Mobility Assessment
One of, if not the most, important places to start a strength training program is your mobility. We need to be able to move and control our body through an exercise motion before we add weight to the movement. If we add weight prematurely we can do one of at least three things. One, we might be doing the exercise with less than full range of motion (ROM). Sometimes partial range of motion is fine but more full, pain free ROM is the ultimate goal and the way to get the most out of an exercise. Two, we could be training our body to move and create strength in a less than optimal movement pattern. Why would we want to train our body to perform less efficiently? Third, we will almost certainly create an injury inside of our body at some point down the line.
Mobility training is beneficial even if you don’t plan to strength train. It can help prevent injuries and aches and pains on and off the bike. It will help your posture in every day life. It can help you maintain a more optimal position and be more efficient on your bike. And the most eyebrow raising thing is many mobility exercise techniques can also be used to speed up recovery time. So everybody should be doing some mobility training.
What is mobility? Is it stretching? Partially. One of the fascinating things to me is that if you have some good flexibility it doesn’t necessarily mean you have good mobility. Good flexibility for your hips and hamstrings might be to have a really good single leg supine hamstring stretch. Good mobility of your hips might be to have a full ROM deadlift. These two things are not always the same. Here is a video of an example of the difference between flexibility and mobility. Try it out.
There are a few ways to test your current mobility. One way I used as a personal trainer at Equinox was the Functional Movement Screen or FMS. If you are a member of a gym I’d recommend checking if they offer this assessment. When I worked there it was complimentary along with one training session. It is definitely worth trying because you’ll have a trained eye assessing how you move. Also who knows, you may like the experience and decide to work with a personal trainer? If not you’ll at least gain some valuable information.
It is very possible to get all the information you need to do an adequate job without performing an FMS. We can use a similar strategy in this routine below. As you go through these movements you can use a mirror, have a friend watch you, or video yourself. We want to not only make sure we have full range of motion but also that both left and right sides are equal. If we find our hips are tight then we want to be careful which hip strength exercises we choose to do until our hips move better. Same with our shoulders. If our core needs some work we want to choose exercises that don’t rely as much on core strength for proper form.
Pay close attention to your head and neck, shoulders, hips, knees, ankles and feet. These are sometimes called the five kinetic chain checkpoints. Common things you may find are your head and chin jutting forward, shoulders shrugging or rounding forward, hips tilted forward (tight hip flexors for us cyclists), knees collapsing inwards or bowing outwards, ankles/feet/arches of feet collapsing in. There is probably no such thing as perfect movement. It might be more accurate to say more or less optimal. The more optimal you are moving the safer you will probably be performing a strength exercise. I do not claim my mobility in this video is picture perfect but it probably good enough to safely perform the exercises we as cyclists do in the offseason.
We have to be mobile first in order to strength train. Even if we don’t plan on strength training we should be working on our mobility to help prevent injury, improve efficiency and our off-the-bike posture, and to help us recover faster. After reading this post and trying these videos I hope you have a better idea of how well your body is moving. Think of the information you find like a red, yellow, and green light. If you’re not moving well in a particular area, red light, no added weight until you improve. If you’re moving okay with a few minor looking things to fix, yellow light, proceed with caution. That could mean you perform the exercises with your body/very light weight to start. If you’re moving well then that is a green light with any exercise you choose as long as you have good form and range of motion.
Sometimes it’s hard to find the time. Start small. If it’s literally just one minute before and after riding then that’s where you can start. Next time might be two minutes!
