IOL Strength and Conditioning

I’ve been sorting out a long list of structural problems over the past few years, one spot after another resulting in various levels of pain or annoyance from neck to feet. Some of the trouble spots are now completely fixed, and remain moving easily with a few simple exercises, stretches and some easy soft tissue work.

Once in a while the relief happened so quickly it felt like magic. Other problems are taking more time, especially after guessing wrong a few times and compensating or over-compensating with incorrect movements.

Many of you suffer some of the same problems, or will when the length of time your body is moving wrong catches up with its ability to mask them. It seems we can do things really badly for a whole long time before things start breaking down, but once the structure starts faltering, look out.

A remarkable aspect of weight training is it strengthens our musculature enough to keep us going through pain that would knock down our non-training neighbors; the bad part is we’re strong enough to compensate for weakness. This is done automatically, without awareness, so the problem gets deeper ingrained than it would have been otherwise… which is to say, hard to find and even harder to fix.

Now, after several years, books, dvds, paid site subscriptions and a variety of goofy-looking rehab tools, what things boil down to for me is a few minutes a day of pre-hab and a couple minutes of pre-workout activation. This is an amazingly complicated process, this structure and movement rehabilitation, made simple by a few easy exercises and stretches done consistently and forever.

Many of the mobility and functional movement experts, their books, dvds and workshops, are truly outstanding, and I highly recommend them. The thing is, most of us get a little lost in the volume of material, much of it using language we don’t understand. The writer or presenter expects us to know where the ever-spasming piriformis is, and before he gets to the vital part of how to fix it, we’ve tuned out.

In this thread on mobility, rehab and functional movement prep, we’ll discuss some of the products of the best thinkers, and where to spend your attention and money when you’re ready to focus in on your troublespots. Before you branch out, though, I suggest you spend a month on the following remedial tips.

Everyone who lives upright should do the following most days of the week.

Soft tissue work:
Tennis ball rolling under the foot
Foam rolling of the glutes and legs (front, back and sides)
Tennis ball rolling of the piriformis (deep in the glute, rolling leg bent at the knee to access)
Tennis ball rolling of the psoas (front of the torso, inside and above the hip)
Foam rolling the upper back

Deep core work:
Plank
Side plank
Hip bridge
Birddog

Mobility:
Ankle bending (forward and to the inside and outside)
Hip circles (leg to the front, back and sides, circling in both directions)
Cross-over lunge (one leg lunges back, crossing behind, hips rotating)
Step-overs (lift leg high enough to step over a hurdle from the side and front)
Thoracic spine (upper/mid-back backwards, then chest up, scapula back)

Stretching:
Pectoral stretch (arm from elbow to wrist against wall, lean into the stretch)
Hip flexor stretch (lunge one leg forward, body upright, spine long, arms overhead)
Hamstrings (body flat on floor, one leg up, against doorway, other leg flat)

Before we move on, perhaps a bit of clarification would be useful. We see a lot of “mobility this” and “stability that,” but what’s it all mean?

In this context mobility means joint movement, encompassing both the ability of the joint to move through its widest safe range of motion and the ability of the nearby muscles to cause that motion.

Flexibility is referring to the muscle lengthening, whether it can move to its full expected range, or if it’s instead shortened to a less than optimum length.

Stability can be both joint stability, such as the knee, low back, neck and elbow that have a short range of motion and need to be stable, and muscular stability, as when talking about the deep abdominal muscles that stabilize the spine.

When we talk about activation, we’re talking about waking up a muscle group that’s not firing well, such as the glutes after a day sitting at the desk. Glute activation movements are a perfect example of a two-minute pre-workout program that will provide an enormous payoff.

Most of us have a problem in one or more of these areas, and those problems trigger other compensation problems that eventually knock us off the gym floor until we figure out how to fix them. That, or we get our own Costco membership card so we don’t have to sneak in with a friend for wholesale, mondo-size bottles of Aleve.

There’s a lot more to it that this, and once we get the flexibility started, the core strengthening and the activation going, there are other exercises we can use individually to fine-tune our hip mobility and to make outstanding progress.

The coolest part? After a few weeks of this introductory stuff, we can keep things humming along nicely with a few minutes a day on the pre-hab stuff and a couple minutes of pre-workout activation.

Hey, you could potentially stay pain-free for the duration, however long that happens to be.