What is Mobiltiy?

What is mobility?

Mobility is used to describe the body's ability to move or be moved. When assessing an individual's physical abilities, mobility is referred to as their ability to move in any given environment. It is YOUR overall range of motion, most importantly within your joints.

Why is mobility important?

Mobility is important when it comes to your health and daily function, increased mobility can prevent the body from soreness and decrease the chance of injuries and their severities. Mobility can help keep you active and healthy for years, which is incredibly important as you age.

Benefits include:

- Strengthening the joints can decrease the risk of physical injury, while increasing body awareness.

- Increase strength, through muscle activation and joint strengthening.

- It can release tension built up in muscles and joints

- Increase body function, while decreasing physical pain and tension.

- Improve posture, helping with the bodies daily functions including work.

- It can help you understand YOU better.

Mobility and our Physical Health

Mobility is the foundation of your physical health and is key to a long and healthy lifestyle. When we spend an increased amount of time in one position, such as working at a desk for 8 hours a day or standing up for extended periods with limited movement, the internal connective tissues can become short and tight. Overall decreasing your bodies range of motion.

This can lead to immobilisation, such as soreness, stiffness and triggering pain. We depend on our mobility every single day, for every single activity we take part in, including physical activities such as hiking, HIIT workouts, lifting weights, but also for daily tasks or accidents that could potentially take place like falling over, missing a step and bending over to pick things up. Mobility is always serving us!

Having poor mobility, means you are not moving through your joints full range of motion, this can lead to a number of issues, uneven distribution of pressure throughout the body and joints, and can lead to increased tension in the body. When optimal mobility is reached, your body becomes fully equipped with functionality and an active range of motion.

What is the difference between mobility and flexibility?

Mobility and Flexibility are often interchanged; however they are not the same!

Flexibility is the ability to lengthen your muscles, it is a passive way of movement, such as stretching. While mobility is the ability for your joints to move actively move through its full range of motion.

Mobility requires good flexibility, but also good stability and strength. Passive stretching focuses on flexibility, while dynamic stretching focuses on mobility. Flexibility is important, however due it being more widely known than mobility, overstretching can occur if not mixed with strength building exercises, causing connective tissue to constantly stretch without the opportunity to recoil and regenerate.

Mobility and Our Mind

Mobility is not just about its physical support to your body, it encourages and allows your body to relax, and expanding your breathing capacity. Breathing with tension is vastly different to breathing without tension. Breathing with tension causes the chest to inflate and the shoulders to shrug upwards, while breathing without tension drops down into the body, expanding the diaphragm and relaxes the body through the autonomic nervous system. Less tension means greater mobility!

To Conclude…

Mobility is the key to peak physical performance, due to the functional and active range we have within the body. Improving your mobility is one of the most effective ways to have a happy, healthy and relatively pain free body, that can sustain you throughout your life!

Ankle Mobility