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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Katie HemphillParticipantYo, what Kelly means when he says “stretching is bad” is that the classic model for flexibility (hanging out at tissue end ranges with no real intent) is not a good solution to movement and mobility issues. He felt that the terms “stretching” and “flexibility” came with a lot of pre-conceived notions and misconceptions, so he decided to strike them from the MWOD vernacular in favor of “mobilty” and “mobilitizing”.
The MWOD approach still uses some techniques that look like classic stretching shapes, but with a strong focus on position and improving movement. The system also tends to look at improving other things before assuming an issue is a muscle length problem (as in the classic stretching paradigm).Settle in, because there is no one episode for this question. It’s the basis of the entire MobilityWOD approach. Enjoy the trip.Katie HemphillParticipantI’m impressed the new Daily Rx went this long without a major interruption, really. Even during the original MWOD there were breaks here and there, as life tends to happen to even the most supple among us. K-Star actually seems to have a pretty solid system going of recording multiple episodes at a time.
Leave California for one lousy minute and the snow jumps all over you and messes things up. It’s a wild winter world out there!Katie HemphillParticipantHey Brenley,
Do you have some known overtension issues in the front of the hip? If your hip flexors are all jacked up, putting your hip in extension puts them under increased tension, which may be inhibiting the glute (especially if you are unable to actually fire).Check out Episode 347 for a good anterior hip floss that might help prioritize glute activation for you.Katie HemphillParticipantI believe the current MWOD model agrees with that. Lately (since maybe the introduction of the pro site) Kelly has been recommending all smashing work be saved for after the workout since it has some systemic down-regulating effects.
He does say, however, that if you have a sticky spot that didn’t resolve in your warm-up and you deem it necessary, hit a couple minutes worth pre-workout.Katie HemphillParticipantThey should probably get that thing stocked up. It’s a perfect stocking stuffer!
Merry Painmas.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Alex,
Remember the golden rule of “if it feels sketchy its sketchy”. Like Kaitlin said, make sure you are loading the hips before the knees when squatting, and maybe take your squat test in doses. That tendon is hot, and its trying to tell you it’s under way more stress than it wants to be.Aside from cleaning up your movement errors, which probably resulted in the tendonitis in the first place, smash the hell out of your quads and feed some slack to that patella. Move better, take some tension out, and that should be a strong fix. However, if the fire doesn’t go out, you might need to seek treatment from a physio (etc.) to help speed along the tendon healing while you deal with the cause of the issue.A couple years before I discovered MobilityWOD I was sporting a nice double case of patellar tendinits, no doubt because I jumped around a lot and my mechanics were terrible. I’m talking sloppy jumps loaded with a barbell BAD. Pain free these days, but it was my first experience with a foam roller, and my quads were a mess.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Harrison,
What symptoms specifically have hinted at nerve compression for you? Not saying its not the case, but we might be able to sleuth a little more accurately with a little more info on the symptoms. Any numbness or tingling in the foot? Sharp, pinching sensations? Radiating pain?One must wonder if the pressure of the brace simply set fire to some tendons on the outside of your ankle, as that could have totally happened. Try some lower leg smashes, focusing on the outside of the lower leg. (If those peroneals are stiff, the smashes can be nearly unbearable, so take them in doses and use a softer ball if necessary.)A good double ball smash for the outside of the lower leg is demonstrated in this Daily Rx, but you can find a bunch more easily if you just search through some of the older episodes with the right filters on.If feeding slack into the leg doesn’t work, and you have the means, get that nonsense diagnosed! You deserve some answers and solutions.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Kevin,
There was a good Pro Episode (#53) recently concerning the athletic implications of a past SC joint injury. Clearly not the same injury, but it might have some good pearls for you to take away and apply to your own situation.In general, the thinking is that you’ve lost some of the primary stability in the shoulder system through this injury, so there is going to be less of an ability to buffer bad movement. This shoulder is probably going to demand more than its fair share of TLC to keep it running, so make sure you are diligent with your shoulder mechanics. Use your pressing and pulling movements both as diagnostics and as ways to approach treating that instability.You might find you even want to take a step back and work on static stability in your functional shoulder shapes for a bit (hand planks, stabilizing weight overhead, holding the top position of a dip) to gauge your positional strength before getting fancy with movement.That injury is going to come with all sorts of messy tissue problems and missing ranges of motion, especially if it hasn’t been fully treated since the injury. Make sure your shoulder and lacrosse ball become great friends, and smash out any artificial stability (i.e. tension) so you can replace it with the good stuff.I suffered from a little Grade I separation a couple years ago, long before I found MobilityWOD, and it went largely unmanaged for the better part of a year. My biggest issues are overhead movements, probably as a result of not being able to lift my arm higher than my chest for a while.Look for your biggest movement deficiency and go after that first. Best of luck.11/17/2013 at 7:20 am in reply to: 2 very basic questions. Initiating the squat? screwing into ground #73230Katie HemphillParticipantIn regards to #1, I would wonder whether this MCL heat you’re feeling is actually just an expression of crappy adductors?
Personally, I have always get sketchy medial knee pain when my adductors are stiff. Generally, a little medial thigh smashing helps alleviate the symptoms pretty quickly. I’ve also suggested this for a couple members at my gym who suffered similar pain, and they had some pretty astonishing results.It makes sense, too, as you’re seeing you have limited range of motion in the squat. Tight adductors will prevent you from being able to express good hip abduction (knees-outness), and efforts to do so will put more tension in an already overtensioned system, which may be causing your pain.My suggestion would be test/retest with a little set of air squats, focusing on the motor control suggestions everyone gave for your #2, with a little foam roller adductor smashing in between. You might also gain some decent ground in your squat ROM!Katie HemphillParticipantHey Brenley,
I would usually start off a warm-up with some general activity to wake up the system and warm. If I was benching, I’d probably want to see the shoulders moving, since that’s the main joint of interest here.As far as specific prep for the bench, you say you do four fairly light warm-up sets. You might have better results with more progressive warm-up sets. I usually start with a bajillion or so reps with the empty bar, just to start grooving the technique, then slowly progress it up to my working weight. It kinda depends on what kind of time you have to work with, but if I was planning on doing 6×2’s (some fairly freakin’ heavy loading), I’d probably check out at least six warm-up sets.This might be why you’re feeling that last set is the best one, simply because your technique is finally online and you’ve finally got the system completely fired up. That said, sometimes that last set is the best just because you’ve been practicing like a boss. In general, even though you’re fatigued, you’ll probably be at your technical best a little ways into the working sets.Treat your benching as much like benching practice as skill training. Extend your warm-up, get a ton of practice reps in (with adequate rest, and performed sub maximally), and I think you’ll see good results.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Jim,
I, too, fail a pistol test like a champ!Seems to me like you’re just a little overwhelmed about the process. My advice would be to make sure you read allllllll those wordy chapters in BaSL before cracking into the mobility stuff, as they explain a lot about how to begin dealing with your issues. The biggest thing is to just take it a day at a time, chip away at the problems, and get some work done.The process is just that, a process, and it takes time. Program your mobility work along with the movements of the day (prep for positions and recover worked tissues) and it will become much easier to organize. Aside from that, I would prioritize trying to clear pain issues, starting with the worst one.You’ll get really good at being your own mechanic over the next few months. Just be patient, diligent, and focused.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Frankie,
I might be wrong, but isn’t the pelvis reset one of those things that only “clicks” if it needs to? As in, if you have pain and dysfunction caused by the two sides of your pelvis being a little out of sync, you can use the technique to reset it?I’ve tried the reset a couple times just for the sake of it, and had no click or anything myself, but then I don’t think my pelvis is very dysfunctional.Katie HemphillParticipantHey Jim,
I would say most of the difficulty you’re having keeping the knees back is a function of the narrow squat stance you’d have to use to keep a soccer ball between your knees. The only way you’d be able to keep the shin super vertical would be to hinge way forward at the hips to counterbalance.With squatting in general, the maxim that Starrett usually throws out is “knees as vertical as possible for as long as possible”. Like Thor said, just make sure the knees aren’t the first thing to load (hamstrings back first), and I would add that the end of your toes is as far forward as I’d let them go (excepting pistols).Katie HemphillParticipantHey Costas,
As Kaitlin said, spine stuff takes priority and all that, but as far as your hip-to-knee pain goes, have you considered that it might be as simple as a strained sartiorius?Consider for a moment the function of the sartorius, which is hip flexion / abduction / external rotation (basically the bottom position of your squat clean). If you are actively pulling yourself into the bottom to drop beneath the bar, it seems likely that that sucker was firing and doing some work. Your crappy rep might have caused some issues there.Also consider the fact that you were sprinting on the same day. As you extend that leg and internally rotated, dear Mr. Sartorius is going to be put under stretch, and then I would suppose it is active in driving that leg back forward.I guess it really depends on whether that pain feels “nerve-y”. Just an idea, really, but it seems to make sense. If your back isn’t too jacked up, and provided it doesn’t cause any sketchy pain, maybe try some cautious smashing of the flexor wad and thigh.Katie HemphillParticipantYeah, like Kaitlin said, if you’re not seeing change move on to another potential solution, and start to look at the bigger picture.
Pro Episode #21 was a user-request regarding difficulty improving ankle mobility, and the take-away was basically to take a systems approach and start looking beyond the ankle itself. Also, making sure your squat is technically sound and that you’re not lacking any fundamental motor control details would be prudent. -
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