Training Myths That Won’t Die #5: “Infinite Mobility and the Importance of Activation”

Ever since the late 2000s, mobility has been the IT concept. For many people, seemingly the only
problem that caused any lifting plateaus or injuries was a lack of mobility, which was some
magical property of the body that could never be excessive, and there were people lined up
around the block that could help you. Most of those people lacked any degree or credential
related to biomechanics and physiology, but boy did they spout off the fancy terms to make up for
it. One of the fanciest of those terms was and is “activation.” Now it might be mobility that was
limiting you, but it could also be that you were unable to activate various parts of your body that
you didn’t even know were problematic,
problematic, like the glutes,
glutes, which apparently
apparently nearly everyone had
problems activating. The tip of the spear in this line of reasoning was that… drumroll… your
inability to activate was CAUSING YOUR MOBILITY PROBLEMS. Now that’s the one-two punch
that, the newfound experts proclaimed, could only be solved with some mystical combination of
foam rolling, extreme stretching, face-rubbing (not a joke), and 1-hour-long mobilizing and
activation drills before every workout. Millions bought in, and while many have since been
soured by the majority of the movement and egressed considerably from most of its practices,
countless others are still in the thick of things.

Alright, so let’s shed some light on

on the major problems with mobility/activation claims and sort
sort
through to the valid approaches.

1.) Half the time solutions are proposed, the folks proposing them don’t even have their terms
straight. Much of that time, they are using the term “mobility” when they should be using the
term “flexibility.” Ugh but flexibility is a term from like the 80s and brings up memories of the
sit-and-reach test in middle school… that’s not modern and cool!

To get things straight, flexibility is the ability to produce a certain range of motion about a joint
or series of joints. It can
c an be active (you put yourself in that position using the muscles around
those joints) or passive (you or someone else puts you in that position using gravity or other
muscles not around that joint). Mobility is very related, and just adds one detail. Mobility adds
“strength through the range of motion” to flexibility. So that mobility isn’t just “how flexible are
you?” It’s “can you move your own body through
through those positions,
positions, including the extreme
extreme ones?”