Probably most people reading this are familiar with the whole mobility-stability continuum, but I'll briefly break it down for you here (Mike Boyle and Mike Robertson have good articles on it here and here, respectively, even though it was physical therapist Gray Cook who first came up with it.)

For optimal performance, functioning, injury prevention, sex appeal, and the ability to see through walls,* each joint in your body provides both mobility (movement) and stability (resistance to movement).  If you start at the ankle and alternate joints as you climb up the ol' kinetic chain (that's a fancy term for "the body"), however, the joints tend to become dysfunctional in one direction or the other:  the ankle tends to lose mobility, the knee tends to lose stability, and so on.

When all is said and done, it breaks down like this:  in order to impress everyone at the Elk's Club Smokehouse Buffet, the tissues around your ankles, hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders need to be mobilized (stretched, dynamically and statically), whereas the muscles surrounding your knees, lumbar spine, scapular joints, and neck need to be stabilized (strengthened).  

Over time, if you don't exercise correctly, the joints that need stability start to move too much and the ones that need mobility freeze up.  So your knees are wobbly and your hips are stiff; your lower back is all shaky but your shoulders are fused in place.  

Of course, this model won't apply to 100% of people 100% of the time--but it's a pretty darn good place to start if you're sniffing out movement issues or sources of pain or dysfunction.  Like I said, I didn't make this up--it's a cool model that's been getting some airtime lately, in part because it's so darn elegant, like the quadratic equation of  physical therapy.  

I've been researching the hip joints lately for an article--a fascinating topic, as it turns out--and discovering that if you don't stretch your hips regularly--by rotating the thighs inward and outward, as well as forward and back and side to side--your lower back can go wonky.  It makes sense:  if your hips are frozen, and you try to run, your lower back will move instead.  

The body's a wonderful thing:  if you ask it to move something, and it's unable to...it just asks another nearby structure to do the moving instead.  Only in this case, you're moving something that isn't supposed to move, and potentially causing damage.  

So this is just a friendly reminder to keep your hips limber in order to spare the lower back.  Do some front high kicks, some bird dogs, some internal and external rotation walks before your workouts (here's one to start with, and while you're at it try this cool stretch as well, both demonstrated by Nick Tuminello).  If you already have back pain, give these moves a try and see if they help fix it up.  

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Here's something interesting:  people who come down with chronic illness like to work out--apparently because it gives them a sense of ownership in their bodies at a time when it feels like their bodies are being taken away.  This seems to dovetail well with the recent studies indicating that exercise can improve cancer recovery, which I wrote about here.  

The next step, of course, is to get people to prevent illness by working out regularly before they get sick...but I suppose that's my job.  

Have a great Thursday,

Andrew

*Sorry, just fulfilling my duties as a trainer who promises way, way too much.