Lower Body Mobility
(Refer to the Athlete Playbook for movement listing to follow)
Practice your lower body mobility before the next class.
mo·bil·i·ty
noun
- the ability to move or be moved freely and easily.
What if we said you have the power to Relieve Pain, Prevent Injury, Improve Performance? If you knew that you could prevent a disease from crippling you 20 years from now, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to avoid the triggers that result in that disease?
Pain is an Epidemic
It prevents you from performing at your best because it robs you of concentration and power. But pain is preventable, treatable and within your grasp to heal.
Mobility awakens your body’s resilience to erase pain, relieve stress, and improve performance. Take healing into your own hands.
Stretching only focuses on lengthening short and tight muscles. Mobilization, on the other hand, is a movement-based integrated full-body approach that addresses all the elements that limit movement and performance including short and tight muscles, soft tissue restriction, joint capsule restriction, motor control problems, joint range of motion dysfunction, and neural dynamic issues. “Hard bodies” soften to the sensation of self-care. In short, mobilization is a tool to globally address movement and performance problems.
Self-massage is a fundamental practice for fostering internal anatomical listening skills and enhancing embodiment. Through mobility, people have triumphed over chronic pain, illness, emotional trauma and prevented surgery by using the transformative methods.
Fascia and Proprioception
For years, they thought it was passive tissue. (By they, we mean the mainstream medical community, of course.)
They thought that fascia were lifeless connective tissue simply meant to protect muscles from friction, to house nerves and blood vessels as they traveled through muscles, and to connect muscles to bones. They do those things, of course. But fascia is so much more central to the process of being alive than researchers had previously given it credit for.
Fascia connects your connective tissue (bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, etc.) It’s like a thin film, mostly made of collagen, that runs in one continuous stretch all over your body. The word comes from Latin, meaning “band”, because it encloses and connects everything in your body like a band might.
While it’s healthy, fascia is stabilizing, separating, protecting, sliding, twisting, and transferring energy.
Conversely, when fascia isn’t healthy, it becomes sticky, flaky, and tight – thus preventing it from functioning flexibly.
Fascia is the ubiquitous living seam system in your body that threads your tissues to one another. It is just one of many types of connective tissue in your body, but it is the tissue that plays the biggest role in mobility.
When was the last time you had a muscle knot? It was actually caused by tight fascia…
- Fascia Creates Scar Tissue
In addition to absorbing the physical shock of impact, fascia forms scar tissue after an injury or surgery. Scar tissue is one of the areas that can get tense or tight when fascia is unhealthy – because it’s made of fascia.
- Fascia Is a Cell Highway
Cells travel through fascia to keep muscles working independently, and otherwise disperse organic information through all of your organ, muscle, and vascular systems. It’s an enormous communication system. That’s why fascia can be affected by so many different body functions.
- Trauma Can Cause Fascia Issues
Trauma – emotional or physical – can change the shapes of our bodies. For example, physical trauma permanently tightens or affects one area of the body… and because fascia is one connected, continuous membrane-like thread, that one change can ripple out and affect a seemingly unrelated area of the body.
Like if you pulled on a corner of your T-shirt and accidentally showed your belly button. Emotional trauma can have effects on things like your posture, which means that if you’re standing cramped all day every day, your fascia is in a prolonged state of crumpling and sticking.
- Emotional Unrest ITSELF Can be a Culprit
The actual consistency and biological footprint of burdensome emotions can build up in the body and travel through fascia, according to R. Louis Shultz and Rosemary Feitis. When that happens, you feel tense, heavy, and restricted. Releasing and moving through negative emotions can help restore your fascia to health.
- Fascia Can Get Dehydrated
Just like all of our other bodily functions, fascia needs water to survive and behave! Without consistent hydration, fascia strands wither and become brittle, resulting in inflexibility and muscle pain during attempted movement. It can also get stuck more easily when it’s dried. Your fascia will glide and slide if you keep yourself, and therefore it, hydrated.
Your posture follows you like a shadow, and it has a ripple effect into everything you do. Unfortunately, many choices lead to degenerative vertebrae, bulging disks, herniated abdomens, torn knee cartilage, or stress fractures in hips, to name a few examples. These very preventable musculoskeletal ailments are hurting not just us, but also our wallets, our healthcare system, and our economy.
What we do to steward this:
Whether you’re a top athlete who wants to improve your performance or a new mama with sore shoulders, the treatment is the same. Your tissues need comprehensive, integrated strategies to restore optimal performance so that you can do what you want to do, better and pain-free.
What’s necessary is a soft-tissue conditioning, self-care fitness format that uses the various therapy balls for self-myofascial release (self-massage). This may include breath work, CheckIn and ReCheck, elements of alignment, anatomy instruction and mental awareness (such as conscious relaxation). The sequences don’t take long but the time you spend on the balls each day will begin to add up, and it will uncover and erase pains that were previously hiding in plain sight. You’ll also remodel your body into a supple fortress that pain cannot penetrate. It presents a concrete roadmap for pain management, body ease, and movement efficiency.
