I want to share how you can get very mobile, very fast, without the need for stretching, mobility routines, or all the stuff normally associated with flexibility and mobility that also often leads people to getting very little results.

Poor Mobility Is Not A Necessary Part Of Aging

We often take experiences like feeling stiff, feeling sore, getting out of bed with aches and pains, or feeling a general sense of immobility—as if our body’s getting old and dysfunctional—as a normal part of the aging process. We think that getting into your 30s means your body’s just not functioning like it used to, and you’re losing mobility. These things are absolutely not a necessary part of the aging process, certainly not to the degree we think at age 30, 40, or 50, that those things are just normal and things we have to accept.

I know the irony of speaking about this as a 27-year-old, but I work with a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who have been able to reverse all of those things and function better than they did in their 20s. I also know a lot of people in their early to mid-20s who have far worse mobility and overall physical functionality than some of those clients who are 40 years their senior. And it’s not because of genetics or random chance; it’s because of a process.

Your Routine Determines The Direction You Develop In

Just like we know with strength training, building up a body, muscles, and definition takes time—years of implementing a consistent routine or practice that gets those results when multiplied over a sufficient time span. Just like that, what most people do from the moment they become adults is implement a routine which, over time, promotes poor mobility and a lack of physical functionality. So these experiences of stiffness, soreness, immobility, poor flexibility, weakness, and general lack of range of motion are all a result of not stimulating your body to develop in the right way, multiplied by the passage of time.

As we know, if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards—there’s not really such a thing as maintaining. So as time passes in your adulthood, you are either growing stronger, more mobile, and more functional, or you are growing weaker, frailer, stiffer, sorer, and less able to be active and enjoy your life.

Wherever you are now, maybe you’ve tried yoga, stretching, various mobility routines, or some other solution, and it has either blatantly not worked, or, very likely, it’s just been too boring and time-consuming to sustain long term. Either way, when it comes to this, I don’t think that’s your fault. In my experience, most of these things tend to be an ineffective solution to the wrong problem. Thankfully, the solution to basically all these problems is really simple and extremely time effective. In fact, if you’re already strength training regularly, you probably don’t need any more time—and, in fact, the solution to getting these results might mean doing less than you are now. You just need to improve your process to make sure it actually achieves these outcomes.

If you’re not strength training, that’s fine. If you can spare 40 minutes a week to dedicate to physical training or fitness, then not only can you fix all these issues and build a limber, pain-free, mobile body, but in doing so, you can simultaneously gain lean muscle mass, drop body fat, and build your strength up to ultimately elite levels. Here’s how.

The Complete Guide To Getting Extremely Mobile

What Is Mobility?

The crucial thing to understand that’s going to make achieving all of this super easy is understanding that mobility is just strength. The only caveat here is that the mobility we normally think of—when we think of flexibility, having large ranges of motion available to us, and being able to move freely—requires that strength just needs to be built through a full range of motion. Strength is range-specific, so if we don’t train through the full range of motion of our joints when we do our strength training, we sacrifice gains in the end ranges, which are usually, then, unsurprisingly, the ranges where people lack mobility, feel tight or stiff, and are more likely to hurt themselves, get injured, experience muscle strains, tears, etc. The good thing about this is that if you’re already training, you don’t need to add anything to your routine. The only two things you need to do are as follows.

Step 1: Ensure Your Training Is Effective

Firstly, make sure that your training is effective and actually works, because if your training isn’t building your strength and muscle mass effectively, then it doesn’t matter what you do with it—it’s not going to get you any results, mobility or otherwise. This is a really important point, because most people’s training is just not effective. Basically, if you’re a beginner or intermediate and not seeing strength gains every week and visible changes in your physique every month, then you’re very likely missing something, and there’s room to improve your process—again, not with time, but with how effective the time you’re putting in is for stimulating change.

Step 2: Perform That Training Over Full Range Of Motion

So first, make your strength training actually effective. And then, the second thing you’ve got to do is just make sure that you train throughout the full range of motion. Even fewer people get this part right; it’s very rare to see people training to the end ranges of their joint ability. Often, because we’re weaker in those end ranges, it means we often need to use less load to get there and train there safely and effectively. So, people are either unaware that’s something that needs to happen, or we need to reduce the load we’re using a lot in order to get there—which means we either need to add more training that’s lighter in order to get there, or we reduce the load of our main training and then make the training we’re doing on the rest of the range of motion sub-maximal and ineffective.

Adjusting The Load

I’m not saying that with weights this is super easy to do, but this is another incredible benefit of training with bodyweight training and being able to shift the load constantly throughout the range of motion as you train. What this means is that you can train at maximum intensity in the strong range of motion where you’re able to exert lots of force, and then, as you get to the end and become weaker and less stable as you reach the extreme range of motion, it doesn’t mean you need to stop. What you can do is then scale down the intensity, make the movement lighter, and keep going until you reach literally your joint’s limits of mobility. That means you can safely, every single rep you do—even if you’ve been at super high levels of intensity and absolute difficulty earlier in the rep—train full range of motion, start to finish, every single rep you do. It means that all the range gets equal attention, so as fast as you can gain strength, you are also gaining functional mobility.

That’s a bit of a side tangent, but it’s another reason why load-adjusted bodyweight training is so time-efficient and effective for building not just strength but mobility as well. However you do it, the important thing is that you give that full range of motion attention when you’re doing strength training so that you actually build it, because, as I said, strength is range-specific. If you don’t train it, you don’t gain it.

Specific Mobility Goals

So for functional, everyday mobility that allows you to sit down and get up off the floor, play sports, not get injured, and feel free and limber when you wake up and get out of bed—that is all you need. If you’re training the right basic set of movements that cover your whole body, all you need to do is train the full range of motion and make sure that training is actually working to get you stronger, and you’re covered. There’s no need to add anything else to get all the functional mobility that you want.

That said, some people—and this is the small minority—may have specific goals to build specific flexibility or mobility in some extreme end ranges. For instance, dancers, acrobats, gymnasts, or people wanting to learn things like splits, back bridges, pancakes, and pikes. For these movements specifically, if it’s really a goal you care about, you can go there and train those movements using the exact same technique of maximum-intensity strength work, just in those extreme ranges, which we normally wouldn’t get to doing normal functional patterns like the six basic planes of motion. But honestly, if you’re at that stage of wanting to build those movements, you should by then already be well past the point of having a high level of strength and functional mobility, be well beyond poor recovery, injury, stiffness, and soreness, and have a great-looking physique that’s lean and aesthetic because you’ve already got these basics dialled in to the point where you’re now advanced. And if you want to go learn those specific “party move” mobility skills, then you have the experience to go and figure that out and add it into your routine.

But realise that the basics—what we’ve gone through already—are going to take most people watching this all the way to the functionality that they want with zero extra time commitment. So you dial that in, and there’s really nothing else that you have to do.

Get Extremely Mobile By Optimising Your Strength Training

That’s how you can get extremely mobile without stretching or mobility routines. Honestly, if you want that mobility, don’t waste your time—get straight into making your training work. If you want to learn how to make that strength training effective for building strength, then read this.