Mobility and flexibility are my biggest weaknesses. Yes, I’ve always been strong and coordinated but my limited range of motion has hindered me throughout my entire athletic career. Back when I was a soccer player, practically every season was cut short by a muscle injury. And now that I am one of the world’s most average climbers, I find myself facing a similar obstacle: my own rigidity.
Thankfully I’ve managed to build enough core strength to keep me from pulling muscles as often as I used to. But climbing is a sport that requires you to twist your body into unnatural positions so you can defy gravity. It demands strength, mobility, and flexibility. I only have one of those things, and my lack of the other two has severely limited my progress. Recently, however, I had a mobility breakthrough!
And it happened on the dancefloor.
Someone once described my dancing as “awful.” My wife has called it “interesting.” Others have said it’s “surprising” and “frightening.” I happen to agree. My dancing is so good, it’s scary. When the music starts playing, I’m all confidence.
So when the party moved onto the dancefloor at my wedding last month, I was determined to make an impression. About thirty minutes into the dancing portion of the night, the DJ started playing Low by Flo Rida. If you’re not familiar with this title, I guarantee you’ve heard the song at least once. And when you read this next part, you’ll curse me for getting it stuck in your head:
“Shawty had them apple bottom jeans (apple bottom jeans) / Boots with the fur (with the fur) / The whole club was looking at her / She hit the floor, next thing you know / Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low…”
You definitely sang that didn’t you? Anyway, at this point in the song – when Flo tells us just how low she got – it happened. But before I tell you exactly what it is that went down (hint: it was me… I went down), let me give you some context. First of all, my wedding day was one of the best days of my life. Secondly, all of my inhibitions and insecurities had exited stage left at around 3:00 p.m. when I had taken my second shot of tequila. My point is, I was extremely loose.
When Flo started saying, “Shawty got low, low, low, low, low,” I decided I was Shawty. In other words, I got low! No, I wasn’t twerking (although, I would if I could). Instead, I did something akin to what Neo, AKA Mr. Anderson, does in The Matrix to dodge all those bullets. Except I got lower.
I dropped it low until my knees were both on the ground and then I leaned back until my head was on the ground. My knees were bent under me and I was basically a pancake that had folded over itself. I was completely flat on the ground. Then, I bounced right back up in one fluid motion like a rubber band snapping back into shape. Everyone in my vicinity looked at me slackjawed.
“How the hell did you do that?” my brother asked.
The inebriated version of me played it off like “Yeah, of course I can do that.”
But to be honest, even I was surprised. I knew that climbing and stretching had improved my mobility but I didn’t know to what extent.
I probably should’ve mentioned this sooner, but in case your not familiar with mobility and flexibility in an athletic context, let me explain. Flexibility is your muscle’s ability to lengthen or stretch passively through a range of motion. Mobility is your joint’s ability to move through a range of motion actively. In case that wasn’t clear, flexibility is being able to put your foot behind your head by pulling it there with your hand. Mobility is being able to put your foot behind your head without using your hands to guide it. Weird example, but you get the point. Flexibility is passive. Mobility is active. I’ve been using both terms interchangeably because I think my matrix move required both mobility and flexibility. I needed flexibility to flatten myself on the ground and mobility to spring back up.
As I’ve written in previous articles, a climbing gym is a mecca of mobility and flexibility. Not only are high-level climbers freak athletes, but they are also extremely bendy. It’s not uncommon to see climbers training by doing full splits or folding until their knees are by their ears. All that’s to say that over the last year, I’ve been paying extra attention to my mobility and flexibility. Despite that extra attention though, I’ve felt like I’ve made minimal gains.
I did the matrix move ten more times that night, partially because it was fun and partially to prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke. Each time, I expected to tear my quad muscles and every ligament in both knees. But instead, I just sprung back up and kept dancing.
The next morning, I thought to myself, “Maybe I’m more mobile and flexible than I think.”
Why was I so elastic at my wedding, and yet I struggled to even touch my toes in my day-to-day life? I thought about this question for weeks and when I went back into the gym as a married man, I started paying attention to my mindset when I felt loose and my mindset when I didn’t. I thought about what headspace I was in when I pulled off the matrix move and I realized I was the most relaxed I had ever been. As I said, my wedding day was the best day of my life. I didn’t carry even the slightest inkling of stress in my mind or body. I was fully present, fully engaged in the moment, and completely loose. Could this mindset have led to my sudden burst of mobility?
Of course, this is not a science-backed research paper, it’s anecdotal evidence based on my own experience. N = 1. Still, I will share my conclusion with confidence: mobility starts in the mind.
It’s well documented and researched that mental health disorders like stress and depression create mental, spiritual, and physical contraction. In other words, when the mind is in a state of stress, the body contracts to protect itself against injury and pain. In my case, this stress response backfired and led to some pretty serious injuries. But, I also believe the opposite is true: when the mind expands, the body expands, or relaxes. See meditation, breathwork, flow. All of these are versions of mind expansion, which is exactly what happened to me at my wedding. I entered a deep state of flow, and thus my muscles went from stress-and-contract mode to relax-and-perform mode.
Okay, the matrix move was cool and all, but how do I get back into that state again and achieve peak elasticity? Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about this question and I’ve adopted two practical methods to optimize the mind and body toward peak mobility and performance.
Set Focus Thresholds.
Last week, I listened to a podcast episode by Stanford neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman, called Science-Supported Tools to Accelerate Your Fitness Goals. Huberman mentioned an idea about setting boundaries for your focus, or “focus thresholds.” Rather than try to explain what that means, I’ll just give you an example.
One of my new focus thresholds is the front door of my local climbing gym. That means once I cross that boundary and enter the gym, my focus is solely on my workout – whether it’s climbing or weight training. Ideally, I would turn my phone on do-not-disturb mode, eliminate any distractions, and focus entirely on my goal for that day until I cross the threshold on the way out. By adhering to this focus threshold, I can leave emotional baggage at the door. Any mental stress or distractions that have piled onto my shoulders throughout the day will be left outside. I can pick them up on the way out, but while I’m training, I’m training with my body and my mind.
This concept can be applied to any high-performance activity. If I want to focus on writing then I can make my desk chair my focus threshold. Once I sit down to write, distractions are eliminated and I can commit to focusing on my task and only my task. Of course, this requires a certain amount of mental discipline, but imagining an actual, physical threshold makes it a lot easier to quite literally enter a state of deep focus. And that state of deep focus allows us to move our muscles intentionally and consciously across their full ranges of motion… which brings me to my next point.
Talk to your muscles.
When I was fifteen, I had a crazy soccer coach – and I’m not using the word crazy loosely. He had a Ph.D. in Human Physiology and was much more mad scientist than soccer coach. He used to bring a computer connected to a loudspeaker to practice. And rather than coach us himself, he would sit behind the computer monitoring our heart rates while a seductive female robot voice would blast through the speaker and tell us when to run and when to walk. Beep! Run! Beep! Jog! Beep! Walk! Yes, you read that correctly. He automated soccer practice. Suffice it to say, he did not last very long as a youth soccer coach, but during one practice he said something I will never forget – a rare piece of wisdom amid the ramblings of a mad scientist.
While we were warming up one day, he told my team, “I want you to talk to your muscles!”
We all laughed.
He did not.
He was dead serious. How do I know? Well, a few minutes later we were all asking our right and left quad muscles how they were feeling.
“Talk to your leg,” he said, “tell it to perform.”
At the time, I thought, this guy had lost his marbles. I wanted to win games, not have a conversation with my glute muscle.
Alas, I’m older and wiser. The more I pay attention to my own body the more I realize this guy was on to something.
I recently came across a similar idea in Be Water, My Friend, a book about the teachings of Bruce Lee written by his daughter Shannon Lee. Here is a line from one of her father’s many proverbs:
“Do not strive to localize the mind anywhere but let it fill up the whole body; let it flow freely throughout the totality of your being…”
I believe this is what my coach was asking us to do by talking to our muscles. Rather than “localizing” our minds in our heads, he wanted us to channel our focus and intention into each muscle. He wanted us to be fully conscious in the entirety of our bodies and demand the attention of each of our muscles. By “talking to our muscles,” we could strengthen the circuits connecting the mind and the body.
When I was growing up as a young athlete, I was taught how to perform exercises physically – how to use proper form when weight lifting – but I was never taught how to perform exercises mentally. Now I know that when it comes to physical performance, the mind is not a passenger. It’s the driver.
Take a simple exercise like bicep curls, for example. For years, I struggled to develop strength in my biceps. I was doing curls several times per week but always felt weakness and susceptibility to injury. It wasn’t until a strength coach at my climbing gym in Dallas showed me how to do the exercise without weight that I realized what I was missing.
“Pretend your curling 100 pounds,” he told me. I went through the range of motion with my bicep fully contracted, focussing my attention on recruiting the muscle. When I was doing the exercise with weight, I was only worried about moving the weight through space. My mind was a passenger. I wasn’t focusing my attention on the intentional movement.
When we do exercises passively our bodies take the driver’s seat. And our bodies aren’t worried about building strength or gaining mobility. They are only worried about the economy of energy expenditure. That’s just a fancy way of saying if you have weakness in a certain muscle, your body will recruit other muscles to compensate for that weakness. On the other hand, when you consciously and intentionally target, or “talk to” a specific muscle, you can add or release tension to it at will. If you want to increase strength, mobility, or flexibility, you have to move with focus and intention. This is why leaving your distractions and your emotional baggage outside your focus threshold is crucial.
I’m nowhere near my mobility and flexibility goals, but at least now I’m fully aware of every component of my body. I’m moving with precision and intention and scanning my muscles for areas of tension or weakness. There’s still plenty of work to be done but at least now I know that the next time I enter a flow state or get drunk at a wedding, I can hit the deck and bounce right back up like Neo from The Matrix.