Daily Mobility Exercises by Dr. Kelly Starrett › Forums › Shoulder › Where do you start when the entire system is the problem? › Re: Where do you start when the entire system is the problem?

07/24/2013 at 7:15 pm #72500
AvatarErin Ritter
Participant
Short story and long story follows. Hope it helps!
In a nutshell, I think it’s best to take an “Error Message” systems approach and pretty much pick the area of my body that sends me a warning signal and start working on it until it feels better or the error message goes away. Then move on to the next area while maintaining the areas I’ve made progress in. Below is the long story of why I think this approach is reliable and practical method for increasing mobility and range of motion.
Mobility Progression

My entire stability system was jacked up at every level. I’m slightly more than a month in on my initial mobility work. As much as I love mobilitywod.com, I think Kelly’s book  (“Becoming a Supple Leopard”)  does a better job of making it easy to fix any and all mobility issues extremely quickly and effective. 

After reading the first few chapters of the book, then quickly going through the entire book to understand what is in there on a basic level,I took the approach to open the book to the mobility  section that goes over addressing the area of the body that felt the most tight, painful, or inflamed. 

Thoratic Spine
The initial week I mainly worked on the tissue around thoratic spine. I had a massive amount of pain, tightness and inflammation in that area. About 30 days, I still work on this area for about 10-15 minutes each day with foam roller and two lacrosse balls taped together as Kelly demonstrates in his videos.
Hip Flexors
About a week later, after my spine started to feel better and I could turn my head with a full range of motion without major pain or restriction Hip flexors, stance, and creating stability, power, and torque through extending and opening my hips as much as possible with my feet straight while keeping my glutes activated and my stomach tight. . I did it while walking, sitting, and standing, jumping, exercising, and working. I had a horrible duck stance, and had a lot of navicular drop with each step/movement.

After a couple weeks of continued thoratic spine work, and countless hours and days of conscience work on my help flexors, I started to notice much better alignment and positioning with regard to my hip, spine, and head alignment. 
Shoulders
At this point, I started to feel pretty good but there was an obvious shifting of tension moving to my shoulder sockets. At this time I was working on learning how to properly do handstand push ups and I felt like I was close to seriously tweaking my shoulder and there was tons of stiffness. With my spine, neck, and hips feeling pretty good, I moved to the shoulders. Specifically getting my shoulders to stay back in the sockets as opposed to rounded which Kelly refers to as “Douchebag Shoulder Syndrome”. 

So once again I open Kelly’s “Becoming a Supple Leopard” book of black magic and go through the shoulder mobility exercises on one shoulder for about 15 minutes then looked in the mirror to compare the position of my two shoulders against one another. One was all the way back in the socket properly and I could hold the position for the rest of the night until morning. I proceed to work on my other shoulder and like magic, I now feel loose, stable, and balanced from my toes, through my hips, spine, shoulders, and neck.

Knees

As I worked through the category one exercises in the book, I started to feel a little knee pain due to changes in my movement and lack of stability under light load or high rep body weight exercises. I worked in some of the knee mobility stuff and of course, the knee pain has ceased.

After about a month in, this has been my main areas of focus. As new things come up, I find myself constantly referring to the book. Every time, the book has rectified the major pain or problem I was having. I work on each of these areas for a short time each day. I’m now feeling some minor knee pain and popping from all of the changes my body is making. 
I’ve started to do some category 1 movements under light load and feel pretty good. Even if you’re a member, you need to pick up the book because it’s completely changed the way I approach strength and conditioning.