One of the bigger problems we have is not strengthening
ourselves in the range of motion that we have.
So if you come into a gym, and you start doing your temporary mobility techniques, like your
static stretching,
which we talk about all the time, should not be done prior to your workouts.
But you're going to use your static stretching to give yourself more room in your hamstrings,
you're going to try to elongate your hamstrings before you go do your exercise.
If you can't control the weight in that new temporary range of motion that you gave yourself,
you might set yourself up for an injury.
You might be doing more harm than good.
You need to be able to control your strength within your available range of motion, within
your active range of motion.
Meaning what is the range of motion that you can actively get yourself into?
And if you're in that range of motion and you're able to control the weight in that
range of motion and progressively get stronger in that range of motion,
that's where you want to be.
If you're creating artificial range of motion just to feel as if you can move through an
exercise with a little bit more freedom
but you don't have the strength, in that extra range of motion, because you've never trained
in there because you don't actually have it, that's a problem.
Guys we can go into a lot more depth on this, and I actually will go into a lot more depth
on this.
Matter of fact in our first ATHLEANX LIVE Event, we're going to cover this entire topic
in it's entirety.
However, and if you haven't heard about our Event guys you can go to ATHLEANX.COM/ATHLEANX-LIVE
and set up for our Live Event.
It's coming up here in August.
That being said, you've got to start bringing it back to reality a little bit guys.
You can get in with a nice warm up for your body in about 5 to 8 minutes.
Get your heart rate going, get a little bit of a sweat going.
You can do that through Jump Rope, you can do that on an Elliptical, you can do that
whatever, whatever makes you loose and ready to go.
You can go through whatever your very particular, one or two or three mobility drills are, that
are specific to your circumstances, if you have a circumstance
but if you're not and you're just in general good health and you want to get going, you've
got to get into your workouts.
And in those workouts, take your exercises through full range.
This is the best way for you to adapt and utilize the mobility that's already there
in your joints and to increase that as you increase your strength.
If you're going to be doing Squats, Squat as deep as you can. Increase the mobility
of your hips.
Take that through all of your exercises, like I said, the Lat Pulldown as well.
If you guys found this video a little bit refreshing and maybe even a little bit relieving,
so you don't feel like you have to turn these 30 or 40 minute workouts into hour and 40
minute sessions,
then leave your comments and thumbs up below, and make sure you let me know whatever else
it is you want to see and I'll cover it here in these videos ahead.
Alright guys, I'll be back here again soon.