Most of my blog readers are active people. You’re dancers or athletes of many different sports. Certainly you spend a lot of time honing your skills and techniques in your sport. But do you have a regular check in for your range of motion? Do you have a baseline against which you measure how your body is holding up to the sport-specific stresses you’re asking it to do?
What do I mean by a check-in? A check-in is a series of movements that you do one by one on a regular basis to see if your range of motion has changed. Perhaps it’s improved or started to wane. For some people this might be yoga, for others it might be stretches or a warm up routine. But I want to suggest that besides these practices that you have a regular range of motion check in. It can make the difference in alerting you to a new movement pattern that could become an injury down the road.
During the Anatomy in Motion course, aspiring practitioners were taken through a series of check-in movements, joint by joint, to explore the ranges in their own bodies. Partly to understand what each joint should be capable of and partly to plant the seed of creating a daily or regular check-in practice.
You may be asking what would a regular check in practice give me that I’m not already getting in my training routine? Well, all the joints in your body need to be able to access their full, ideal range of motion to assist you in doing all the complex movements required in your sport. If just one joint has started to lose it’s full range of motion, there’s going to be knock on effects above and below that joint. New areas of compression and extension will appear which may lead to pain, limited power or strength and possibly injury. If you’re checking in frequently with your range of motion and you have a baseline to compare against, you can be smart about preventative measures to stop injuries before they surface.
I’ve yet to meet an athlete who has perfect range of motion in their whole body. We all have something we can improve. But I meet a lot of athletes that have a heavy training schedule that covers all aspects of their training without a frequent habit of checking in with their movement. This can be as simple as a few minutes of checking the main joints of your body: ankles, knees, pelvis, ribcage, and skull. Can they each move in all three planes (two planes for the knee, please!)? Has the range in one of those planes changed? Have a baseline to check against. If it’s changed, ask yourself why and find out how to restore that range of motion. You’ll be glad you added this simple check in to your warm up or cool down routine.