The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Mobility Periodization
Bear with me because I’m feeling a little goofy this morning, and I'm coming up with some strange analogies to get my points across, but I’m having fun, so just roll with it, will ya?
Remember at the beginning of Forrest Gump, when Forest was sitting on the park bench talking to the women about his life?
(if you haven’t seen the movie..what are you even doing with your life??)
You can already hear the famous quote, can’t you?
“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get”
You read that in that gumpy southern accent didn’t you
Well, I feel like that’s exactly how most people approach their mobility training.
They grab a foam roller, go to the empty space on the gym floor and just start ‘goin at er’ without a single clue as to what they’re going to do next.
But not you though, you’re different, you have a specific plan you follow that you know will help you get rid of your pain under the barbell…
Or maybe you’re not, and you don’t.
Maybe you’re exactly like Forrest sitting on the park bench, and if I walked up to you and asked what your plan was for your mobility today you’d look back at me with an innocent, clueless blank glare and tell me…
“Matt, life is like a box of chocolates…I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re in good company..
There’s a whole secret club of clueless foam rolling floppers and sloppy stretchers that just kinda go at it without a plan.
And I was the freakin’ king of this club back in the day…I was foam rolling royalty, with my foam roller as a crown and yoga mat as a cape.
Oh, and just like in Fight Club (good lord don't tell me you haven’t seen this one either), the first rule of the Clueless Stretchers Club is…
You don’t talk about the Clueless Stretchers Club.
You’re probably in it, but have no idea you’re in it because no one talks about it, but everyone is doing it…
It’s a sad and lonely club.
There’s no friends to play with and no real benefit of being in the club, so why stay there?
This article is your formal invitation to join me and 6000+ other crossfit and olympic weightlifting athletes that actually have a strategic plan to get rid of their pain under the barbell.
In this article I’m going to simplify the process of structuring a mobility program so you don’t have to feel like you need to join some sort of cult in order to get this information.
Let’s dive in.
What is Mobility Periodization?
In the world of strength training, the term periodization refers to the concept of breaking down a larger training pan (macrocycle) into smaller time periods (mesocycle).
This allows us to find the best balance between stimulus and recovery in order to drive adaptation for the best results.
Considering that mobility training is a form of strength training, we can approach it in a very similar way, by breaking down an overarching plan into smaller training blocks to make sure we’re applying the appropriate principles in a strategic way.
Like dollar store cutlery, it might appear to be real fancy, but it aint.
It’s honestly very simple.
The Importance of Mobility in CrossFit
Why Mobility Matters in CrossFit
In Crossfit, mobility is understood to be wildly important.
With the exercises stemming from multiple different disciplines (gymnastics, olympic weightlifting, calisthenics, etc.), the demands on our range of motion are kinda sorta all over the place.
While much of the equipment used will challenge your mobility in a big way, none as much as the barbell.
The barbell is incredibly demanding in the sense that it forces you to comply within a strict set of movement rules.
In order to avoid dumping the bar, to keep the barbell from falling forward or backward during your lifts, you need to move your body in a certain way to maintain the center of mass.
Unfortunately, most people really struggle with it and it eventually causes pain in the knees, hips, low back, or shoulders.
But don’t worry, just like double unders, you’ll get it!
The goal is to give your body more movement options.
A better opportunity to find the appropriate positions needed to sustain the demands of the barbell, and to feel like you can move without any limitations.
We want movement freedom, ya feel me?
Reducing Injury Risks
Injury prevention is a bit of a buzz phrase in the Crossfit industry, and for good reason.
Considering the nature of this training method, and the commonality of joint restriction/poor range of motion quality, injuries and pain are quite prevalent.
But it don’t have to be that way, homie.
While completely eliminating the risk of injury is impossible, we can definitely minimize it.
This is one of the big benefits of mobility training.
It allows you to expand your joint capacity (to improve your joints ability to withstand force), and reduces the amount of restrictions in your movement that can cause the barbell to place demands on your body that you can’t manage.
Kinda like Forrest Gump, sounds like a no brainer, huh?
(I think I can say stuff like that without getting canceled because he’s not a real person, right?)
The only problem is that most people are just kinda wingin’ it.
They’re walking into the gym, looking at the workout for the day, doing a quick audit to see what feels tight/sore, and finding the bands and a foam roller to get nasty with.
Again, at the risk of making all of this sound complicated and elaborate, this approach never actually gets you anywhere because there’s no systematic method to the madness.
Since mobility training IS a form of strength training, we need to find ways to drive adaptation in order for you to move and feel better under the barbell.
It’s the only way, young padawan.
Enhancing Performance
Athletic performance may or may not be at the top of your list of goals, hell, you may be here just to get rid of your knee, shoulder, hip, or low back pain in order to get under the barbell again without being afraid of your joints exploding.
But at the end of the day, ain't nobody here gonna scoff at snatching a heavier barbell or kipping a prettier butterfly pullup.
The funny thing is, no one starts training their mobility until it’s abundantly clear that it’s necessary to do the workouts without cringing in fear that a snapped tendon is one squat away.
Plain and simple, mobility will allow you to access deeper ranges of motion and give you more movement options.
It allows you to meet the demands of the barbell more easily, and manage those demands more easily.
While you may have come for the pain reduction, you’ll stay for the performance gains.
What is Mobility Periodization?
Breaking Down Mobility Periodization
So earlier on I briefly introduced the idea of macrocycles and mesocycles. Well, if you truly want to understand periodization we’re going to have to dive a bit deeper into that topic.
In this section of my glorious article I’m going to break down:
- Why periodization is important in mobility training
- The 5 different pillars of the Primal Method and how we use them to guide our mesocycles
- How we gauge our exercise selection throughout the process
Why You Need Periodization in Mobility Training
Most people think that our current range of motion is just about how tight our muscles are.
It’s not.
Mobility is highly neurological.
See, when we lengthen a muscle (ie. during stretching) these little stretch receptors will be stimulated and send a signal out to our spinal cord.
This signal is to warn the nervous system that we’re starting to move into unfamiliar, weak, and potentially fragile ranges of motion.
The spinal cord then says “look at me…I’m the captain now” and sends a signal back to the muscle to encourage it to contract and halt the stretching process.
Although your muscles might feel tight, they aren’t, what you’re actually feeling is the stretch reflex doing its thang.
So, with this in mind, the goal is to calm the excitability of the stretch reflex, while building strength within the deeper available ranges in order to earn the nervous system’s “trust” that you can handle those deeper ranges.
With a periodized mobility program, you can systematically build in progressive overload to drive adaptation in a way that influences the nervous system to trust you like a Crossfitter trusts a knee sleeve to hold his joint together.
The Phases of Mobility Periodization - The Primal Method
The Primal Method is a 5 Pillar process that we use to structure our programs in a way that has the influence over the nervous system that we want.
Each pillar lays a foundation for the next to be built upon, and offers a unique angle to improving your overall mobility.
Pillar 1 - Awareness & Connection: The ability to understand where your body is in space (proprioception), how your body is compensating through movements, and how to engage your muscles within deep ranges of motion that are weak and unfamiliar.
Pillar 2 - Build New Ranges: In this pillar we’re mostly focused on increasing our passive range of motion.
Pillar 3 - Stability: The way I describe stability is to learn how to manage a particular position under stress. This is a highly neurological feature of the body that helps you automatically contract muscles in order to keep your joints safe. The goal in this pillar is to use this “feature” within the newly found, deeper ranges of motion that we just gained access to during Pillar 2.
Pillar 4 - Movement Control: Now we are going to teach our body how to maintain control of the muscle as it moves in and out of our deepest ranges of motion, under load. Generally, the more we lengthen our muscles, the weaker they become. This pillar is intended to learn to maintain control to show the nervous system you can handle a decent amount of stress within these ranges.
Pillar 5 - Strength: This is the holy grail of mobility. All of our efforts should lead us to strength within our deepest ranges of motion. Once we genuinely begin to foster strength, we are developing the capacity to manage high levels of stress and ultimately reducing the amount of movement compensations we use while under the barbell. This is where our pain starts to disappear for good, and our performance reaches a new layer of opportunity.
As you can see, each pillar works systematically to set up a good base layer for the next.
This is the Primal Method.
From the outside, it may seem complicated, but the whole purpose of the Primal Method is to simplify and speed up the process of getting results.
And it works like a charm.
More Than Just Exercise Selection
When it comes to mobility training, everyone seems SO focused on exercise selection.
They feel as though THIS is where the answer to all their problems are hidden. They think “once I learn the right combination of exercises, I’ll be good to go”.
Well, I hate to be a buzzkill, but that ain’t it, homie…it just doesn’t work like that.
Every single exercise provides a particular stimulus, which means that in theory, every exercise will offer its own version of benefits to the body.
But the true benefit only comes from the adaptation that occurs from progressive overload.
You must create a progressive stimulus to the body in order for the body to improve and become better over time.
So at the end of the day, yes exercise selection is absolutely crucial to your overall results, but it certainly doesn’t end there.
It comes down to how the exercises are stacked upon themselves to create a compounding effect.
In this section I’m going to provide some insight into what type of exercises fit best into each pillar so that you can know how to structure your mobility cycles in a way that leads you toward the goals you’re trying to achieve.
So let’s break this down by the pillars of the Primal Method.
Awareness & Connection
There’s a reason why Awareness & Connection sits as the first pillar in the process…
Although strength is the ultimate goal we are after, awareness & connection is something that should be baked into everything that we do, mobility wise.
Here’s how we differentiate and describe the two:
Awareness: Understanding how and where your body moves and what compensations may lead to your specific symptoms and mobility issues. This is an acquired skill that takes a certain level of intention and practice to foster. For example, a client experiencing knee pain during squats may think they have “bad knees” when in fact, maybe it’s their restricted hip rotation and unstable ankles that are causing excess stress on the knees.
Connection: The ability to feel, contract, and control specific body parts during movement. Think of the difference between an intentional bicep curl and taking a sip from a drink. The movement mechanics are relatively the same between the two. However, when performing a bicep curl, you will place more mental focus and contractile energy (squeezing the muscles) on the working muscle.
See, this is one of the most common missing links when it comes to mobility training.
Next time you’re in the gym and you see others working on their mobility, have a look around to see how truly connected to the exercise they are.
You’ll see that most people are mindlessly rolling around on a foam roller and groaning, like some kind of fitness crazed zombie.
Or sitting in the same boring-ass stretch that they do every day because it “really helps with the low back pain” that they’ve been having for months (or even years) now.
But hey, it’s really not their fault, they just don’t know any better.
Hell, you’re probably doing the exact same thing too, but I’m here to tell you that there’s a much better way.
Simply just tuning into the work that you’re doing, by really focusing on the intention of the exercise/stretch/movement, is going to give you so much more bang for your buck.
You’ll notice a couple major things:
- Your connection to your overall movement starts to improve drastically, and you’ll begin to learn how to control your body more easily throughout your training (proprioception)
- You will notice where your weaknesses are, and where you have the most opportunity for improvement, which increases your chances of getting even better mobility results.
Now, Im hesitant to give any exercise examples here because this should be baked into every movement that you do, but I don’t like to leave you empty handed and scratching your head, so I’ll play..
I find that one technique in particular truly requires a higher level of focus to get the most out of it.
CARs - Controlled Articular Rotations.
Check it out.
Example Exercises:
Ankle CARs:
Shoulder Swimmers:
Build New Ranges (BNR)
Developing new range of motion can be a tricky endeavor, but if we take a step back and realize that we’re really playing a game with the nervous system here, we make the whole process slightly less confusing.
What we’re really aiming to do is delay the stretch reflex, to any extent.
Once we achieve that, we have given ourselves the opportunity to start layering the pillars of the Primal Method in a way that creates lifelong changes to our mobility.
Now, here’s where things start to get real interesting…
While we can certainly use traditional static stretching techniques (like a classic pigeon or couch stretch) to build new ranges, over the years I have found that there is a better…speedier way of doing things.
See, our nervous system will generally respond best to any stimulus that creates strength.
This is because it provokes the most powerful adaptive response from the body, through muscular contraction.
We can manipulate this process by using muscular contraction within our stretching process in order to speed up the process and increase our range of motion almost immediately.
This is called Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation, or PNF for short.
PNF is a contract-relax stretching technique that has you stretching the particular muscle that you want lengthened, and then going through a sequence of short (but relatively intense) contractions of that same muscle, followed by another bout of deep stretching, typically getting deeper and deeper as the exercise progresses.
This is a phenomenal technique to use as it quickly shows the nervous system that you have the ability to contract your muscles within these deeper ranges of motion.
Again, it’s certainly not the only technique that you can use, other stretching techniques work great here too, but this is one of my personal favorites as I’ve seen the best results with it.
Example Exercises:
Breathing Frog:
Dorsiflexion PAILs/RAILs:
Stability
The way I see it, stability is the foundational building block for strength.
This is where we really learn how to contract our muscles within our deeper ranges of motion.
See, as you begin to explore your deepest ranges of motion, you’ll start to notice that they become weaker as you reach the outer limits.
The deeper you go, the weaker you get (don’t make a that’s what she said joke…don’t make a that's what she said joke)
That’s what she said…DAMMIT!
Anyways, as you develop stability, you are creating the first layer of capacity.
You are training your muscles to learn how to contract autonomously within the deepest ranges, which shows your nervous system that you are capable of managing greater levels of stress within them.
Once you do this, your nervous system will start to open up these ranges and make them even more accessible through movement.
And just like that, another glorious layer of the process has been laid.
Exercise Examples:
Deep Lunge Iso:
Tall Frog Iso:
Movement Control
Thanks to my glorious joke, you should now know that our deepest ranges of motion are often our weakest.
As we lengthen our muscles, they lose more and more of their capacity to withstand stress.
Here's another way to look at it:
A muscle is generally strongest in its shortened state.
Which portion of the squat is easiest to pause at, when you’re standing at the top of the rep, or when you’re in the deepest squat position?
Yeah, the deep squat position is hard as hell to pause in because all your muscles are lengthened.
So the intention behind this pillar is to learn how to maintain control of our movement as we approach those deep, weak-ass, ranges of motion.
This is where we start to truly become aware of our movement compensations, and aim to navigate and minimize them.
Exercise Examples:
Eccentric Shoulder Flexion:
Eccentric Sumo Squat:
Strength
I say it all the time, mobility IS strength…it’s the glue that holds all your results together for a long period of time.
In order to actually make mobility gains that will allow you to reduce your pain under the barbell, and move like a nimble savage, you need to switch your perspective from stretching to strengthening.
Once you develop strength, you are truly showing your nervous system that you are not only capable of managing stress within your deep ranges of motion, but you’re able to thrive there as well.
Simply put, this is the ultimate goal, to be strong in your end ranges, BUT, there's a process to getting there.
Exercise Examples:
Primal Shoulder Checks:
Ankle Reapers:
Conclusion
As Shrek famously said…
Mobility is like an onion donkey, it has layers.
If you’re spending all your time stretching and foam rolling, the real mobility gains are hidden in the work you’re not doing.
We need to look at it as a progressive process that requires an active approach.
It’s simple, but definitely shouldn’t be easy.
Once you make this shift, you’ll start to see real progress with how you feel under the barbell.
No more fear of injury.
No more pain.
It’s all related to strength.
Want my help getting back under the barbell without the pain?
At Primal Mobility, we’ve helped over 6000 athletes get rid of their pain and get back under the barbell with confidence.
If you’re dealing with any of the following:
- Knee pain
- Hip pain
- Low back pain
- Shoulder pain
And are ready to get back under the barbell without the nagging issues, and finally feel confident in your joints again, I can help you.
Schedule a meeting with me here, and we can see if a strength-based mobility protocol is the answer you’ve been looking for.
As always, thanks for being here and giving me the opportunity to teach what I love.
Cheers to your mobility gains,
Matt Phili
