Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1685: Why Mobility Training Is So Important If You Work an Office Job

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin cover the importance of mobility for injury prevention, improved productivity, and improved workouts. How pain today is much more connected to not moving enough. (2:11) What made Adam stop his boot camp business and focus more on making people feel good. (4:44) The two biggest flaws with how people approach their pain in the workplace. (7:42) Why your body is only ever as strong and mobile as it NEEDS to be. (10:32) Mobility is a prerequisite. (13:19) Mobility has to be ACTIVE. (15:30) How to train the body to make good posture feel more natural. (17:39) You MUST change your mentality surrounding mobility. (24:04) Why feedback is so important when first starting your mobility training. (26:01) Stretch with PURPOSE. (28:19) Increase your productivity at work by taking mobility breaks. (30:31) How improving your mobility unlocks the potential of so many more effective exercises. (33:22) Be kind to yourself and trust the process. (40:18) How do I add/incorporate mobility into my training routine? (44:10) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS Prime, MAPS Prime Pro or the Prime Bundle for an additional 50% off!! **Promo code “GETMOBILE” at checkout** Visit Four Sigmatic for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Which is Best - Mobility or Stretching? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1490: How To Improve Your Posture How to Fix Rounded Shoulders (GONE IN 4 STEPS!) | MIND PUMP MAPS Prime Webinar MAPS Prime Pro Webinar Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Justin Brink DC (@dr.justinbrink)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, alright? In today's episode, we talk about mobility and why mobility work is so important, especially if you work a desk job. So working on mobility will improve your body's ability to build muscle, burn body fat.

We go into detail in this particular episode. By the way, we do have mobility programs, maps prime and maps prime pro. And then we have a bundle that puts them together and discounts them. And here's what we're doing for this episode. You can get maps prime or maps prime pro or the bundle, which is already discounted all for an additional 50% off. So it's a huge promotion. It's not going on forever.

It ends Sunday, November 21st. So if you're interested, head over to maps, fitnessproducts.com, and use the code GetMobile. That's G-E-T-M-O-B-I-L-E for that discount. Now this episode is also brought to you by one of our sponsors, ForSigmatic. ForSigmatic makes the best mushroom-based elixirs and supplements you'll find anywhere, anywhere. Like they use a dual extraction process. Their products are legit,

so a lot of mushroom supplements out there don't have a lot of the active ingredients. This is not the case with Forsymatic. It's the most potent stuff you'll get anywhere. My favorite products of theirs are cordiceps for athletic performance, for stamina, for a better pump. It's good for testosterone levels.

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And again, my favorite product of theirs is the cordiseps. So there you go, here's the episode. I was on a podcast earlier today and I was having a discussion with the... Don't brag. With the host. No, it's okay. I was having a discussion with the host and we were talking about how pain is today is much more closely connected to in not moving enough, sitting still.

In other words, we're not hurting because we're doing too much or because we're hurting ourselves. We're hurting because the opposite is true. Do you think that's changed since, like, let's say the 50s, do you think that the chronic pain that maybe somebody in the 50s battle with with joint pain and let's say they're advanced to when they get above 40, 50 years old and their knees hurt, their back hurts. You think it has more to do with,

they were just doing like laborist type jobs versus they had poor movement even back then? I don't think that's changed. I think there's more. I think it's more, it's skewed more in the direction of inactivity. So there were definitely desk jobs and stuff, you know, in the 50s, but not as many as are now,

and people are way less active. So I would speculate it's the exact same problem that we see today. It's only accelerated because it's more common that in your 20s or 30s now you sit at a desk at a computer for eight hours. That's what I'm saying. So like literally, it's no different

than somebody back in the 50s. It's just that there's a smaller percentage of people that actually sat at a desk all day long. Correct. So it just looks like this is a bigger problem today. Well, it is, it is because of percentage wise. It is, and if you go back even further, of course, people, I mean, my grandfather jokes with me about this.

He's like, man, you guys with your back pain, when I was, when I, my back hurt, it was because I heard it, carrying something heavier or working real hard. So it's an interesting, indifferent problem. And the issue really stems from lack of connection, lack of mobility, lack of strength. And other words, yeah, our, our body is obviously controlled by our muscles, and our joints have ways of moving that are optimal, that keep them healthy, that don't have high risk of issues like injury and pain and inflammation. But when our strength is weak or unbalanced, or we have mobility issues, and our body

has to find other ways of moving, or it literally morphs into the position that you're always in, which is sitting in your chair. Then you start to get pain in your body because it's not operating the way it should. And it's super common these days. I think, I think something like half of Americans will suffer from some kind of back pain every single year. Almost that many. It was a huge percentage of people did you see me sharing the story i was i did the mind pump media story the other day and i was sharing my my history with boot camps and stuff if you got you guys heard me tell the story of so i used to have boot camps all over the bay area and i did that for a few years the business was successful and i remember like i just had this moment where i felt guilty and when i felt guilty about was when I looked at the clientele.

So at one point I was probably servicing somewhere between 50 and 70 people throughout all the camps. And I was doing traditional boot camp type shit, lawyer robes and tire flipping and ladder drills and burpees and running around the track and stuff, stuff to make them sweat and burn and push them. That was kind of the idea. It was burn ton of calories.

This two to three times a week that they would see me. When I looked at the bulk of the clientele, they weren't a bunch of young athletic kids. They were 55 to 60 year old, either retirees or desk job type of engineers and people that said it desk all day long. And I would watch them up and down, wait, up and down, and wait, but their movement never got better. They always still had the low back pain. They always, there was exercises that someone had to sit out and I had to make modifications

for. And I was stuck in this position of like, how do I run this class at the same time, really tried to address these things? And I wasn't addressing any of that. And that's actually what made me stop the business. And I started to, and I did this for about two years after I left boot camps and moved on from that business.

And I still was in contact with a lot of those clients. And it was in a different place financially where I had other businesses that were successful. So I had the opportunity to do like this free class that I would do on Saturdays. And I invited all these people that I used to train. And the class was a 50 minute class of nothing but mobility work.

It was just mobility drills for these people. And I felt better about it. Obviously it was free, so they were getting tremendous value because I'm not charging anybody. But what I would do with them, the class would start off. And you guys, imagine 55, 60-year-olds that sit all day long, they come in and I'd cold, I say, okay, we're gonna do 20 body weight squats.

It's just a vision with that looks like, you know, barely getting down, hearing everybody groaning, like just stiff the shit. And I would do that on purpose because I wanted to show them that just in an hours time of the work that I'm about to do with them, how much better are you? How much better they would? Because at the end of the session,

I would have them do the same thing, 20 body weight squats, and you would see this dramatic difference in how their chest would be upright. They would be getting deeper into the squat, their feet weren't collapsing inward is bad. And it was just a 50 minute session of mobility and they would all come up to me after we were like,

oh my God, I feel so good. And I felt better about that because I was finally giving them what I felt they really, truly needed. Yeah, the two biggest, I'd say, flaws with how people approach like they're paying from the workplace. One is they'll have these ergonomic experts

that will come in, that will adjust their chair and their desk and your hands and this position, they're basically trying to band-aid all of the pain issues. Oh, your knee's hurt. Maybe we need to position your chair differently. Yeah, elevate you up a little bit higher. Yeah, your wrist hurt. Oh, we gotta change your chair differently. Yeah, elevate you up a little bit higher. Yeah, your wrists hurt. Oh, we got to change your keyboard to help and all that kind of stuff.

Not really understanding that the pain is not that's not the root of the pain. It's because they're they're lack mobility and they're weak. And the second issue is a lot of people think if you talk to the average person about their pain, they'll say, well, yeah, I need to stretch. I need to be more flexible because I'm tight. Flexibility is not mobility. Flexibility increases your range of motion or is your range of motion?

Yeah, temporarily. Mobility is, do you own that range of motion? Are you strong and controlled within that range of motion? I like to use the example of my one-year-old son. He's got incredible flexibility. I'm like, I'm gonna put him on the ground. I could take his feet and put him by his head and put him in the splits. But he's got no mobility because he has no strength.

So if I put him in the splits, I wouldn't have to put me load on him, he'd fall over. So I think people confuse that. They think, it's my desk, it's my chair, or I'm tight. No, tightness is part of it. You're also weak and you lack control and stability. That's what gives you the pain-free mobility. It's really, I think, the weakness

of people don't really understand that that's what's happening. Your body being fixed in this position and you constantly signaling that this is gonna be the majority of your day is what your body starts to then reallocate all of its energy, so it's just as efficient as possible,

and that we don't need this ability to, you know, maintain this amount of muscle mass, because we're not stimulating the body like we used to, and to the whole weekend warrior thing and boot camps and all that. I mean, I was like the majority of clients I would get was they try to make up for, like inherently they know like their job is sedentary. Like this is something is a problem. And I'm trying to address this, but you know, they have this brief window

of like an hour, maybe like three times a week or then like full blown on the weekend. They're going to, you know, do a pickup basketball game or, you know, flag football or like they're going to gonna go all out. And I just see so many injuries and then so many new problems now that I have to address in the training sessions because you have to factor in like your lifestyle was completely different

when those factors applied best. Yes, yes. So it's a different thing now that you have to focus on and prioritize and some mobility something that I think is just, I'm an evangelist for it because it's just something to consider. You said something that I want to go back to because I think this is important to understand. Your body is only ever as strong and mobile as it needs to be. Never more. Your body's

not going to give you more strength or control or stability or mobility if you don't ask it. Because that would be wasting energy. Wasting calories. Like, your body, remember, we evolved when food was scarce and we had to conserve energy. You're not going to have a car. Your car isn't going to have a V8 engine.

If you only ask it to have the power of a four cylinder engine if your car is also trying to save and conserve energy. So your body's only ever as strong as it needs to be. And if you think of your, if you work in a desk job, which most of you watching do, and that's what you do most of the time, that's the limit.

And here's where the injury and pain starts to happen. You move outside of it a little bit. You know, oh, I went on a hike or I threw the baseball with my kid or I stepped off a curb where I turned a little quickly. Why did I hurt myself? Your body's not strong enough to do those things, you never do them. That threshold is much less now. Yes.

Well, I think clients don't even, they don't, like, sneak up on them. And I would do these things where I'm like, you know, what was the last time you took your hand all the way above your head? Yeah, right now, can you raise your hand and have your bicep basically next to your ear? And you see them, they kind of like think about it, like, oh, you know, and they go to do it. And it's like, and they just, and it's like,

you've just lost that. Your body's pruned it off because for years, you've stopped doing it. You stopped doing it. So the body says, okay, we no longer need to move in this range of motion. It takes more energy to go all the way through that full range of motion. Let's limit that. There's no reason. Same thing goes for rotating to the left right. When was the last time you completely rotated to your as far as you could to

the left or the right? And they start scratching their head and they think, God, I can't remember the last time. And that's why you can't do it anymore. But the exciting part, or the positive part about this is that you can get that back. You know, if you just prioritize that work right. And I think what keeps, you know, the client that you're talking about, Justin, which I think is a lot of people,

the weekend warriors, the people that know their sedentary and have put on 20, 30 pounds, I think there's this myth that I can't lose body fat and get in shape while also addressing this lack of mobility and it tends to be this either or like they're both the same right. It's kind of like they I think they look at it like no while yeah I'll work on my mobility but let's first lose this 30 pounds of fat because I know that's a problem. I doctor said it's a problem. I feel terrible about myself. I've never looked like this and never felt like this before. I'll get to that later. It's new lose away. Yeah, just new lose away. And I think that's a problem. My doctor said it's a problem. I feel terrible about myself. I've never looked like this and never felt like this before.

I'll get to that later, so you lose the weight. Yeah, just need to lose the weight. And I think that's how they fall prey to these boot camp type of classes because it temporarily gives them that. Oh, I definitely burned a lot of calories. I mean, I'm drenched in sweat. That was hard as hell.

It's not an either or choice. Improving your mobility or optimizing mobility, will only improve your ability to get in shape, stay in shape, exercise properly. It actually should be a, it's a prerequisite. First of all, as trainers, good coaches know that this is a prerequisite. In fact, you never take a client, especially someone who doesn't work out and move them directly into hard workouts. You just don't do that. It doesn't make any sense. They don't not only do they not get in shape

and you fall in there. You want them to come back. Yeah, but your risk of injury gets higher. And whatever you train, you strengthen. So if I strengthen a bad movement pattern or if I work a bad movement pattern and I add load to it and I get stronger in it, guess what?

I have made that bad movement pattern. We're stronger. It is now a stronger, worse movement pattern. No, I've used this example before, but think about this way, right? Because we're talking about a lot about the joints. When we talk about pain, think of a sliding glass door on a track. If it's perfectly balanced, there's no damage to the track or the door. Now, if the door is pushing a little bit to the outside, as it runs along that track, you start to see some damage and some wear and tear over a period of time. Now, imagine, and I'm behind the glass door,

and I'm pushing even harder on it to the outside, and then making it slide back and forth. I've added more strength to that direction. It's gonna wear and tear even faster. So, mobility is required, and not only that, but again, it helps you get in shape faster and more effectively. Well, this is also, I think, part of the reason why in the last decade or so, I feel like barbell squats have gotten a bad name or people have moved away from it. Because the truth is, if you get somebody who's 50-something years old, they have their feet pronated, their knees collapsed, and where they can't even break 90 degrees, they have excessive forward lean,

and then you load the barbell with 90 pounds or more on their back, terrible idea. Because to your point, you're just going to reinforce all those bad parts, you're only going to exacerbate the chronic pain that they're dealing with already. So that's why I think squats get a bad name. But the truth is, it's not an either or thing again.

We can work on and address all those issues while also trying to perfect and perform a barbell squat and get better at it. Now to be clear, mobility work, although it's individualized like resistance training would be, mobility work moves through ranges of motion and you connect through those ranges of motion. So it's the difference between sitting

and stretching my hamstrings and stretching my hamstrings, but then connecting to my hamstrings and activating them through that range of motion, right? It's the difference between doing it like a passive chest stretch or doing a chest stretch, but then activating the chest and connecting and then activating the muscles that hold that in position and connecting, right?

That's kind of loosely what we're talking about, although it gets more specific and connecting, right? That's kind of loosely what we're talking about, although it gets more specific and complex. When you train mobility, you don't just get that flexibility, you own it, you control it, you're stronger. And here's what's beautiful about it. If you make yourself stronger and more mobile than your day-to-day requirements to ask you to be,

in other words, if you train yourself a few days a week and you focus on these things and work on them and you get better at them, but the vast majority of your time is spent at a desk because no one's going to work out 40 hours a week. I mean, first of all, you wouldn't do that, but it's totally not realistic. 40 hours a week or more, you're sitting down at a desk, but you're focusing on mobility and strength and doing it the right way. more, you're sitting down at a desk, but you're focusing on mobility and strength to doing it the right way. Now you're sitting at a desk that requires this much strength and energy from you, very little,

but you have the capacity to apply this much strength and mobility. Now sitting at a desk is nothing, it doesn't hurt. That doesn't hurt your body because your body's so much more capable of more than just that. So if you find like, oh man, when I'm at work and I sit for a long time in my sciatica flares up,

my lower back starts to bother me. Oh, my wrists start to hurt. I feel tight in my neck. And I used to have clients that needed to see a chiropractor animusage therapist every single week. And I'd say why? Because man, my neck, you have no idea how tight it gets because I'm always sitting at my desk,

never really addressing the root cause. Of course, once we strengthen their body, improve their mobility, they had no more need for that kind of temporary pain relief type of treatment. Because they had more strength. I think we should go into a little bit of posture in terms of what that tends to lead into in terms of a forward head know, what that tends to, you know, lead into in terms of like a forward head because I'm just always looking down and I'm always, you know, reaching

my chin forward, you know, my shoulders tend to follow that. And so I'm, you know, protracting my shoulders, my arms tend to reach a bit away from me. And just, you don't think that that's going to add a whole lot to the way that you move and do things outside of that. But yeah, the accumulation of all these hours of just constantly being in this position, you know, and you wonder where like, at first it might be a bit of a neck pain,

but really it goes down throughout the entire kinetic chain down to your back. And I wanna say, you know, sometimes people would be like, oh, so what I gotta do is have better posture. So I'll hold myself in better posture. So what you need to do is have better posture. So I'll hold myself in better posture. What you need to understand is that posture for the most part is unconscious. How you sit, how you stand,

or you could sit there and think about it all day. I mean, that'd be a stressful way to live. Like if I had to, oh my God, I stand straight. Like I can't have my brain focus on that and all this other stuff. Posture is natural, right? So it's not about just having better posture, but rather strengthening the body, training the body,

so that good posture happens naturally. And it feels more natural. Yes. Well, I'm glad you guys went this direction because actually, last night I also had my NCI talk, right? So when I, we get on the every Wednesday and we talk to the mentor group, right, with NCI and MindPump.

And a lot of the trainers on there have most of our programs and most of the questions on there are like trainer related. I had a question last night and I'm curious to how you guys would respond and I'll tell you what I said afterwards. But so we have prime and this is talking about posture. This is what prime was all about was a more robust assessment protocol than what we probably did.

It's pretty standard to do a squat assessment. We thought it was important to actually address multiple planes so we broke the body up in three segments, basically hinging squatting and then overhead pressing is what we're looking at. And then it's like pass or fail. So one of the trainers was saying, like, okay, well, what do you do out in when,

and this is what happens very common, like people fail everything. So they've got the forward shoulder, they've got the, you know, the forward head, the rounded shoulders, they've got an asymmetrical shift, they've got their knees caving inward, they can't hinge and rotate the spine,

like they've got, they're broken down everywhere. Now, one posture issue usually contributes to another one and so on. Right, and so it's really common. And so he was asking me, you know, at the spine, like they've got, they're broken down everywhere. Now, one posture issue usually contributes to another one. Right. And so it's really common. And so he was asking me, you know, so what do you do with that and how do you program for that? Are you trying to address everything at once or are there certain, is there certain rules

that you guys apply to a client when they have all this breakdown and dysfunction? How do you guys approach that client? So it's a lot of people that sit at desk all day long are going to have more than just one breakdown in the connection. Yeah. Personally, I would do an effective movement for each of those areas. And then I would place a little special emphasis on the grossest offender. The one that I think as a coach is causing the most problems.

But I would do something for all of those issues. So, oh, forward shoulder, we're gonna do these movements here. Oh, it looks like you have an anterior pelvic tilt. We're gonna do some movements here to help that. Oh, your ankle mobility, we're gonna focus on that. And then, most of your pain is probably due in this would be based off the assessment to your anterior pelvic tilt.

So now we're gonna do additional stuff to work on that area. It's kinda hard. Yeah, I've found behaviorally, like not bombarding them with too many exercises. It was a big thing that I learned. And so, yes, it is a broad strokes kind of a thing. So I wanna address all those dysfunctions,

but I wanna make it as simple as possible. So to find like the three most impactful ones, and I really wouldn't go past three. I would just take three exercises and I would try to, you know, apply those and make it a part of like what they do. So if it's in the morning and they have like a ritual of, you know, when I put my clothes on, right before I put my clothes on, I'm gonna do this one drill.

And then the middle of the day, you know, when it's most impactful and I'm sitting down, you know, this exercise is going to apply best for that. I want you to stand up and I want you to go against the wall and I want you to do this. So we have very similar answers. I was even simpler because this is what I had found, too, because we talk so much about the behavior aspect of training clients. And I know that, you know, like throwing so much at a client at one time, the likelihood of them applying all of it is really difficult. My goal is to get them to have,

to have buy in on what I'm trying to coach and teach them. This is obviously new to them. They had trust me, they believe me. Now, if I get them doing all these things at once, the likelihood of them executing all of them consistently multiple times a day, like you're saying, to see real impact in change is less likely. So I actually said one or two things.

I was like, I'm looking at the biggest gross offender, like you said. So the number one thing that is probably causing most, and I used myself an example. I said, I was pretty broken. I have, I've got a shoulder stuff going on and I have a slight, a slight forward head. I had hip to really weak tight hips. I had a pro-dandy foot and I had terrible ankle mobility. So I was broken down like this. And really what unlocked it for me was 90, 90 and combat stretch.

I was like those two things. And that the strengthening of my hips and working on my hip mobility, unlocked the pain in my low back. And that was enough for me to become like spot in myself personally. I just had wall press but that had been the same protocol. Right. So what I look for is in a client is, you know, what's one, maybe two movements that I know that if I could just, if I could get them doing it three times,

five times a day every day, because it makes them feel better, and they notice a difference. If I could get them to do that, then I could get buying, and then I could start to go address all the... Because we'll see it in the field. That's right. So, very similar answer, all of us, but I think that's the goal here,

because what you're gonna get after we do this episode, and say somebody goes out and gets prime, or the prime bundle that we have, which has all of our mobility exercises, has our assessment in there, and they find out they've got all this dysfunction, and then they're just constantly overwhelmed with all these new movements and there's hard to measure, am I better, am I not better? They're inconsistent with some days they do it, some days they don't. So I really like to help them with what I think is one or two movements that I think is going to help in the most

and drill it home. Now it is important to understand that there's a different mentality that goes into mobility training, just like there's a different mentality that goes into powerlifting versus bodybuilding versus athletic training, right? So, you know, if I'm training for powerlifting, I'm looking at maximizing leverage, staying tight, moving the weight, don't care about if I feel it in my quads or my glutes or my chest, just about how can I move the weight, don't care about if I feel it in my quads or my glutes or my chest, just about how can I move the weight, right? Body building is about feeling the muscle squeeze and stretch and hit it from different angles,

get the pump, different mentality. Maintality with mobility is this. It's all about the movement. It's as zero to do with the resistance, but you are trying to try and just stay connected throughout the entire movement and you're trying to perfect the movement. I'm gonna use a silly example.

I'm gonna use a bicep curl, not a mobility movement, just because it's an easy exercise to understand. If I treated a bicep curl like a mobility movement, let's just say in some alternate universe, it was a mobility movement, my goal would be the fullest range of motion but completely stay connected to the bicep and staying tense the entire time.

Everything feeling stable and strong. What does that mean? Much lighter weight, slower, controlled, and intention, that intrinsic intention, that internal concentrating on the movement. This is how you treat mobility work. So it's not reps. You're not going to get into a mobility movement and just do a bunch of reps. You're not going to go into a mobility movement and just do a bunch of wraps. You're not going to go into a mobility movement and try and lift more weight.

The goal is to, can I increase my range of motion? Can I stay connected the whole time? Oh, I feel a little disconnection there. How can I increase that connection? Increase that signal so I can get connected. That's the entire goal with mobility work. It's not a crazy workout. It's different. It's a different feel. Will you get sore? You do, because you often are doing

things you're not used to, but it's not damaging the body like traditional resistance strength. This is why you'll hear a say doing it frequently throughout the day is so beneficial because it's all about connection. Yeah, and also to add to that, like this is another reason why like we like the floor and we like the wall and we like a stick and that's because it provides feedback. One of the hardest things to understand about mobility training a lot of times is where you are in terms of space.

Yeah. And so that's a hard thing if, this is the first time you've ever even tried mobility training and we're talking about intrinsic tensions, like what the hell are you talking about? This is like basically why we throw up against the wall and for just the example of the wall press. I wanna be able to place my elbows against the wall

and then also rotate my arms so the back of my hands can touch and I can press my entire body into the wall. Keeping your back in contact. Keeping my back and everything. So it's just something tangible, but you have to squeeze, you have to pull back, you have to activate and actively pull your body into the wall.

So that's the intrinsic mindset. So that's the intent behind it. I'm gonna give you an example of, so I'll give you an example of a client and then what happened to me, right? Why feedback can be so important. I remember training this one woman who had shoulder mobility issues, and she could only get her arm up to about right here, and then it would start to hurt. So she had some shoulder impingement

issues. She's a laptop. She's still a laptop down chick. Yeah. And so what I would do is I would grab her wrist or have her hold on to a laptop down bar, and I would tell her to slightly provide resistance, but still allow the bar to pull her up or allow me to pull her up. And with this did is it caused it allowed her to create downward tension, but still allow me to pull the arm up and we were able to get the arm straight up. Now what I did is I'd say, okay, now what I'm gonna do, so I want you to stop resisting and I'm gonna let go and let's see if we can hold your arm here. She needed that feedback to know where her arm was in order to activate. When I went to Dr. Brink, he put me in 90, 90,

and in the back leg, he said, lift your foot off the floor. I'm like, it doesn't come off the floor. And he goes, why? And I said, I don't have the range of motion. And he goes, you sure? And he grabs my foot, pulls it up next to my head. And I looked over and I'm like, holy cow.

And a brick. And he goes, you have the range of motion. You just lack the connection. And so he would put blocks under my foot and have me connect to that new range of motion. So it's very much a feel thing with mobility. Well, the point you guys are making right now is also the number one reason why people fail at doing this. So when what this is a is part of what inspired the free webinar that we did with Prime Pro webinar, the idea was, I remember when we started selling that program, we were, I remember that was of all the programs we created, Prime and Prime Pro, I think all of us equally would say most proud of that program, right?

And we would have this kind of that program, right? And wise to everybody. Right. And we would have this kind of 50, 50 feedback. Some people it would be life changing as soon as they implement. And some people be like, I just can't really tell the difference. All the people that couldn't tell a difference or struggle with it or didn't feel like it made a huge impact in life. When we assessed what they were doing, it's because what if you look at an

exercise like Justin's talking about the wall one your time out the ninety one And I just see somebody do it and I get down and I try and mirror it My body has has regulators. It will only allow me to go to where I What feels comfortable and then if you stop right there and you don't try and intrinsically move push forward You're not going to recruit those those muscles that allow it to go further and you'll just take it to its end range always. This is what you see when people, I mean, there used to be a saying with trainers, right, stretch with purpose. Like, if you, if your stretch is taking a muscle to what feels comfortable to you, then you're, you're not

gaining any more access. And so it has to be intense. And if you watch the Prime Pro webinar thing that I did, I'm sweating. All I were doing is... Because you're trying. Yeah, because every movement, I'm taking it to the in range of motion, whichever action whether we're talking about 99, we're talking about wall, we're talking about combat. I take where it feels comfortable with my body, and then, intrinsically, I'm trying to push further. Push further, and do it controlled and with good form not dynamically not fast really quick but to intrinsically move it even deeper and further into the stretch with that good

form right absolutely that that piece is everything without that all the other bullshit before isn't doing much for you it's the last part of you trying to get connected to a greater range of motion that will unlock the potential of what this feels like when you do it correctly. Now, another thing that I would get from clients when I talk to them about this, and I'd say, okay, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to do this one mobility movement. Let's just say it was shoulder dislocates or something like that. It's a very basic shoulder mobility movement. It's appropriate for some people. I'd say here's what I want you to do. Every other hour, I want you to stand up at your desk and do this for 30 seconds or 60 seconds. That's it, some small like that, right?

And they'd say, I would get the subjection sometimes. I gotta stop my work every two hours to get up for a minute or two minutes and do this and, you know, that's going to kind of take away from my flow, my productivity. And I would say this, and this is true, I'd say, look, if you feel good, you're going to be more productive, even though you're taking a little time aside to do this. And luckily I'm convincing, and I would convince them to try it. And I would always, they would always report that back to me. My productivity went through the roof.

I had no idea how much it would improve me at work just by getting up moving and doing mobility. Like I had no idea how much my forward head and the tension in my neck was taking away from my ability to think clearly or sharply or to be creative or innovative or to come up with ideas. It got to the point where I actually had clients who were executives who would do a 10-minute mobility workout before big board meetings. They literally like, sell, give me something I can do for 10 minutes before I go into these

big sales presentations or these big meetings. I'd give them a mobility, it was of course appropriate to them. They would follow it and they'd have better performance. It was such a wonderful thing to hear because they were always worried about, you know, it was going to take away from their ability to be productive. Well, you hear even like somebody like Tony Robbins or something that's been, you know, professing this for a long time, just getting yourself in that sort of power stance, you know, with your arms over your head and open chest and just kind of holding and it not only is it build confidence, but you energize. And it's like your body just

responds to just being in good, you know, stacked alignment. Okay, there's two types, there's feedback. There's the feedback from the outside and then there's the feedback from the inside that tells you brain how you should feel. If you put yourself in a closed-off position where you're probably feeling some pain and some inflammation, then your body's also receiving the signal that this person is feeling pain and inflammation. We're gonna make them feel more tired. We're gonna feel them more isolated. Make them feel more isolated. They're gonna feel worse. When you start to strengthen things, improve mobility.

The signal that your body gets from inside is I feel good. Produce more of these feel good hormones. Oh, you could work more. You could be more productive. It's not going to take away from, you know, it's not going to cause more of this inflammation that you had before. You know, another big part of mobility that I think people don't realize, especially people who already work out and are fit, improving your mobility unlocks the potential of so many more effective exercises, right? So, for example, I can't tell you how many times

I've heard this, right? In some of our programs, we'll have an exercise like an upright row, right, for shoulders. Amazing exercise for the delts. It's a great exercise for the delts. It's a tie, it ties together the bicep in the deltoy, to which rarely happens, because I'm pulling. Normally it's tricep in deltoy,

so it's a different culmination, a different feel, you get a different stimulus from it. Love the exercise, but it does require more control and mobility and stability than other traditional shoulder exercises. So people will tell me, oh, that one, it's bad for the shoulder, I know it's just avoided. And it's like, what if you could do it? What if you could do an upright row

with no pain, with perfect control, perfect stability? Now you get to reap the benefits of that exercise, right? So think of all the exercises that you could potentially use and think of the ones you can't do because I'm too tight or that one hurts. That means you're not benefiting from those amazing exercises behind the neck presses, dumbbell, pullovers, right? Squats, dead lifts, like all these incredible exercises that you don't have access to because you don't have the mobility to do them and they hurt you

But what if you could do them imagine what you would get well There that's the group. That's my favorite to sell mobility to like I find it very easy now To sell mobility to somebody who's 55 60 years old as an incarnate pain I can take you in one session and alleviate a lot of pain that you're probably doing with by teaching you some mobility moves Like in one session. So there are ease. It's like there you go I unlock that for them and they're like whoa, I'm sold But I love to take somebody who's could would consider themselves fit body fat wise But maybe they do set it a desk all day long and so there's certain movements

I can't do an upright row or they don't have really good deep squats and selling them on the idea of like listen watch What happens when I get another three to six inches on your squats? And again, I love to use myself as an example because this was something that got unlocked for me I'm able to squat less with less weight to keep my quads as developed as they were when I was doing twice the amount of weight and double the amount of volume That's mind blowing to me. Like even me as a trainer and coach who knows all this stuff, it's wild that unlocking that greater range of motion

has allowed me to do less work for more results. You teach that to somebody who's young and kind of fit already and you, because they're stuck in that mindset still, right? Like I'm 25 years old, maybe I sit at the desk all day long so I don't have the most pretty squat. So I can't do that. Who cares, I like pressing, right? Who I'm 25 years old, maybe I sit at the desk all day long, so I don't have the most pretty squat. So I can't do that.

Who cares, I like press and really good. Who cares, I look pretty good and so like that. But what if I told you that you could do less work and look better if you actually unlock the potential of the full range of motion of some of these issues? Well, you know, it's funny, this shouldn't be controversial.

They've done lots of studies on this and they'll compare full range of motion to shorter range of motion. And by the way, they will allow people to use more weight on the shorter arranges of motion. So it's not even apples to apples necessarily. It's like a half bench press to a full bench press, but because you can lift more than half,

they'll allow the subjects to lift more in the partial. And so the question is, does lifting more weight with a shorter short range of motion equal the amount of muscle you build with less weight with a full range of motion, or does it even surpass it, or is it worse, right? Here's what the studies show. It's worse. A full range of motion builds more muscle than a shorter range of motion, even if you have to use lighter weight to accomplish it. It stimulates more muscle fibers. It'll develop a more balanced physique. It's funny when you look. It'll develop a more balanced physique. It's funny when you look at like the squat, for example, you look at the muscle activation of

a half squat, a parallel squat, and a full deep squat. And you'll notice more muscle activation across the board with the deep squat. The quarter squat, half squat, you get good quad activation. Well, with the full squat, you get great quad activation and hamstring and glute activation that you don't get with the half squat, right? Think of full extension on your presses or a full stretch on a fly or a row or a pull-up or all these movements where there's a range of motion and can you increase the range of motion. And of course, I want to say this, it's not about range of motion at all costs. It's about range of motion that you can control. Never go beyond where you can control. So if right now a parallel squat is as far down as you can go with good technique, good form and good stability, that's as far as you should go when you squat. However, you should do mobility movements to get yourself

to be able to essentially eventually get deeper in your squat. That way, a month from now, now I can go two inches past parallel with the same control instability that I had at parallel, what is that going to equal? Better results. Better results across the board. But again, back to what I said earlier, you also unlock brand new exercises. Now, I, you know, I fell on to this as a kid on accident.

It wasn't even something I didn't even know about. Like, what we're talking about now, I had no concept. But I would read lots of these old time, like Bodybuilder magazines and books. And the exercises that Bodybuilders did back in the day required more mobility and stability than the ones that they started to do in the 90s, for example. Like, they were doing, I mean, in the 60s and 70s, these bodybuilders, because there's roots to bodybuilding that come from gymnastics and physical performance, and eventually

it turned into just looking a particular way. But you look at the 60s and 70s, these guys were doing behind the neck pull-ups, okay? They were doing behind the neck presses. Everybody was squatting. Everybody was squatting barefoot, right? Ben presses. Ben presses in dead lifts and dumbbell pull-overs with windmills. Amazing ranges of motion, right? Eventually bodybuilders did other exercises

as a lack, that requires a lot of mobility and stability and so I'll do something else and I'll develop this big, whatever body. But these old timers or these old school guys did all these other exercises. So I was a kid going to the gym and I'm like let me see if I can I can do a pull up. Let me see if I can do a behind the neck pull up. Oh, that hurts. I can't do that on my shoulder. But I'd watch these old videos of Arnold and Franco doing them with great reps and how can they do them? And so little by little I would

practice and I wouldn't go up to pull a bar, he's a pull down bar, and I'd go lie, and I'd focus on, okay, this is how I can move without paying, I had no idea I was working on mobility, I was just trying to get these exercises. But anyway, I got to the point where I could do all these old school exercises with no pain, and I got way better development from doing them.

You know, it's like a behind the neck press, I remember when I first did them, I did not feel right. So I had to start with like nothing, not even the bar, eventually adding load, and able to do it, and it became a great exercise for me. So there's like all these incredible exercises that you can have access to if you have the right mobility to do that. Well, and one of the best parts about what you're talking about right now is it take, it does take a lot of work, especially if you are really broken or really tight,

or really lack good range of motion. This is not an overnight thing. Like it's gonna take months, maybe even years for some people to unlock the fullest potential and full range of motion in some of these joints. But the beauty is when that unlocks, and then it unlocks those exercises that you couldn't do before,

now all you have to do is to keep those exercises in your routine. I use this example. That's a good idea. I tell people like I lived in the 90, 90 for like almost two years, like that was like I did that two, three times a day, every day, whenever I had the chance to do it, trying to improve that while also trying to get deeper

and deeper in my squat. Now I have this astagrass, I could sit all the way at the bottom of my squat. You just gotta do that. Comfortably, now I just have to do that. That promotes that mobility and strength in my hips that I know I don't have to live in the 1990 anymore. I just have to do these exercises

that actually express that full range of motion. And as long as I intermittently keep them in my routine, I stay very mobile. And I think of like the overhead squad. If you can do, if you can work towards being able to do an overhead squad, the amount of work you have to do on shoulder mobility and hip mobility starts to go,

well, you don't have to put so much effort in it because you just can do that exercise. You can just do that movement, which expresses and strengthens all of those things. And that's a wonderful message because it can be a little bit, I'm gonna be really honest, right? It's daunting at first. It can be very disheartening. Like, you know, I got a thousand pound leg press and I can,

you know, chest press all this way and I look muscular and then I start doing these mobility movements and I suck. And I'm weak. And then I'm practicing a squat and I'm trying to go down to pedal. Oh my god, I got breakdown down I can barely put me weight on the bar like it's super disheartening but there's light at the end of the tunnel number one by the way here's something I want to want to make clear when you are it's when you're doing an exercise you're already good at getting yourself to improve into the 10 to 15% can be really hard right so if you're if you're a great dead lifter and you're perfect at it you've been deadlifting for a long time, like adding five to 10% after a few years, like that's really challenging.

If you try and exercise your suck at and you start to work on the ability to do it and then you're able to do that exercise, the range of potential of improvement is massive. It gains, come on, like, it's crazy. Like, I remember when we first started working together, I could not do a single windmill. It just didn't work, my body didn't work.

I practiced it and first I'd hold a broomstick and then I'd work on the mobility. Then eventually I could do it with no weight. Then those strength gains were like five or ten pounds every week. There's not a single exercise that I could think of that I could do. What is you just gain strength and. Where you didn't have it. And now think about how that applies to something as simple as a deadlift.

But now you have even more of that security. Your body feels secure when any kind of movement that takes you out of that track, you can adjust and you can have that ability. You didn't have before to be able to brace and stabilize in that position. And this is across the board. And this is also something too,

to your point of bodybuilders, like having all these specific type of exercises. Well, the same thing applies to your weekend athletes and people like that that still wanna throw a ball hard. They still wanna jump and move and cut and have abilities where they're not gonna roll their ankle, they're not gonna damage and hurt their joints. This is a protective system that you're building back.

And so to put emphasis and effort in that direction, it just approves the overall quality of your life and abilities of what you wanna do. So mobility is literally strength, control, and flexibility or range of motion. You've got all three of those things are what produced the mobility that we're talking about. So the last question I guess would be,

or what someone might be wondering is, well, what does that look like with my workout? Here's the beauty, is I don't care what your workout looks like. You can add mobility to it, and it'll make your workout more effective. And there's two main ways you could do it. One is you pick a couple mobility movements that are applicable to you. By the way, just like workouts, they are

individualized. We wrote a program called Maps Prime, which has a what's called a compass test. And it's a self assessment tool to help you find the best movements for you because it makes no sense if I don't have forward shoulder to work on forward shoulder mobility. If my issue is ankle mobility, for example, right? So you want to do the stuff that works for you. So you pick one or two movements that you practice, literally you just practice them throughout the day. Okay, so that's the number one. So and what does that look like? I don't know, five minutes a few times a day. You know, I'm watching TV. All right, let me practice a little bit or I'm between phone calls and me practice. I just, you know, before lunch, I'll practice a little bit.

That's all five minutes, a few times a day, practicing a couple key mobility movements. And then the second way that you add mobility is instead of doing your typical warmup, which might be, you know, going on a treadmill or stretching for a second, do a priming session. A priming session is essentially targeted mobility work, and it should take you 10 to 15 minutes.

So it's your normal 10 to 15 minute warmup time except you're focusing specifically on mobility and you do that before your workouts. That's it, that's it. 10 to 15 minute targeted warmup mobility priming session before your workouts and one or two movements that you practice throughout the day, and you'll see tremendous progress and everything that we're talking about.

Well, and the second one, talking about that's Maps Prime, right? So that's what Prime was for. You talked about Prime Pro first where we go over all the major joints to figure out the best movements for you. And then Prime is to get your workout ready. So if you don't know how to figure that out and you want help, I mean, first you have the free resources that we have there, which is the Prime Pro webinar and then the maps prime webinar, right, dot com. Yeah. Those absolutely free view. This makes no sense to you. And you want to learn more.

It's absolutely free. That's Adam and Justin coaching you. You can sit through those, watch those and so you can help piece it together. And if not that, then we have programs that are built for that. Yeah. And speaking of the program, so what we did is, and by the way, mobility will contribute to any physical fitness goal or routine. So it doesn't matter if you're an athlete, bodybuilder, bikini competitor, strength athlete, you know, weekend warrior, it'll improve all of those things. What we, what we have done is we take maps prime and prime pro, and we put them in a bundle and discount them

because they work together. And what we're doing with this episode is we're taking that discount and adding an additional 50% off. So that's what you can do right now with that particular bundle. I'm gonna get the link here so I can say it on the show. It is, it's at mapsfitinistproducts.com. And then what you do is you use the code get mobile and that'll

give you the additional discount on the already discounted bundle. And again, it's the prime bundle that we're looking for. And this promotion ends Sunday, November 21st. So it's not a forever going thing. It's a huge discount on the 21st. It ends. Look, if you like this information, you got gotta head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our fitness and nutrition guides.

They can help you with all of your fitness and nutrition goals. You can also find all of us on Instagram. So Justin is at Mind Pump Justin. I'm at Mind Pump Salon, Adam is at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance,

check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having

Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is MindPump. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mindbump.