Four Habits That Drastically Improve Mobility

Mobility is critical for health living, but stretching isn’t the entire story:

Beyond just stretching

Liv Townsend, of LivInLeggings fames, recommends these four habits:

1. Sit less: prolonged sitting affects hip and shoulder mobility. Specifically, it affects it negatively. It is also a bringer of woe in many other ways beyond the scope of what we’re doing here today, but the important thing for mobility is to sit less. So, if you spent a lot of time at a desk, invest in a standing desk (writer’s note: I dearly love mine, which is technically a sit-stand converter like this one on Amazon but I just keep it in the up position all the time, so it’s easy to forget it has multiple settings. Anyway, it’s sooooooo much better for my back than sitting for hours at a time.). For how to deal with other (i.e. not desk-related) reasons you might be sitting a lot, check out: Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t*)
2. Take creatine: more than just for strength and muscle-building (and even aside from its brain-benefits that it bestows to older people, but not young ones), creatine also supports mobility and flexibility. Any brand is fine, so long as creatine monohydrate is the sole ingredient. Also, micronized or not is also fine—that’s just to do with whether it’s been pre-compacted into super-tiny beads (so small that it will still effectively be a powder), which helps it to avoid clumping when mixed in a liquid, that’s all. It shouldn’t have any additives either way (so, check labels to ensure it doesn’t).
3. Spend more time under tension: no, we’re not talking about texting your spouse “we need to talk”, but rather, this means that when we do stretch, we should spend longer in the stretched position. While dynamic stretching has its place, passive stretching (holding stretches for longer periods) is essential and shouldn’t be overlooked.
4. Incorporate “movement snacks”: this is about when we are going about our daily life, we should move more while doing everyday tasks. Get in some shoulder stretches while waiting for the kettle to boil, deep squat while petting the dog, etc. These are very important, because mobility is very much a “use it or lose it” thing, and so moving in many different ways, frequently, is the only way to ensure full coverage (no stretching regimen is going to be able to cover the many compound movements that we do in everyday life).

*That article also covers how to avoid the damage of sitting even if you cannot physically stand!

For more on all of these, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

Mobility As Though A Sporting Pursuit: Train For The Event Of Your Life!

Take care!