Welcome to healthy Ish. Thanks for joining us on the Body and Soul podcast. I am Felicity Harley. Hope you are having a healthy ish day. It seems everyone is talking about mobility right now, and with good reason. But I'm joined today by exercise physiologist and author of Stretch Yourself Strong, Glenn Phipps, and I say, but because he is here with a new perspective, he's going to give
tips on how to increase range of movement in your body. Now, make sure you listen in to our sister podcast, Extra Healthy Ish, where he explains how to increase mobility on those desk bound days. You can search for that wherever you get your podcasts. Glenn, Welcome to healthy Ish. How are you?
Thanks for having me. I am awesome.
I'm actually excited to talk to you about well, mobility. What is mobility? Talk to us about the important But perhaps you don't like this phrase.
I shouldn't have primed you on that, and I'm glad you're excited about it because I guess it's an exciting topic for some people, isn't it. So yeah, mobility, really it's a word.
That just means movement, and in some.
Regards, I guess it's a word that's been a bit hijacked by the fitness industry and it's really come about. I don't really have a good timeline on it, but let's say over the last decade is really when the
words really risen the prominence over the last few years. Right, No one spoke about mobility ten to fifteen years ago, and it came about to kind of discern this difference between flexibility training that involves movement and flexibility training that is static, so obviously stretching and then mobility opens itself
up toward is different movement based things. And it's a very flawed view of how flexibility training works because different types of flexibility training favor different types of addicts and they're all good, they've all got their place, which is.
Where I'm coming from with what I do.
So, but to answer your question, people talk about mobility, they're really talking about anything that works around improving our range of movement, our.
Capacity to move Do you what can we refer to it as then? I mean, is it flexibility? I mean it's almost increasing strength and it's just movement. But how can we differentiate it from you know, movement of running and walking and exercise, it gets a heart rate up.
Yeah, I think range of movement training.
Is a good way to talk about it, and you know then kind of talking about those different types of training within that. So obviously we do have static type training like stretching, we have usually when people talking about mobility are talking about dynamic.
Types of exercise, and there's this thing that.
Exists online where they say, and you'll look up the definition and you may even been compelled to do this after the chat, and there's things that say mobility is active range of movement, where stretching is static or passive. And the thing is that dynamic stretching is movement based range of motion training as well. But the mobility of definition also misses a fact that we can have active and passive dynamic movement, you know, so whether we're controlling
it or it's being controlled by something else. So there's all of these different types of range of motion training and we can name them within that subset. You know, whether we're stretching, we're doing dynamic stretching, we're doing things like eccentric training or ballistic stretching or in range isometrics, all these things can have their name. I think fits
under the umbrella somewhat. But I think the problem with the word ability is it's there to kind of sit itself above other types of training that have been said to be detrimental by some people.
So how can we increase our range of movement? I mean it's almost like an afterthought. A lot of the time we focus on the you know, getting the heart rate rate up and then I'll just do some stretching on the side. How do we actually go about increasing this in our day to day.
So it's the same thing when you're talking about other types of exercise, right, Like, if you want to improve your cardio fitness and you can easily walk a kilometer, easily walking a kilometer is going to lag it.
To maintain that fitness, but not necessarily improve it.
So it's all about, you know, putting our body under adequate stress so that it wants to adapt. Same thing goes for strength strength training. You're not going to get biceps like Arnie by curling five kilo dumbbells your whole life.
You need to get some more stress on.
Top of that, right, So you know, it's all about adding intensity so that we can create change.
So what should out perhaps let's got routine look like in a week. I mean, what are some things we can do to increase our range of movement? So we're actually making a difference, not just ticking a box.
So it's a good question, and I guess all good questions come with it. It depends, So it depends what you're trying to make a difference in, right, So if you're simply trying to make a difference in your range of motion, or you want to do to split so you have some sort of goal that looks good on Instagram, then you can certainly get in that position, sit in it, add some load, and you will definitely make a difference to that position. But it's not necessarily going to make
a difference to your movement outside of that position. So my take is all about how do we make our gains transferable. Otherwise we're just getting good exercise. We want to get good at movement outside of our exercise, and particularly I work with a lot of athletes, so we want to get better at our sport. We want to be able to draw a line between here's what we're doing, here's our sport.
We get better at that.
So then we need to make sure that our training firstly is actually improving our range emotion. We're learning how to control it. We're paving a way to some sort of permanent change, so we don't necessarily have to do it every day to see a difference in how we feel in our movement. And we also need to understand that range emotion is different under different scenarios.
So load and speed.
Just because you can sit in a stretch doesn't mean if someone comes and sites wipe to you and you hit the ground and your leg comes in that position you can easily get there. So you need to train your body so it can easily get there, and that
means applying different loads and doing things under different speeds. So, like most things when it comes to the human body, of variety is it's same for strength training, its same for cardio fitness, and it's the same for this thing that everyone else calls mobility.
I like that that you are almost you know, setting it alongside. Okay, work on your fitness, work on your strength, and then work on your what everyone calls mobility. Like it's actually making me realize it no doubt, listeners that it is as important as the other ones.
Yeah, you know, like they're all, and which is why the word I can see why the word mobility is such a useful term for you because.
It's just movement, right. Everyone wants to improve how they move.
No one wants to, you know, feel like they move badly and just stay there. You've got to have a strategy to figure that out. So you know, they're all parts of the same puzzle. And the thing is they don't. They don't necessarily have to be as separate as we make them either. We can make them all work together. You don't need to go all right, now is my mobility time. Now's my cardio time, now's my strength time. Clever programming can put them all together.
What do you do you know, daily or weekly to make sure you are working on your body's range of movement.
So it depends on my goal at the time. So I like to each year to kick some sort of goals. At the moment, I'm training for an ex terra triathlon.
Oh wow, is something you.
Haven't done for some time.
So part of my training is making sure that I feel confident doing that without being injured. So for me, that's a morning routine. It's incorporating some of these strategies I'm talking about in my strength routine. But one of
my other sports is rock climbing. And the reason I love rock climbing is that even if I miss my other stuff, it's inbuilt into rock climbing that my body has to go in a huge number of positions and load them there because again, and variety is really key for everything in terms of you know, health and movement benefits because when we're not moving in a variety of positions, that's where compensation patterns happen and muscles don't like sitting
into one spot, blood wants to return to your heart or these things. So for me, the biggest thing is making sure that I'm visiting a variety of movements every day.
And you know, when I first get.
Up in the morning, I put my spine through a range, you know, three planes of motion in all these different movements, because then I know, if the day gets ahead of me, I've at least done that.
What can you describe those movements?
Right?
So I like to look at the opposition between pelvis, rib cage and head, knowing that I see a lot of people in clinic who I ask them to move their rib cage and they can only move from their hips or if they if you ask them to lean forward without moving their head, they can only move their ribcage in their head as one unit. So I'm big on trying to encourage joint opposition because when joints oppose one another, it means that muscles have to move, So muscles will follow joint positions.
Joints aren't moving, muscles will stay in the same place.
You remind you just reminded. You took me back to like my year when I was eight year old dance class and I was doing those isolations with my rib games. Then I'm like, oh, yes, those isolations. To Glenn, thank you so much for coming on healthy.
All right, thanks for having me.
Well listeners, what's your range of movement? Like, I think we could all get better when it comes to moving our bodies, increasing that DEARISO mobility. Anyway, I'm relabe link to Glenn's book in the show notes. It is called Stretch Yourself Strong. Anything else you know where to go Head to Body and Soul dot com dot U for us and so shores. You can DM me at Felicity Halle grab our print edition which is on your local Sunday paper and until tomorrow, stay healthy,