I Thought I Lacked Mobility. What If Mobility Wasn’t The Problem?

The other day, I threw a ball.

Or at least, I tried to.

I already knew my shoulders had lost mobility over the years. What surprised me was how sluggish the movement felt.

There was no velocity. No elasticity. No real transfer of power through my body.

I tried throwing harder.

The ball barely went any farther.

The strange part is that if I test the different regions of my body separately, I can still produce good strength. I can still lift respectable weights.

But when my whole body had to organize that strength into one fast, coordinated movement—something resembling a baseball throw—it was as though I hit a wall.

There was no pain.

Nothing was injured.

Yet a capacity I used to have was clearly no longer available.

And that made me wonder:

How much capacity am I currently leaving on the table?

I HAD KNOWN ABOUT THE RESTRICTION FOR YEARS

When I was younger and playing elite hockey, I had very good mobility.

Around the age of 22, when I stopped playing at that level, my flexibility and range of motion declined considerably.

At the time, I didn't make much of it.

You stop training as intensely. You get older. You become less flexible.

That was supposedly normal, so I accepted it.

Then I began University study in kinesiology.

As I learned to assess movement and understand the body more deeply, I started seeing my own restrictions differently.

My shoulders were limited.

My hips were limited.

Certain positions that I knew my body had once been capable of simply weren't available anymore.

So over the years, I experimented.

A lot.

Stretching. PNF. Dynamic and ballistic mobility. Flossing. Fascial work. Cupping. Massage and deep-tissue work. Loaded stretching. Prolonged positioning. Yoga. Visualization. Strengthening through larger ranges. Neurological approaches. Energy work.

Some things did nothing.

Some gave me a little more movement.

Others created surprisingly large changes.

But there was something I kept noticing.

Sometimes I could spend weeks or months gaining mobility, only to stop the exercises for a few days, miss a weekend or go on vacation...

and watch part of it disappear.

Back toward square one.

That never really made sense to me.

WHEN A TECHNIQUE WORKS... BUT DOESN'T ANSWER THE WHOLE QUESTION

PNF stretching gave me one of the clearest examples.

The first time I used it, my body responded.

I gained mobility.

But when the restriction returned and I tried the same thing again, the effect could be much smaller. Sometimes there was barely a meaningful change.

It almost felt like my body was saying:

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Something had clearly been influenced.

But repeating the same strategy wasn't revealing more capacity.

And that didn't make PNF useless.

It gave me information.

The same became true of many things I experimented with.

If something changed my mobility temporarily, that response told me something about my system.

But if I constantly had to reproduce the same intervention to maintain the result, another question remained:

What makes this intervention necessary in the first place?

I could stretch harder.

Hold longer.

Strengthen farther into the range.

Find another variation.

But if I hadn't reached the level actually organizing the restriction, I was still working with the result.

Not necessarily with what was creating it.

MY HIPS HAD ALREADY BEEN SHOWING ME THIS

As a hockey goalie, hip mobility isn't simply about how impressive my butterfly position looks.

It changes my positioning, timing, technique and ability to respond to the play.

And my hips have taught me something strange over the years.

Give me support behind my body and I can sometimes open my butterfly considerably farther.

Remove that support and let me hang there passively, and I lose some of it.

I can actively contract and push myself open again—but then excessive muscular activity appears. Muscles can begin cramping as my body works harder to maintain the position.

Sometimes one leg can reach farther only if the other gives something up.

And when I'm exhausted, the whole position becomes smaller and more costly.

So what exactly is my mobility?

The range changes according to what the rest of my body is doing.

The movement exists—but its availability changes.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Because maybe mobility isn't only a question of how far a muscle can stretch.

Maybe it's also a reflection of how well the entire system can organize that position.

FROM MOBILITY TO AVAILABLE ORGANIZATION

Posturology was one of the first things that really changed this perspective for me.

I saw strength, coordination and mobility change rapidly without specifically training those qualities.

Years earlier in kinesiology, an active straight-leg raise had shown me my own limited mobility.

After changing other elements of my postural and sensory organization, I could lie down and actively bring that same leg to 90 degrees and beyond.

I hadn't spent months teaching my hamstrings how to do it.

Something had changed in the organization.

And the movement followed.

Over time, I started thinking less about how much mobility someone has and more about what I now think of as available organization:

What can this system express, right now, when all of its parts have to work together?

Mobility is one way I can ask that question.

Strength can be another.

So can posture, balance, stability, tension, coordination or sensation.

They aren't always simply things to correct.

Sometimes they're information.

THEN I THREW THAT BALL

And suddenly I realized my shoulders were telling me something very similar to my hips.

I had known for years that my shoulder range wasn't what it used to be.

What I hadn't appreciated was how much that missing movement could influence my ability to express power.

I could still create force.

But when that force had to travel through my whole body and leave through my arm at speed, something wasn't coming together.

So the question became interesting again.

Not:

How do I stretch my shoulder farther?

But:

What isn't allowing all of these pieces to become available together?

And this time, the question was ready.

I DON'T FORCE THE ANSWER

When something doesn't make sense, I've learned not to keep attacking it harder.

I step back.

I keep observing.

In French, I would say I wait until the question is mûre—ripe.

Like fruit.

When it's ready, you don't have to tear it from the tree. Very little force is required because the process has reached the right moment.

A lot of discoveries in my work have happened like that.

I don't need to mentally force my body to give me the answer I want.

I need to understand enough to ask a better question.

And one ordinary afternoon at home, another question became ready.

NOTHING FANCY

My girlfriend and I had put our daughters down for their nap.

One of their little swings was still sitting directly in front of me.

I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and running shorts—one green, one red.

Absolutely nothing matched.

The whole setup looked slightly redneck.

And there I was, playing with my own nervous system again.

I decided to film myself performing a few movements so I could clearly see what was available before and after.

One movement.

One test.

No practising my way into a better result.

Then I sat down and followed a line of work I had recently been exploring around neurodynamics, neural tissue and the connective-tissue organization surrounding nerves.

I worked with what I found.

Then I asked my body the same questions again.

[VIDEO]

My shoulders moved farther.

My hips changed too.

Different movements became available.

And as I continued testing and moving afterward, the changes remained.

But the number of degrees wasn't what interested me most.

It was what those degrees were telling me.

The capacity for more movement was already there.

Something had been preventing all the pieces from making it available together.

THE RANGE OF MOTION IS THE ANSWER, NOT THE INTERVENTION

This is probably the simplest way I can explain how I work today.

I'm not necessarily trying to convince a shoulder to move farther.

I'm interested in understanding:

What prevents the body from organizing a shoulder that can move farther?

Those are very different questions.

A shoulder movement requires much more than a shoulder.

The nervous system has to organize it.

Muscles have to coordinate.

The shoulder blade, clavicle, rib cage and spine have to participate.

Neural structures have to accommodate the movement.

Connective tissues and joints have to allow it.

Everything has to become available together.

So when the observable movement changes immediately after working somewhere else in that organization, the movement itself gives me information.

The visible restriction may be where the story ends—not where it begins.

That's why, for me:

The range of motion is the answer, not the intervention.

I WORK FROM THE ORGANIZATION OUTWARD

This is the same principle that guides me with clients.

I don't automatically begin by asking:

How do I correct what I see?

I ask:

What is keeping this result in place?

I read what the body currently expresses.

I identify a potentially relevant layer.

I change something.

Then I ask the body again.

If several things change together, I don't necessarily need to manually correct every downstream consequence.

I let the system integrate.

And whatever remains becomes the next piece of information.

That's probably the simplest model I've found for describing my work:

I don't work from the limitation inward.

I work from the organization outward.

Sometimes that means more movement appears.

Sometimes strength changes.

Sometimes the body requires less tension to accomplish the same task.

Sometimes something that seemed completely unrelated changes with it.

The point isn't to force a predetermined result.

It's to find something relevant enough that the body can produce a different result itself.

WHAT ABOUT WHEN THE CHANGE DOESN'T STAY?

I've experienced that too.

Many times.

I've made a change, gained considerable mobility and thought:

There it is.

Then later, part of the restriction returned.

Today, I don't necessarily interpret that as meaning nothing changed.

Sometimes the first change was real—but another factor eventually became limiting.

So I follow what remains.

That's another important difference in how I approach the body.

I'm not looking for something I need to repeat forever just to hold everything together.

I'm looking for what the body needs now.

Change it.

Ask again.

Let the system integrate.

See what remains.

Then move forward.

“BUT I'VE ALREADY TRIED EVERYTHING”

I hear this often.

And I understand it.

I've spent years exploring my own body too.

But I've come to see an important distinction:

Have we tried many different things—or many versions of the same way of understanding the problem?

Different techniques can still ask essentially the same question.

Stretching can become a different stretch.

Strengthening can become a different exercise.

A different practitioner can still begin from a similar explanation of why the limitation exists.

That doesn't make any of those approaches bad.

They may simply have reached the edge of what that particular explanation can reveal.

And that's something I find incredibly hopeful.

Because sometimes you haven't reached the end of what your body can do.

You've reached the end of what the current explanation can offer.

Another relationship may still be waiting to be noticed.

Another level may become relevant.

Another question may finally become ripe.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM THROWING ONE BALL

I started with a terrible throw.

That throw reminded me of my shoulders.

My shoulders brought me back to my hips.

My hips brought me back through years of stretching, training, studying, testing and trying to understand why capacity can disappear even when the body still seems physically capable of producing it.

And then, during an ordinary afternoon at home in mismatched clothes while my daughters slept, my body gave me another piece of the answer.

I didn't discover a better way to stretch my shoulder.

I recognized another layer of the question.

And once that question was ripe enough, the answer required surprisingly little force.

Maybe that's one of the biggest things years of working with the body have taught me:

When something refuses to change, I don't necessarily need to push harder.

Sometimes I need to understand what I haven't learned to ask yet.

The limitation is where I see the result.

The organization is where I begin looking for the answer.

Have you been working on the same restriction for a long time? It may be time to explore what is organizing it. www.andyaudet.com

Andy Audet – Un Corps Équilibré

Specialist in Body Recalibration and Human Performance

Saint-Bruno-De-Montarville, Québec