[quote]Sentoguy wrote:
[quote]Shadowzz4 wrote:
[quote]Sentoguy wrote:
[quote]lunk wrote:
^^ shadow, trust me, I do all the bird/dogs, glute bridge iso holds, single legged glute bridges, supine pelvic tilts, RKC planks, body saws, reverse crunches and dead bugs in the world, and have done consistently for years, and none of it has done jack to increase my mobility.[/quote]
Why would you expect that any of those exercises would result in any appreciable increase in ROM? You aren’t going through much if any range of motion while doing those. The supine glutes bridges, iso bridge holds and single leg bridges are good glute strengthening exercises, but they aren’t going to give you much if any noticeable increase in hip mobility in the short term.
Active flexibility (which is what Glute bridges would qualify as) is important for application of flexibility (which is often called mobility), but it’s not the best way to gain it. The best way is through passive flexibility exercises (actually PNF is the most effective method). In fact, active flexibility can never exceed passive flexibility and in most cases passive flexibility levels exceed active flexibility levels.
With all due respect to guys like Robertson or Cressey, their athletes are pitifully tight compared to Dancers, Gymnasts, adavanced level Yogi’s, and kicking intensive Martial Artsists. What do all of those athletes have in common? They do a ton of static passive stretching along with lots of dynamic and static active stretching.
Again, if you want to make noticeable increases in your mobility you need to start doing static passive (or better yet PNF) stretching on a regular basis (best case scenario would be to do PNF 2x per week per muscle group and regular static passive stretching the other 5 days of the week). Then, once you’ve retaught your neuromuscular system that it doesn’t need to “hit the breaks” (engage the stretch reflex) until further and further into the range of motion, you will be able to “magically” move through a greater ROM voluntarily.
To illustrate my point, straighten your arms, crunch your abs (think of pulling your ribs down or trying to completely take the curve out of your lower back), keep your head neutral (or better yet keep your neck “packed”) and try to raise your arms completely overhead. From a physics standpoint the weakest place in the range of motion is where your arms are parallel to the ground. However, what you are likely to find is that this will not be where you feel the “end” of your ROM, or where your shoulders and traps will start really straining to continue to raise your arms.
The reason for this is that the strength in your traps and delts is not what is limiting your ROM ( just as the strength in your glutes is probably not limiting your hip extension ROM). What is limiting your ROM is that your body is firing the antagonistic muscles (your pec major, pec minor, lats, Teres major and/or rear deltoid), aka “putting on the brakes”, to stop you from exceeding the “safe” (or more accurately accustomed) range of motion and injuring yourself. If you reset this “safe” ROM though, your body won’t put on the brakes until later in the ROM and thus you will be able to comfortable move through a greater ROM.
[/quote]
It depends on what school of thought you are coming from. I come from the school of thought that most things are tight because they are being asked to do something they shouldn’t be doing. Removing the reason the body is using them in the first place is the root of the issue. Stretching helps, but it’s secondary.
Great flexibility with little strength is not helpful for strength training purposes. You need to be able to demonstrate you have strength with range of motion. Some who do what you mentioned earlier will have this. Most people I have trained that have done alot of yoga, sure they are flexible, but in a worthless way. They have no tension in their posterior chain. It becomes apparent when they all have knee and back pain until we can improve their strength.
And if something was tight, it would be hip flexors, if you have a weak posterior chain your not going to be able to stretch your hip flexors.[/quote]
We’re both in total agreement that strengthening the posterior chain is a good thing and that there are flexible, yet weak people out there.
But like I said, passive flexibility will always preceed active flexibility. All athletes or individuals who attain elite levels of mobility (who start training as adults) do so via static passive or PNF stretching. So, if the OP wants to improve his mobility (more accurately active flexibility), then he needs to start doing static passive and/or PNF stretching on a regular basis. He should of course also perform exercises to strengthen his glutes, hamstrings and abdominal muscles (as well as work heavily on his shoulder flexion flexibility and mobility as IME most people with APT also have poor shoulder flexion flexibility/mobility) as that will allow him to access more and more of his passive ROM during movement.
While some Glute activation can help when stretching the hip flexors and quads, it hardly takes huge amounts of Glute strength to do so if you stretch properly.[/quote]
I come at it from a different side, I don’t think he will get much out of stretching UNTIL he gets his glutes going. So maybe we are on the same page, just a different order of what is most important.
I am not advocating getting the glutes massively strong, not that thats a bad thing, instead I’m saying get them working the right way, which at first will only be a subtle bit. But that is all it will take to get things going properly.
My experience with glutes is that unlike other joints and muscle such as the bicep where as the muscle gets stronger the elbow can flex more powerfully, glutes are working so poorly in most people that the hip joint stops functioning correctly. So its not a get the butt super strong thing, just a get it working to the point the hip joint is starting to work properly, its extremely low level stuff but it has to be done IMO or he wont get anywhere.