Flexibility

Physical Fitness: Components of Fitness Part 1: Health-Related

Health Component of Fitness: Flexibility

Flexibility and mobility? Are they the same?

No, they are not. Yet both are necessary for a multitude of reasons such as:

· Reducing injury

· Full range of motion

· Active movement

· Passive holds

Benefits of flexibility and mobility

Flexibility

Flexibility is the ability of a joint or series of joints to move through an unrestricted, pain-free range of motion. (UC Davis Health) It is a passive way of voluntary movement. Moving your body through ranges of motion are useful to connect with your body because it’ll allow you to pick up on problem areas that may be weak and tight, strong but tight, weak and loose to name a few complications that can arise.

Mobility

To simplify this, mobility is an active dynamic movement through a limb’s range of motion while flexibility is passive.

Now let’s think about this from a practical sense. Let’s say you’re looking to pick up a box from the floor. It’s fairly heavy and you’ve been lacking mobility in your hips and ankles. You go to pick up the box and as you come up, you feel a pull in your lower back.

Tying the two together

The importance of having great mobility and flexibility is that you’ll only be as mobile as you are flexible. You can only dynamically move through ranges of motions that you have access to. If you are extremely tight, you will lack mobility. This will also limit the amount of strength power and agility that you can produce. If you try to go beyond the limits of the range of motion that you are flexible, mobile, and strong in, this is when injury can occur. As we all know, nobody has time for that.

What is happening when I work on Flexibility or Mobility?

When stretching passively, you are going to stretch out the muscles and connective tissues to improve… you guessed it… flexibility!

When talking about flexibility, we cannot leave out mobility.

When you hold a position long enough in the end range that you have access to (without excruciating pain), you are engaging the golgi tendon organ and inhibiting the muscle spindle in the muscle (look at the picture below).

Before breaking down the GTO and muscle spindle individually, let’s talk about how they work together. Their function in the body is to work together on regulating muscle stiffness. One is found in the muscle belly (muscle spindle) and the other is found at the musculotendinous junction (GTO). Both are important to relay information to the CNS (Brain & spinal cord) on what’s happening at the muscles and what is happening between the muscle and joint to avoid injuries and to know where the muscle/s are in space. With all of the information, it allows the body to know where it is in space (proprioception)

Muscle Spindle

Ok, let’s start at the muscle spindle (image above). The muscle spindles are delicate sensory receptors that inform the central nervous system about the changes in length and the speed in the change of length of individual muscles. Almost all of the muscles contain muscle spindles.

The information received lets the body know its position and movement in space, which is needed for motor control, maintain posture, and for a stable walking pattern.

If you’ve ever tried to stretch your hamstring while seated on the floor and you try to stretch past a certain point and you felt your hamstring muscle contract, you can thank the muscle spindle for that. The muscle spindle helps avoid overstretching the hamstring muscle when the change in length occurs at a speed at which it feels that you would cause injury. This is also what is known as the stretch reflex.

Golgi Tendon Organ

The Golgi tendon organ senses the muscular tension within muscles when they contract or are stretched. It lies at the musculotendinous junction. When the GTO is activated during stretching, it inhibits the muscle spindle temporarily within the muscle that’s being stretched. This will allow you to get into a deeper stretch because the information being sent to the GTO is stating that it is safe to go beyond the usual range of motion.

Without the GTO, the muscle spindle would kick in and avoid you from getting deeper into any stretch.

Joint by Joint Principle

Alright, let’s say, you’re cleaning out your garage and you see this heavy box. You go to lift it in a squat position and as you come up, you hurt your back. Ahh!

Keep this visual in your head and if you’ve felt this pain before and or are dealing with it now, I’ve been there myself.

Before I go any further, I’d like to go over what we call the joint-by-joint approach. I’d like to thank two titans in the industry, Mike Boyle and Gray cook for creating this simple concept breaking down movement dysfunctions, injuries, and how the adjacent joint where the injury occurred may have played a part.

Looking at the illustration above, what you see are circles around joints in either red (mobility) and blue (stability). To be clear, all joints need to have some level of stability and mobility yet a joint will be required to be more mobile than stable depending on where it lies on the body and its disposition.

In the illustration above the hip joint that’s in red. This joint needs to be mobile to allow us to jump, run, walk, go upstairs, sit up, squat, etc. To get to the point, if you were to have restrictions in the joint actions that the hip can perform, you’re going to have issues with the joints above and below. The body will pick up the slack (compensate) for the lack of mobility at the hip. When the mind is in the process of performing a movement, the body will do all that it can (whether it is performed properly or not).

Got it… How does this apply in a real-world scenario?

Time to go back to our vision of having back pain while attempting to lift up and move a heavy box. Looking at the joint-by-joint approach, my hope is for you to comprehend that due to a lack of flexibility/mobility in your hips, you will have issues getting in the proper position to allow your muscles to move your bones/joints into the proper position to execute the movement. When we lack flexibility and mobility, we do not have access to the proper mechanics and ranges of motions. Now other muscles compensate and do more work than needed to execute a movement that you’ve set your mind on. So, as you try to lift up this box and you’re not able to be mobile in your hips, the lower back will try to help pick up the slack… and here is when people get hurt.

Asking for a joint that’s meant to have more stability than mobility to become more mobile will pull muscles out of place and put you on the sidelines longer than needed.

Putting an emphasis and focus on flexibility will allow you to, gain access to ranges of motion that our bodies had access to (watch babies move around/ they have sound technique!), improve your body’s ability to perform components of fitness well, and decrease your chance of injury.

Got it! How can I improve my flexibility and mobility?

You can work on your flexibility by stretching. Two ways to stretch and work on flexibility are static stretching and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF). Now one key thing that I want to preface for each and every style of stretching is that you must make sure to set your body in the proper position to feel the stretch properly and not put any other body part in a compromising position.

Static stretching is what most people know as stretching. Stretching this way consists of holding the muscle in which you’re stretching up to a point of discomfort for at least 30 seconds.

Proprioceptive neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) is when the muscle of a stretched muscle is contracted at its full lengthened position. The reason for this stretch is because it activates the muscle spindles stretch reflex function to let the muscle know that it is safe enough to go into a deeper range of motion in a stretch. You want to hold the position for around ten seconds, before before relaxing and working on holding the stretch in the newfound range of motion.

There is an amazing book called the permanent pain cure by Dr. Mind chew. He is a bodybuilder turned healer as a physical therapist. His approach is called the mind method and it consists of doing stretches that require PNF stretching and static holds for 30 seconds and up to a minute. The stretches are broken into two sections, spinal stretches, and fascial stretches. His approach is simple and effective in stretching to place tension on the muscles to affect the fascia and help distribute the way your body holds tension properly.

In short, the spinal stretches help create and keep length in the spine to allow for a better connection/signaling with the brain, spinal cord, and the body. While the Fascial stretches help with hold static stretches throughout a limb or sets of limbs to allow the fascia to be introduced to tension at a lengthened state. These are hard to do and you will feel tighten.

It is imperative to:

1. Hydrate

2. Breath diaphragmatically

3. And be patient with this practice.

Yoga is also another way to hold positions and work on your flexibility while also working on your mental focus so feel free to explore new spaces and start journeys to help you improve on this component of fitness.

Below are some stretches that will help improve your flexibility and mobility over time. Perform them in the order they are shown.

Flexibility Exercises

Deadroach 1

Holding a small globe

Low back Stretch

Side of neck stretch

Hip Flexor stretch

Mobility Exercises

Quad Adductor Mobility

T-spine Rotations

Flexibility & Mobility Takeaway

Flexibility is a crucial part of health-related fitness. It is one’s ability to move joints through unrestricted, ranges of motion that the joint or joint series have the ability to move to get to a location or complete and objective. Flexibility is worked on passively by holding a position for a period of time.

Mobility is a dynamic way to work on the body’s range of motion. It’ll allow you to get into positions and move well while avoiding injury.

While improving flexibility and mobility, the two will continue to help the other. This, over time, will help you with being able to get stronger, move better and reduce injury.

For exercises to perform for mobility and flexibility, scroll up and subscribe to my youtube page here.

Conclusion

I know this was a jam-packed post and I hope you bookmark this page as a reference. I will continue to update this post with current information and actionable items for you to do. Now what I want you to remember is that although I said a lot, the most important is to have awareness through everything that you do. As you read this article and more coming from myself, tap into seeing what is most relevant to you at this moment to either relieve pain, help you move better than to make you stronger. I will rather be the pain-free person in the room than to be strong with a bunch of aches and pains.

Part 2 Skill-related components of fitness will be released soon.

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