WHAT IS VIRTUAL MOBILITY COACH?
The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach is like having a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket.
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01/31/2015 at 3:33 pm in reply to: Ankle mobility radically different straight legged vs. bent #75739
Katie HemphillParticipantHey Brewinz,
My guesses would be that either:(A) You are overestimating your ankle mobility with the knee straight (are you just glancing down, or have you taken picutres of yourself?)(B) You are letting your knee drop inwards doing the straight knee stretch, which essentially creates the illusion of ankle mobility when it simply bypasses all the restriction.Anatomically, it wouldn’t make sense that, if you were using the same ankle movement for each position, you would have better dorsiflexion (toe-to-shin ROM) with your knee straight vs bent. In fact, it’s usually quite the opposite. Allow me to elaborate.Your soleus muscle, the deeper of the big movers in your calf, only crosses the ankle. This means your knee position doesn’t really affect your ability to move your shin forward over your foot. Your gastrocnemius muscle, however, crosses both the ankle AND the knee. This means that if your knee is straight, it puts more tension on the gastrocnemius which may limit your ability to bring your shin over your foot.So yeah, I have to guess that there is an inconsistency between your positions when doing each stretch. Your best bet would be to take pictures of your lower body from the back and sides when doing each stretch and post them so we can confirm that.Katie HemphillParticipantHey jwgiblin3,
Have you done any training of this sort before your first CrossFit class? Or was this your first real experience with squatting and stuff?Katie HemphillParticipantHey Angus,
What sort of movements do you work on in the gym for your rowing?If you’re not already on it, I’d say you could use some squats and deadlifts in your life. They mimic much of the lower body action involved in rowing (bending through the hips, knees, and ankles), so they can provide a good framework for training yourself out of your old rowing habits and making your NEW habits very strong and robust.What I would recommend is some progression where you find the simplest version of each of these movements that you can’t do properly. And by properly I mean like 90% perfectly. Fundamental movement problems (like not being able to hinge from the hips with a braced neutral spine in a deadlift) are a strong indicator that you will have problems with similar high-level movements (such as rowing).Unless you’ve already fine-tuned your squat and deadlift, challenged and trained those patterns against speed, load, and metabolic demand, then doing something like trying to engage your psoas while rowing is going waaaaaaaay deeper into the rabbit hole than you need to.Fix those fundamental patterns, restore any missing lower body ranges of motion (especially hip flexion and ankle dorsiflexion), and then apply those lessons learned on the rowing erg before you hit the water. This will be a process, not an all-or-nothing thing, and it starts with you knowing what a neutral spine and good hip motion feel like.Now go get’em, rower.Katie HemphillParticipantI would also suggest you troll through the mwod or Supple Leopard to determine whether you’re missing any key ranges of motion (other than the thoracic spine mobility you mentioned) in the upper body. I would pay partciular interest to shoulder internal and external rotation.
I have a feeling you could probably stand to open up through the pecs a bit. Get a lacrosse ball or whatever up in there and release some tension in front and you might find your shoulders sit a little prettier.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Realmadrid5 (if that IS your real name),
The reason you are feeling tingling when you depress is most likely because you are compressing the brachial plexus (the network of nerves that run through your neck/shoulder area that supply your upper limbs with sweet, sweet nervous innervation). Nerves don’t like to be compressed.Excessive depression of the shoulder does this. In the pictures you posted for depression your shoulders are WAY down south! It’s important to have the capacity to depress your scapulae, but trying to cue them down and back all the time is a bit problematic.This is sort of like how the “knees out” cue doesn’t mean shove your knees way out over your feet, but rather that your knees shouldn’t buckle inwards. Similarly, you shouldn’t suck your shoulders down to your feet, but they shouldn’t live up by your ears either.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Carmen,
Even though, as David said, we are often trying to create “stiffness” in the lumbar spine in regards to bracing strong positions during movement, a lumbar spine that is unable to move due to latent stiffness and muscle tone is another issue entirely. It is certainly less dangerous that a lumbar spine prone to excessive flexion, but being stuck in one position is certainly not ideal.Your lumbar spine is meant to flex and extent and should have the capacity to do so. Even though we don’t perform flexion and extension in most demanding or athletic situations, there are many instances (such as when sitting up out of bed, performing a forward roll, etc) when lumbar flexion is desirable.The mwod model doesn’t encourage a lot of “stretching” of the lumbar spine, in the traditional sense. You’ll find a few good mwods showing soft-tissue mobilization techniques (balls in yo’ back) for the muscles of the lower back, which is a good place to start. Working out the soft tissue stiffness doesn’t really teach you what lumbar flexion feels like, however, so that’s where more “stretchy” type stuff comes in. A really simple technique is to just lie on your back and use your arms to draw your knees up towards your chest. Hold and relax.Take caution, however, as sometimes excessive stiffness around a joint (like all the little joints of your lower back) can be a guarding mechanism your body has engaged to prevent you from going into flexion. If you have a history of lower back pain or injury (especially disc bulges or herniations), you’d be best served to see a good physical therapist for a proper assessment first.Another thing to note is that some of the intervertebral joints of your back can be stiff while others are lax. It’s quite common from stiffness between two vertebrae to cause another to become loose, since that joint has to do all the bending that the stiff one isn’t. In this case, putting yourself in a stretch position for lumbar flexion would just stretch the lax joint further and have little effect on the stiff ones.Don’t be paranoid, but be cautious. If you’re concerned or have pain, definitely get an expert’s opinion before tackling the issue.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Ben,
Do you get the same twang or whatever if you do a pull-up with an underhand grip?Katie HemphillParticipantHey Atilla,
Ido Portal has some content out there about hanging. He often issues monthly challenges to his training community, and one of the summer months was a hanging challenge. During that time he put out a bunch of videos showing different hanging techniques, including both a passive hang (which is probably close to what’s recommended in your book) and an active hang (closer to what the ideal active position by mwod standards would be).I don’t know how much information is out there regarding how to implement and progress hanging, but there is enough video footage on his YouTube channel and discussion on his blog that you should be able to piece something useful together.Have fun!Katie HemphillParticipantSome RDL’s might go a long way too.
Katie HemphillParticipantJudging from some of your post history (well, the ones I commented on before anyway), I would guess it’s because you’re much more in-tune with your quads and low back than you are your hamstrings. It’s really a symptom of being human in the end. We live on the front of our bodies, and the back side sometimes gets forgotten a little bit.
I used to think my hamstrings were awesome. I’ve always had pretty good mobility back there from my martial arts background, but after getting into the soft-tissue side of mobility it became really clear how messed-up, stiff, and sensitive they actually are.Just giving them more focus in training and recovery has reconnected me mentally to my hamstrings. Even getting a lacrosse ball in there will help you build more proprioception and learn to feel them.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Cazzah,
Yeah, Scott has the right of it. This particular squat drill is probably not giving you enough pressure to actually overcome the stiffness in your calves. Ergo, any attempts to push your knee forward will overcome your relationship with gravity before they overcome your calves.The calves are a strong example of how crappy and stiff your tissues can really get. You will probably get more results at this point by preceding any actual “stretching” with soft-tissue work.If you check out some of the ankle Daily Rx’s from recent months, they have been doing this mob where the ankle is put up on a bench, with a band distracting backwards. This is freakin’ money. You can keep your heel down and use the bench to pull your chest into your knee, resulting in a much better ability to load that stretch. Just take it in doses and don’t go crazy!Ankle mobility can take a lot of consistent work to improve. Remember that even one degree more of freedom there is worth gold.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Doug,
How long have you been training? Are you well-schooled in the bench, or self-taught? I’m going to make some assumptions below just to throw some ideas at you.Typically, when bench pressing, the lifter will use a “globally extended” (arched) spine position to create more stability through the shoulder. Doing this properly involves creating a nice, gradual arch through the whole spine, with particular attention to extending the upper back (thoracic spine). What often happens, however, is that an inexperienced lifter (or simply one with less than optimal bench technique) will arch more through the low back, creating a lot of local irritation and, quite frankly, a shittier position than when they started.There are a few things that might throw your arch out the window, chief among them being your ability to properly set up and maintain global extension during the lift. Most of the mwods with the “bench” tag will touch on creating global extension.Mobility-wise, if your thoracic spine is stiff, you won’t be able to create much of an arch there at all, which leads to your low back doing most of the moving. Also, if you are missing hip extension (stiff hip flexors), simply putting your feet on the floor (which is just good bench technique) will immediately put your low back into over-extension as your legs pull your pelvis out of place.If you’re able to post footage of you benching we might be able to shed more light on the issue.I hope something there helps!Katie HemphillParticipantHey David,
This might be one of those cases where a classic stretch is inappropriate. Tissue stiffness might be the problem, not necessarily length. I would try doing some soft-tissue stuff like ball mobilizations and see if you get good results from that.Also, you could try raising your elbow a bit above shoulder height when doing the doorway stretch. But, as the mwod saying goes, if it feels sketchy, it’s sketchy.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Daniel,
Why can’t you take a lacrosse ball to work?If you seriously can’t, then you might just need to get creative. My roommate likes to do the monkey bars of death with his leg slung over the back of a dining chair here at home, for example.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Julie,
I’d say you’re off to a good start investigating the adductors. Look for stiffness all through that medial chain (adductors, hamstrings, VMO). If you already know it’s mad-tender, than you’ve probably found a big pain generator.It would be also useful to know if anything else about your running technique is compromising these tissues. Case-in-point, you turn your feet out when you land from your jump. That probably results in a little collapse towards the middle, right? It could be that you’re expressing that same mechanical issue when running (your knees collapse slightly inwards), which is overloading and infuriating those tissues.If you resolve the problem with your jump, create a stronger squat, and attend to these soft tissue issues all together, you may get some good results.Keep us posting on what you’re trying and what works! -
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