What is Mobility and Stability?
Two primary areas we focus on in yoga are mobility and stability. Mobility is defined as the ability to move freely and with ease. Stability is defined as the ability to maintain control of joint movement or position. It is important to focus on both aspects equally, as too much of one can be bad for your body.
I am sure many of you recall the childhood song “dem bones”, and it is no lie that the entire body is connected. Injury or dysfunction in one area can absolutely affect another area of the body. For example, something like an overhead stretch requires mobility from the thoracic spine. When we have issues with that mobility, we begin to look for more motion from our shoulder blade. However, that joint traditionally holds a stability role. As you can see, this compensation can cause some trouble.
We often see people chasing flexibility when in fact, they already have great joint motion and actually need stability. If we continue stretching muscles around joints that are hypermobile (outside of the normal range), it can cause dysfunction. We then transfer that load to the ligaments, which are supporting our joints, instead of the muscle. This is not the natural physiological role of those ligaments and can lead to injury. Yoga can be a great form of stability training due to the prolonged static holds of various poses.
How can we improve?
So how do we know when we should focus more on stability or mobility? And how do we know if our pain is being caused from compensation? In physical therapy, we begin our patient evaluations with a full body screen and assessment to observe your movement. It is important that your physical therapist does this, because although you might be coming in with shoulder pain, that does not mean that the shoulder is the problem child. Per our example above, it could simply mean that your shoulder is working overtime to compensate for that reduced motion that you have in your thoracic spine. We identify your mobility joint-by-joint and test stability in order to create individualized plans to improve movement patterns and prevent injury, as well as keeping you engaged with whatever workouts you enjoy.
Our Favorite Exercises to Improve Mobility and Stability
Here we have listed a couple of our favorite mobility and stability exercises, specifically in relation to yoga:
Mobility is defined as the ability to move freely and with ease.
- Pigeon Pose
- Downward Facing Dog
- Child’s Pose
- Cat & Cow
- Warrior I
Stability is defined as the ability to maintain control of joint movement or position:
- Planks – deep neck flexors vs. over-use of the neck extensors, core, serratus and shoulder girdle stability
- Warrior III/SL deadlift
- Side-plank
- Lunge
- Boat pose
