Now here’s a topic that just never gets old at TLA! Members in The Lifetime Athlete App ask about it all the time. And I thoroughly enjoy discussing it from a variety of perspectives.
The title used the analogous terms bricks and noodles. These are relatable monikers for stiffness and looseness. Hypomobility and hypermobility. Nothing derogatory here, only descriptive. We’re talking about how stiff or loose a person may be, how much of that is genetically driven, how this status affects performance and longevity, and the adjustments in training we can utilize to address the condition. Sounds like a lot but it’s actually fairly simple.
The design of the human body is indeed brilliant and it’s something that we celebrate continuously at TLA. Accordingly, human movement – especially when we expect it to be efficient, effective, and graceful – depends upon an inherent blend of stability and mobility within the body. We often refer to the mobility-stability continuum and it’s an important model on our platform. Using a normal distribution or bell-shaped curve, most of the population will fall within one standard deviation of the mean, either on the slightly loose or slightly tight side. Functionally speaking, this works fairly well for most daily activities and sports.
But there can be instances where we have too much of one (stiffness or looseness) and not enough of the other. This situation can relate to one’s overall status or to the specific demands of a chosen sport or activity. Typically, the problem we see when there is either excess or inadequacy – however you choose to view it – is that the human body utilizes its aforementioned brilliance. We compensate for our deficiencies. Usually by modifying movement patterns to get the job done (whatever demands we face in life, work, and sport). By using substitutions or aberrant movement patterns, we execute in our environment. However, this usually (although not always) results in less efficiency (leakage of power, lack of adequate stability, etc.) and increased wear and tear on joints and connective tissues.
Let’s get into a couple of examples that illustrate this point before we go any further. We’ll flesh out a hypermobility situation as well as a hypomobility problem.
A person with hypermobility (excessive looseness) will very often complain of chronically “tight” muscles, usually in the stabilizers of the neck or lumbopelvic region. This might be an entire group of muscles or body area, or it could be localized to the levator scapula or psoas, etc. The reason behind this is the brilliant CNS. The brain recognizes that the body in this example is having trouble stabilizing an anatomical area secondary to the gift of a little too much mobility. Ligamentous laxity, muscular weakness, postural habits, and other possible reasons can be contributing. Throwing no shade just identifying the mechanical problem. The brain doesn’t want excessive wiggling, wandering, shearing, and grinding of the segments and joints because it “knows” this leads to pain and breakdown. So it dials up the muscular tone, or guarding response, in the adjacent muscles. This forms a veritable “dynamic splint” which helps to hold the body in a more stable position. The problem is the muscle usually becomes pissed off (big time) because it’s doing full time work (chronic contractile state) when it “signed up” for a part time position. Hypoxia, inflammation, and aggravation become the primary complaint.
Now let’s look at hypomobility. A super-stiff individual will struggle to move fluidly. This can show up across any and every movement pattern, but it is often most visible in rotary tasks. [Editor’s note: today’s discussion is not a discourse on triplanar or fluid-based models of movement.] When a stiff person needs to turn or twist, they can’t easily access that sequential, domino-like cascade of movement which the average human possesses. Their body will behave like a block, or brick, and attempt to find or force motion to complete the objective. In sport, this can place excessive pivoting forces at the feet and result in high-velocity/high amplitude stresses at the joints and tendons. Essentially, you can rip yourself. Functionally, this is also the person who has great difficulty turning the head to back up a vehicle (the backup cameras are nice but we should refrain from relying on them totally).
So if you’re not born average on that continuum (+/- 1 SD on that continuum in either direction of the mean), you’re potentially a little too loose or a little too stiff. Additionally, your training behaviors can either pull you a little closer to the mean (usually desirable) or you could be (most often inadvertently) pushing yourself into outlier status and increasing your risk of problems. Remember, none of this represents a character flaw or negative judgment. It simply identifies a verifiable biomechanical risk.
One of our major goals in Training for LIFE is to make our bodies last a lifetime. This means not outliving your joints. Grinding them down, or ripping them apart, is not generally recognized as contributing to orthopedic longevity. As a physical therapist, I’ve spent a career trying to educate people on this phenomenon and optimize training program design in order to address mobility-stability issues and thus prevent things from becoming problematic. I’ve also concurrently helped folks deal with the injuries, impairments, and disabilities that show up when all this gets out of hand. I prefer the former to the latter and my clients have universally agreed. “Glad I fixed this before it got too bad” is always better to hear than “Well, some s**t happened but at least I was able to restore some of my function.”
One of the myths we shoot down regularly here at TLA is “You just can’t have too much of a good thing.” To be clear, mobility and stability are certainly good things. We need both. Just not too much of one and too little of the other. A body that is gifted with very high mobility doesn’t need more end-range tissue stress (prolonged, deep stretching) because it already has enough or potentially too much. Likewise, the organism with very high stability (dense connective tissue, ovoid joint architecture, shortened muscles) must be fairly vigilant in maintaining adequate movement variability. To really put it simply, here are two easy to follow recommendations. Loose people shouldn’t stretch too much. Tight people should do more than just lift heavy.
It’s all about giving your body what it needs, or doesn’t have. At least enough of it to keep you near the mean on the mobility-stability continuum. A flexible person can still do yoga. Just be aware of your inherent connective tissue traits and don’t try to make your loose self looser. A genetically stiff person who loves powerlifting can still do what he or she loves. They just need to work harder at maintaining mobility than the average person. The mix is unique to every individual, and it’s also dynamic as you go through your life.
That stated, the 68% or so of the population who is average or close to the mean on that mobility-stability continuum, doesn’t have to focus too much on these considerations. As long as you do comprehensive training, addressing all 5 Capacities of Athleticism (strength, speed, power, agility, and endurance), you’re getting what you need to keep your body working well through the journey. Just tweak things up or down here and there as you notice a need or two. This is precisely what we do in our Training Tribe fitness for life programming in The Lifetime Athlete App. A system designed to keep most humans in kickass shape for life.
It’s the rest of us, whether that’s entirely due to genetics, or also related to long term training patterns, passion pursuits, or injuries – who need to be more thoughtful in preserving reasonable mobility and stability relationships within our beings. I’m going to offer a few suggestions along these lines. Many of our members in The App sign up for Personal Coaching Consultations to customize this process in detail.
The order doesn’t matter so let’s begin with how to adjust your training to make yourself more mobile because you’re too stiff. Recognize that heavy, bilateral, sagittal plane, compound lifts (back squats, barbell bench presses, etc.) emphasize a highly compressed state and tend to increase stability/decrease mobility. You can still do those exercises, just be aware that they should not be your only focus. Insert more dynamic and static stretches, multidirectional movements, unilateral exercises, and rotational motion into your workouts. Spend some time at end range holding positions such as full squats (unloaded) and explore breathwork. Remember that mobility work targets the extensibility of the collagen fibers in your tissues and this is a game of frequency. Get multiple exposures to mobility throughout your day and not just in your workout.
Honestly, the more difficult assignment is making a loose person more stable, but it’s not impossible. The very first thing to keep in mind is that prolonged or chronic positions at end range, especially with overpressure, can increase the laxity of your connective tissues. This reduces joint integrity and you don’t need more of this. So watch out for static stretches and workstation positions. The next thing to consider is that you have to train your CNS to turn on multiple muscles around a body segment appropriately, and intermittently, to protect your joints. You want multiple muscles stabilizing an area because that spreads the force around and helps you get rid of those nasty trigger points. Intermittent because you need an on/off stabilization based on position and motion, not 24/7 tension. How all this is accomplished in training is to utilize, in some of your resistance exercises, isometric holds near mid-range and slow, controlled (at least for a while) movement through nearly full range of motion (stay a few degrees away from either end). At first, you’ll have to think about all these contractions but over time it will become relatively subconscious. Once this foundation has been established over a few months, you can then move into higher load and velocity training in protected positions, which has been shown to positively affect connective tissue density, at least to some degree.
So there are some points which every Lifetime Athlete should keep in mind when designing and performing a training program. We really don’t want to be a brick or a noodle. Just somewhere in between.