How does strength influence mobility?

It seems counter intuitive to think that adding tension to our bodies through strength work would be beneficial for our mobility. However, strength training helps improve flexibility and mobility in a number of really cool ways and is often the missing ingredient to most stretching/mobility programs.

A new perspective:

If we change our understanding of why a muscle group may be “tight” then this will be much easier to understand. Muscle “tightness” is most commonly a protective response of the body; a deliberate action of our central nervous system which stops us from being able to move into a potentially harmful position. ‘Potentially’ is the key work there.
By loading a movement and gradually working through a greater and greater range we are teaching our central nervous system that this movement is safe and that our body is robust enough to tolerate it. When we convince the nervous system of this then we can have a long lasting change in our freedom with that movement.
Stretching, typically, only gives temporary changes in flexibility because there isn’t enough load to convince the body that it’s now safe.

Even more ammo:

The other main way that strength training helps with flexibility (especially heavy eccentric movements, aka lowering/lengthening exercises) is that is can cause a true, structural change to the muscle fibres which stretching simply cannot do. If we imagine that a muscle fibre is like a bunch of accordions stuck end to end we can imagine how muscle fibre lengthening and shortening may look; all of the accordions expand together and shorten together.
Stretching may desensitise the nervous system enough to allow the accordions to expand a little further than they normally would but strength training (along with the healing process) will add more accordions to the length of the muscle fibre. So with strength training we can get a permanent, lasting change in the actual length of the muscle as opposed to a short term change in the elasticity of the existing muscle fibre.

This is why loading our bodies up will always trump things like stretching and foam rolling for creating lasting and significant changes to our flexibility and mobility.

Train hard, train smart and have fun!

Carey Wheeler
(BHSc Clinical Myotherapy)