Flexibility and mobility are areas that are becoming increasingly popular to work on for top level bodybuilders for a number of different reasons. Despite the fact that in the past many gym goers have neglected flexibility, outside of performing a few basic stretches before lifting weights. The importance of having appropriate flexibility and mobility, across the different articular surfaces of the body is gaining popularity and for good reason. It can help support muscle growth, help protect against injury, as well as keeping us functional and able to perform more athletic, functional tasks, without a struggle as can be the case in those who carry large amounts of muscle.
Some people misunderstand that flexibility is more complex than simply being able to touch your toes or do the splits. When we talk about flexibility, the most important thing we should try and achieve is to have a good range of functional movement and not just this, but to be able to control our movements, especially when lifting heavy weights, through a safe and complete range of motion.
This is important because this means that not only can we protect against injury if we find ourselves in a ‘bad’ position, but we can also activate the muscle through the entire range of motion. This is important to promote muscle growth throughout the entire muscle, or muscles, that are being worked.
One of the reasons that people lose flexibility when starting training, is that they focus purely on getting big and strong as quickly as possible, which is after all the goal of bodybuilding. By sacrificing full ranges of motion and adopting smaller ranges of motion to lift more weight, our muscles’ active functional range can also become shortened. Unfortunately, this means that the muscles become stronger only within specific ranges of movement. If we go outside those ranges, into the unknown, where we can’t control the load or by doing something new that pushes us outside our ‘envelope of function’, we are then more likely to get muscle tears, tendon ruptures and a whole raft of potential other structural damage.
Although, there is often more to injury than just problems with flexibility and can be triggered due to poor muscle activation patterns, training with too much load and often just a little bit of bad luck. However, making sure that you are training with proper, full ranges of motion is an important part of injury prevention and will lead to ‘functional flexibility’, which is the appropriate flexibility for what you are trying to achieve through each lift.
To improve flexibility, there are standard practices of stretching and various mobility exercises you can do, including using things like bands and foam rollers that can be used to ‘open up’ the joints and lengthen the muscles to help you get into the proper positions for each lift. There can be underlying anatomical reasons why a person can’t get into specific positions, and this can affect the way we perform specific movements. For example, some people might not actually be able to squat heavy as deep as others for reasons other than flexibility, as our own structure and limb lengths can work against us, so that illusive ass-to-grass squat is definitely more challenging for some people more than others.
That being said, a vast majority of people should be able to squat to at least a decent depth (around 90 degrees angle, between the thigh bone and the shin. If this is something that a person struggles with, it is likely that we need to work on decreasing the load and working on mobility to the joints that are involved in the squat, this applies to other movements where we can’t get into a good position to complete a lift properly.
There are aspects of flexibility other than the actual act of performing an exercise through an entire range of movement; a textbook example of this is a lack of flexibility and mobility in the shoulders, through over development of the anterior deltoid in those who do a lot of pressing. But does this matter as long as we can perform exercises with perfect form and through a good range of motion? For those specific exercises, no it doesn’t, however if we consider that shoulder mobility is important for things like squatting, to ensure the bar is in the correct place and is stable, if we cannot get into a good position, this can affect multiple-joints in the entire movement. For the squat, bar position can be everything, especially when training hard and heavy and if you cannot get into the proper positions, this could lead to elbow, back, hip and knee injuries.
The fortunate thing for most people is it actually takes very little work to be able to get the joints of the body to work through the correct ranges of motion without spending hours on flexibility or mobility work. Firstly, by simply reducing the load and making sure that through warm up sets we start working through the entire range of movement of each exercise with control and pausing to stretch in the most challenging position. It is important to remember that simply trying to increase range of movement without reducing the load can often lead to injury, as muscles are not as strong outside their typical activation patterns. Spending 5-10 minutes a day in our warm up or in between your sets working on flexibility/mobility can help massively to get into the right positions, as long as these are done consistently.
The key to sustaining muscle growth in the long term is consistency, with both nutrition and training, but training consistency can easily be side-lined by sustaining an injury. Therefore, if we are looking to develop our best possible physique, being healthy is a huge element for those who want longevity in bodybuilding and to be mobile and functional outside of it.
This can be achieved easily enough with the inclusion of a few key flexibility and mobility drills as a part of training, rather than something that is done just when we feel tight or after injury. These should be included for all people who weight train, but especially those who want to have a long ‘career’ in bodybuilding, flexibility and mobility needs to be viewed as an important part of our training pre training and recovery rituals.
Paul Rimmer (BSc, MSc, PhD).
