Mobility helps you to boost your performance in various sports, have a positive impact on your posture and reduce joint and muscle pain. Besides that Mobility is necessary when recovering from an injury or making your body nearly bulletproof against it in the first place. Try this 10 minutes mobility routine and start seeing the results!
What you will learn in this article:
Here’s how to start your Mobility Training
This exercise routine is also part of our new Mobility Program that contains many more workouts like this and comes as a step by step online course with follow along videos. In total you get over 160 unique exercises and modifications represented in high quality videos & graphics, ensuring that you know exactly what and what not to do!
This 10 minutes mobility workout routine is built as a flow with 9 exercises. This means you do these exercises back to back with 30 to 40 seconds work time each and 15 seconds rest in between.
Wrist and Elbow focused Mobility Exercises
Quadruped Wrist Circles
Let your fingers point in opposing directions in a quadruped position and rotate your shoulders around your hands. Let both elbow pits point forward and try to lift your fingers up, even if they don’t move at all.
Keep your palms on the ground and your elbows completely straight. To make the exercise harder, enlarge the circles, place your hands further away from each other or apply more pressure to your wrists. To make it easier, just do the opposite.
Single Wrist Flexion
Here you place both hands on the knuckles in front of your knees in a quadruped position and alternatingly move one wrist down to the floor. Let your elbow pits point forward and keep your elbows straight. Stop before you touch the ground, if your wrist mobility is too low.
To increase the difficulty, move your hands away from your knees or away from each other. The other way around makes it easier.
Closed Chain Elbow Circles
Place your hands in front of your knees and move both elbows in a circle around your wrists and change the direction with each rep. Let your palms lift as little as possible and don’t use your arms but your back to drive the motion. To make it harder, move the elbows further down or keep them further up to make it easier.
Spine and Shoulder focused Mobility Exercises
Easy Bridge
From a sitting position with your arms placed behind you, you lift your ribcage as high as possible. When raising your hips, depress and retract your shoulder blades, let the ribcage lead the movement and your pelvis posterior tilted and keep your neck neutral. To make it harder, lift your rib cage higher, extend your legs or use only one leg.
Cat Cow
Here you switch between an arched and a bent back in a quadruped position. In the cat position, you protract your shoulder blades while flexing your spine, tilt your pelvis backwards, and tuck your chin. During the cow position you retract your shoulder blades while extending your spine, only slightly extend your neck and aim for an anterior pelvic tilt.
In both positions you should keep your shoulders depressed and your elbows completely straight. The difficulty can be modified by adapting the range of motion, adding a resistance band, lifting your knees or placing your hands further forward.
Ankle, Hip and Leg focused Mobility Exercises
Hip Figure 8
Here are some common hip mobility exercises you can easily try. Stand on one foot and let the other travel on an imaginary track along the figure 8 like a train on a railway. Make sure to also twist the hip on your stranding side. It’s ok to bend your moving knee a little, but keep it to a minimum. The more you let the foot point in the forward direction and the bigger the figure 8 the harder the exercise.
Crouch Rocks
Start in a sitting crouch position and move the knee of your front foot forward and down to the ground. Keep your core stable and don’t arch your back. Your knee should only gently touch the ground and not fall down. To make the exercise easier, add a stable or unstable support. To make it harder you can move your front foot further forward.
Lunge Knee Rotations
By moving your front knee forward in a lunge stance and letting it make half circles to the left and right. Keep your heel on the ground while moving the knee as far forward as possible. Make the half circle motion as wide as you can and keep your front foot as flat as possible on the ground. To make this exercise harder or easier you simply adjust the range of motion.
Frog Rocks
Take a quadruped position with your knees further apart and move your hips back and forth. Make sure to keep your neck in a neutral position and avoid falling into an arched back position, especially at the front. The further apart you place your knees and the more you move back and forth the harder the exercise.
Congratulations, you completed this 10 minutes Mobility routine!
What is the difference between Mobility and Flexibility?
Mobility exercises work mainly on the joints, actively! As mentioned before, focus and control are required to perform them, and yes, they are tiring (beware: performing the exercises badly or quickly can cause you injuries – the ones you actually should have avoided with mobility).
Flexibility, on the other hand, is exercised with passive movements and mainly brings muscles and ligaments into play. Here our body does not make a big effort, but on the contrary relaxes.
When it comes to flexibility exercises, the effects are normally short-term. Mobility, on the other hand, has longer-lasting effects. Once your body is able to do a movement, it retains the ability to repeat it over time.
Watch this 10 minutes mobility routine
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