MOVEMENT & MOBILITY COACHING ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

Movement and mobility are the cornerstones of athleticism and functional fitness. Being able to lift a lot of weight is irrelevant if it impedes your ability to move well and have proper joint function. Unless your sport is Olympic Weight Lifting, athletes are predominantly movers, not lifters. Athletes play on the court and field, using multiple joints at the same time to move multi-planar and multi-directionally through space. While strength training and weight lifting are integral to sports performance, we believe that they must be balanced with movement and mobility training.

Weight lifting compresses both muscle tissue and joints. Training systems like GOATA and FRC, decompress the tissue and maintain full range of motion in the joints. Weightlifting also codes specific movement patterns that over time can lead to movement behavior that leaves the athlete prone to injury and chronic pain. For example, weight training is heel-down and inside-ankle-bone-low behavior: in order to lift weight we must push pressure through our heels into the ground while moving our inside-ankle bone down and in. Whereas running, throwing, changing direction, and in fact any explosive movement through space, is heel-up inside-ankle-bone-high behavior. When athletes take the weight training behaviors they have overly-coded into their movement patterns through weight lifting onto the court or field and start using those patterns to try to move explosively they are often injured with ACL and MCL tears and achilles ruptures (heel down inside-ankle bone low prevents the ankle from turning in unison with the hip, and the knee in the middle of those two joints takes the sheering force and tears the ligaments; and instead of using the achilles to load pressure through the system with the heel up, athletes push their heel into the ground, twisting the achilles in the opposite direction of its loading ability and then it ruptures).

Using movement and mobility training systems within our strength and conditioning programs, we unsure that athletes gain the benefits of increased strength through weight lifting, while developing optimal movement patterns and keeping their musculoskeletal systems decompressed and their joints with maximum range of functional motion. Athletes should not have to sacrifice movement and mobility for strength, and in fact should see gains in all areas at all times.