If you’ve been and Old Cityzen for a couple days or a couple months, by now I’m sure you’ve noticed the amount of attention we place on stretching and mobility. Sure it’s great for recovery and injury prevention, but the real reason we place so much importance on it is so that we can be as efficient as possible in all of the movements we do. Increased efficiency directly translates to increased strength and increased work capacity. We work so hard in the gym to make strength and endurance gains, we often neglect the ‘easy’ way to get stronger: improving our positions.

Here’s a simple Mobility Assessment you can do at home or with a coach to test yourself and see where your weaknesses are. Remember, this is an assessment – I’ll provide ideas to fix any weaknesses you find in a follow up post. This is my assessment:

Check your hips with the Paleo Chair:

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  • Weight should be on your heels, toes straight.
  • A perfect position is feet together knees together
  • Your butt should be close to your heels
  • Assessment: My position here is good, but not perfect. Probably 8/10 on a totally arbitrary scale. I need to work on getting my feet and knees closer together, as well as getting my butt a little lower.

Check your ankle range of motion with the bottom position of a pistol:

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  • Keep your weight on your heel
  • Your butt should be very close to your heel
  • Squatting knee is out
  • Non-squatting leg should be straight
  • Assessment: My position here, again, is good, but not perfect.  I could improve the straightness of my non-squatting leg (this is my major weakness and you’ll see it fully exposed soon enough…). But since we’re testing ankle range of motion, I’ll give myself a 10/10 on my ankle position.

Check hamstrings/posterior chain with a straight legged deadlift:

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  • Keep your back flat, abs engaged
  • Lock out your legs
  • Hinge at your hips and try to get to the bar
  • Assessment: My position here is terrible: 3/10. This is by far my biggest mobility weakness and this test exposes it in all of it’s glory. I need to work on hamstring mobility big time!

NOTE: Don’t round your back to get into this position:

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Check your overhead position by holding two DBs overhead:

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  • Point your thumbs behind you, get your arms as close to your head (and straight) as possible
  • Use a heavy weight (2x DB: 45/25)
  • Assessment: My right arm is much better than my left. You can see the elbow slightly bent and my arm is further away from my head: 8/10.

Don’t ever extend to achieve the position:

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Check your shoulder internal rotation:

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  • Lay on your back with arm at a 90 degree angle
  • The goal here is to have palm to ground without your shoulder rising up
  • Assessment: I’m missing about 30 degrees of range of motion, so I’ll give myself a 7/10.

Finally, perform the ‘leopard test‘ as a way of checking your thoracic spine:

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  • Overhead Squat two KBs (Rx: 53/35)
  • If your overhead and hip positions are good, but you fall apart in this test, then you really need to work on your thoracic spine mobility.
  • Assessment: I’m doing this with 2×35’s and am falling apart. My arms are separating and I’m too far forward. Since my hips and OH positions were fairly good, I can assume that my t-spine mobility is fairly weak in comparison. I’ll give my t-spine a score of 5/10.

Sean’s Overall Assessment:

  • Hips: 8/10
  • Ankle: 10/10
  • Hamstrings: 3/10
  • Overhead: 8/10
  • Shoulder Internal Rotation: 7/10
  • Thoracic Spine: 5/10

Based on this test I should be spending the vast majority of my mobility time working on my hamstrings, t-spine, with a little bit of IR work.

 

What’re the results of your test? What are your weaknesses? Let us know in the comments below. Also, stay tuned for the next post which will provide you with ideas on how fix your weaknesses.