Body mobility is the foundation for all activity
Body mobility affects many aspects of life such as sleep, recovery, mental health, work well-being and sports performance. By investing in your mobility, you invest in a better quality of life.
What is body mobility?
What is muscle imbalance?
Why is body mobility important?
Benefits of mobility training
Health issues caused by mobility problems
Measuring body mobility
Understanding your mobility
What is body mobility?
Mobility is often used interchangeably with flexibility, but they’re not quite the same thing.
Flexibility is actually is a component of mobility.
Mobility means the active range of movement of the body joints
Flexibility means the muscle’s passive ability to lengthen
What is muscle imbalance?
When a body is in a state of imbalance, the other half of the body has to compensate the situation. This means more stress on the healthy half.
Imbalances can manifest through:
- wrong posture
- weakened power
- muscular stiffness
- partial ranges of motion
- pain or muscular tension
The body and musculature can “lock up”, which in turn can produce all kinds of pain and discomfort. A loss of muscular strength, in turn, can be readily seen in, per se, a javelin throw. The constant tension of the body spends a lot of unnecessary energy and increases stress reactions that reach all the way to a person’s emotional wellbeing.
Oftentimes you don’t recognize the imbalance in your body, which is why you don’t do anything about it.
Why is body mobility important?
Good mobility forms the basis for our functional capacity and performance. It allows extensive trajectories without hard muscle work because the resistance of tissues is low. Sufficient mobility is also a prerequisite for the correct performance techniques.
Mobility allows you to do what you want, not just what you can.
Mobility affects the aspects of our everyday life, such as:
Sleep: Stiffness and pain affect the quality of sleep and energy levels.
Work well-being: Musculoskeletal disorders affect work efficiency, decreasing time spent at work.
Sports performance: Results, recovery, the risk of injury and ultimately, the length of an athlete’s career
Mental well-being: Not being able to move freely may increase stress, anxiety or the risk of depression.
Benefits of mobility training
IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
A wider range of motion helps produce strength and explosive power. By improving mobility, you improve your performance without the need to increase strength or endurance.
SPEED UP RECOVERY
A body that is balanced and relaxed recovers faster. As mobility exercising is dynamic, it keeps the body fluids flowing and gives the body what it needs between workouts.
INJURY PREVENTION
You need enough range of motion to be able to function in your daily activities and exercise. Tension causes muscle imbalance and increases the risk of injury.
REDUCED PAIN & TENSION
Restrictions in mobility often cause us unwanted pain and stiffness. The reasons behind stiffness in shoulders and pain in lower back are often found from body mobility.
Health issues and pain conditions caused by mobility problems
We spend an incredible amount of time sitting. At work, watching TV, surfing at the Internet, traveling to work etc. A lack of physical activity and repetitive movements lead to restricted mobility, tension, left/right postural imbalances, decreased performance and pain.
Most of us are impacted by the downsides of sitting:
- neck, shoulder and back pain
- gaining weight
- type 2 diabetes
- insomnia
- psychological problems
Lower back pain is a global health problem. All the sitting puts our spine to a rounded position and reduces thoracic spine mobility, often leading other muscles to compensate movement and increased risk of pain and injuries.
In industrialized nations, it has been estimated that 60–70% of the population will be affected by lower back pain. It affects the individuals and the society. In the US alone, $50B is spent on back pain treatment per year.
Facts about back pain:
1 BILLION
people will experience back pain during their lives
TOP 3
most common causes of sick days worldwide
LEADING
contributor to disability worldwide
An active spine is a healthy spine. The best way to prevent back pain is to
- build muscle strength and good mobility throughout the body
- warm-up before exercising
- maintain a good posture
- live an active daily life, eg. take the stairs and walk to the grocery store
Body mobility is the missing dimension
The digital fitness equipment landscape is wide. Data is used to measure activity, heart rate, sleep and body composition.
However up until now, analyzing body mobility has been primarily based on visual assessment. This has meant slow recovery and methods that are hard & expensive to implement. Research data is also limited, since there hasn’t been effective tools for gathering data.
Until now. Check out the objective way to measure and improve mobility.
Understand your mobility
Understanding the state of your body mobility is the first step towards improvement. Get started by learning about our objective body mobility analysis.