Personal, non-professional opinion: mobility is the most important thing you will learn/do in Crossfit. It will translate to every time you wake up with a stiff neck or tight calf for the rest of your life.
That said, I have a love/hate relationship with mobility. A few months after I started Crossfit I had some pretty consistent pain that radiated down my arm. I went to a recommended chiropractor and he did active release on my pec minor. After a couple times of going and paying $50 a pop for that, I realized I could do my own "maintenance". By that I mean, for the next month or two, including while on work travel and back in PA, I spent a solid 10 minutes a night using a hardcover book to wedge a lacrosse ball in to that "sweet" spot between my chest, shoulder, and neck. The more I did it the less it hurt, and the pain that shot down my arm and in to my elbow was pretty much gone. I'm not as consistent about it now, but when my elbow starts to twinge, I know the first place to go to self-medicate.
So I love mobility. I was fairly flexible to start with (at least, in some ways) but it's cool to see how much you can improve in half an hour (or just 5 minutes) with a lacrosse ball or foam roller. It's my favorite way to work on my CF when I'm out of the gym (I did the 10 minutes in an squat drill while I was on vacation in San Juan). It's saved me money, it helped me develop a decent front rack (that I then trashed when I injured my right wrist), and I think it's helped with balance too -- 95# OHS, yup. It's made me a better athlete.
But Jesus mother#$%^-ing Christ. I hate mobility. Because the longer I do it, the more I find the exercises that hurt are the best ones. My current love/hate is the exercise where you smash a barbell (with some weight on it) in to your trap. I can barely swing my arm overhead that shit hurts so bad. Preferred method is to have somebody else pull my arm straight up because I'm already thinking about how I'd prefer to black out. BUT IT FEELS SO GOOD AFTERWARDS. I can see how my external rotation and overhead position improve - personal opinion is that is also helps my pulls on the clean. But just typing about it now, at my work computer where I am free from its evil ways, makes me a little nauseous. Right up there with this one is my thoracic spine. That one makes me want to be sick while I'm working on it too. But this is all really just evidence that I need to work on these things more.
That said, I am a horrible mobility student. I was a good mobility student for like 3 days, when I downloaded 100 of Kelly Starrett's videos and watched like 5 of them on the plane. Don't watch mobility videos on the plan. You can practically feel your joints sticking together. I need to start watching these so I can grow my toolbox and iron out my major (and minor) tweaks.
This is also really bad because I plunked down a not-insignificant amount of cash to go spend a day learning from the mobility guru himself in a few weeks (which will apparently render me a certified Crossfit mobility trainer, and also probably produce a cool autographed lacrosse ball and some pictures for the CFSA facebook). I think in order to maximize what I'm going to learn from an 8-hour seminar, I need to have a background. I think I have a solid basic background, I could trouble shoot most areas and am aware enough of my own body to freestyle it from there, but I need to round it out a little more. This comes back to my "I want to help other people change their lives, but need to change mine first." mantra. ...it's been a long time since I've taken biology.
So like I didn't have enough to do being behind in my homeland security law course, studying for my L1, reintegrating back in to a workout routine post-winter-CAL, knowing how sleep impacts both my performance and weight loss, and freelance, we're going to add in some mobility education. Just like mobility, right: if you don't see or feel change... there is no change. I won't get better or smarter thinking about being better or smarter.
We can call this Becka's Studying WOD (WOW... WOM). 23 days, for time. So while I'm doing that, your assignment (whoever you are) is to go to mobilitywod.com and do something to the junk that's built up in your body. Go back to the first episode, do the most recent, search a body part that you think needs work. Don't care. Just do it. :-)
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