The terms 'mobility' and 'activation' exercises get bandied about a fair bit in all corners of the health and fitness world. And their meaning vs their intention vs the outcomes we can get from these types of exercises can change a lot depending on who you're talking to or getting information from; so let's get clear on what these two terms mean first and then build from there.

What are Mobility exercises?

"Mobility" refers to your range of motion (how far you can move a joint or series of joints) under load. This differs to flexibility which is just a measure of your range of motion with no load. You can imagine the difference based on comparing your physio doing a straight leg raise test to you versus you doing an arabesque or single leg good morning exercise. In the first movement your physio has you laying on your back and they raise your leg up, keeping your knee straight and get a measure your hip, hamstring and nerve flexiblity through that movement. In the second movement you have one foot on the ground and you are hinging over that hip with the weight of your torso and any other external load adding a big challenge to the hip, hamstring and nerves of the leg. If you were to take a photo of yourself in each of those positions and rotate them so that the line of your body was the same then ideally there would be no difference between the two. However, if your straight leg raise was ~90deg but your arabesque only got to ~60deg then that would imply that you have good flexibility, but average to poor mobility.

What are Activation exercises?

'Activation' exercises are exercises that are designed to increase your awareness of what it feels like to contract certain muscles or to isolate a muscle group and increase blood flow to that muscle group. This term has been misappropriated to mean that you may have muscles that don't "turn on" or aren't working. This is totally false and completely misrepresents how your body works. All muscles are "on" all of the time. The level of tension or activity in your muscles can go up and down but unless you have had a severe nerve injury (or you are dead) then your muscles will be "turned on" even while you're sleeping. So (whether they know it or not) what your trainer, PT, physio or therapist are trying to do when they give you activation exercises is to try and get you to increase how much you can get a muscle group to contribute to various movements. For example, you may have been told you need to activate your glutes because you have "gluteal amnesia" (or some other silly-ass term) or because your knees fall inwards when you squat or deadlift. Doing an exercise where you can deliberately "feel" your glutes contracting and you can create a sensation of tension could then allow you to APPLY that awareness to the exercise that you are trying to improve/change your technique in.

When to add these types of exercises into your workouts:

The simple truth here is that they can fit into your sessions anywhere! However, to give you a little more direction and summarise how we use them I'll go into more detail. We like to add mobility exercises after a warm up; sometimes the mobility exercise ARE the warm up. Because these aren't just stretches but are weighted/loaded movements they provide more of a demand and get your heart rate up. Then we typically progress into activation exercises. We call these 'tissue prep' exercises because we are generally using these for rehab, prehab or preparation for the bigger exercises to follow.

Depending on the needs of our clients and patients we will often program other mobility or tissue prep exercises as a superset with their main lift for the session. At other times we will disguise some of these exercises in the conditioning portion of their training. Again, depending on the needs of the patient we may also program extra mobility or tissue prep work at the very end of their session as a "finisher". For these we typically program high repetition, fatigue inducing work to deliberately overload that muscle/muscle group or movement in order to drive physical change and adaptation.

How to program these types of exercise into your programming?

We feel it's best to think of programming for mobility exercises in the same way that you think of strength training; we want a significant enough challenge that forces the body to adapt and change. It's hard to do this with high reps so we typically keep things around the 5-12 rep range depending on the exercises and will do anywhere from 2-5 sets depending on how well conditioned the client is at the start of this training. Similarly to strength training, the adaption occurs by recovering from the stimulus. Therefore, allowing for sufficient recovery time will see most people being able to do an exercise 2-3 times per week at the most.

For "activation" exercises, these can be low, moderate or high repetition exercises as the goal is not to force a structural change to the muscle, but to induce a sensory awareness and increase in blood flow and neural drive. So 1-3 sets of 15-30 repetitions typically works quite if the drill is being done with a moderate tempo. If the drill is being done more slowly then the volume will have to drop to more like 10-15 repetitions.

Hopefully this helps you on your journey to becoming strong, bendy, fit, healthy and happy!

As always, train smart and have fun!

Carey