Dive into the world of flexibility and mobility with The Unlimited You! Discover the crucial difference between these two concepts and how they impact your overall physical performance. Learn why a balance of strength and flexibility is essential for optimal joint stability and how to enhance your mobility with the right exercises. Whether you're a martial artist aiming for higher kicks or simply looking to improve your range of motion, this episode is packed with insights and tips for a more limber, powerful you. Tune in now!

Sure. So flexibility usually pertains to taking a part of your body through like a passive range of motion. Right, so sort of like If I were to take Victor's arm and how far can I like move it in a certain direction before it just kind of doesn't go any further, but mobility means you're able to like actively mobilize part of the body or the tissue in the desired direction. So if you just become flexible, like we talked about before, you might have to be more prone to injury. You're not able to actually create optimal joint stability. So it's actually important to have a balance of strength. And flexibility. So the goal is mobility, but flexibility is a component of gaining a high mobility level.

Master Victor: Welcome back to another episode of The Unlimited You. Hey everybody, welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about flexibility and mobility. And how they basically impact everything because So, flexibility in martial arts is extremely important. It lets you be able to kick higher.

Especially Taekwondo, there's a lot of kicks. Even though Taekwondo means the way of the hands and feet, we use a lot of kicks.

Andy Freebird: And

Andy Freebird: you know,

Master Victor: the small muscles that control that movement are essential in mobility? Absolutely. Yeah. So you're going to find that as you increase range of motion through increasing flexibility, you start to almost like access muscle fibers that you couldn't. And that's the best example I could give based on my own experience would be training my chest.

Mm-Hmm. that requires flexibility, but it's also utilizing different muscles to move that, that limb or Yeah. Body part. And a lot of times we might add a very small amount of Yeah. You can use like an elastic band or a small freeway to kettlebell something When you do these kinda mobility exercises, the goal is not.

To lift heavy weight. The goal is to activate and strengthen those muscles that are responsible for that particular movement we're working on. Yeah. do you want to speak a little bit about the difference in dynamic, static and ballistic stretching? Well, I think actually this is one where you have more expertise, actually.

Yeah. So why don't you break it down? Yeah. So dynamic stretching I would categorize this as, you know, stretching while movement. leg swings That's probably the biggest one. Like if you're holding on to something and you're doing leg swings it's actually stretching while you're moving.

at least three to four times, 40 seconds up to about a minute or two. Yeah. And let's say you, so you're doing the splits, you get as far as you can and you're using that and you do it three to four times and you only need to do that once a week and you'll see the same amount of progress as if you actually do it two or three times a Got you. And if I'm not mistaken, based on this, what kind of research I looked The longer that you can comfortably hold this stretch, the better, like that will accelerate the tissue becoming more pliable. But if you can't make it to a full minute, like do only go 30 seconds, like do that. Exactly. And then the more you do it, the easier it will get eventually as your muscle fibers and your ligaments get more used to that lengthening. Yeah. And so what you're talking about is actually called tissue it's, the tissue is actually lengthening

Master Victor: When I went I think I mentioned last episode, I went and did a hot yoga, tried that.

I would like to try new things. And what I noticed the next day was that I had a very accelerated tissue creep, where my ability to actually pass my arm up overhead like this dramatically improved. like, Oh my gosh, like actually the tissue has lengthened and I can just easily do this now.

Interesting. What do you think that came think it was the combination of heat and humidity.

Andy Freebird: with

Master Victor: the flexibility and mobility that really Accelerated the tissues

Andy Freebird: tissue's ability

Master Victor: not only become pliable but also to heal and Because you know that tissue in order to become more stretchable essentially like it needs to accrete more Yeah.

It's just going to laugh at you.

Andy Freebird: And.

Master Victor: You know, this is, this comes into really big play, especially when you're training martial arts. You're going to be throwing all these head level kicks, you're going to be feeling it and extending all of these ligaments, all of these muscles, and it's really important to do dynamic stretching before your exercise.

Yeah. And I think you mentioned this in our calisthenics strength training episode, where if you do stretching, especially static stretching before your exercise, you're actually going to see a negative effect in your strength output. Yeah. So temporarily you're going to see this reduction because the elasticity of the muscle has been reduced.

Because the joints don't get the same blood flow that your muscle tissue does. And this is also true of the connective tissue of the joints, tendons and So it's extremely important to warm up your shoulders and hips and spine primarily, and then followed by the the elbows, and then followed by the. Yeah. And especially when you have younger people training, they, we do these hip rotations, knee rotations and shoulder rotations. Yeah. Like, why are we doing this? I don't feel it. And it's like, I always thought that part was fun, right? Yeah. I didn't really know why we were doing it. Yeah.

And then like, you get to be, you know, mid twenties and your thirties and you're like, Oh, feel my hips now. Oh, okay. That's been doing a lot. Dude, my hip was so bad for like years and it wasn't until I started incorporating regular hip rotations. It's a movement called a hip car, there's a lot of ways to do it, controlled articular rotation that it, you know, after a couple of years of doing that consistently and went away completely.

Andy Freebird: And

Master Victor: there's actually research where you do a rotation in a specific joint, let's say you're doing your elbow like this you do that rotation eight times going one direction and then eight times going the other direction, it releases a lubricant fluid in your joint.

It's called the synovial fluid. Oh yeah. And that helps reduce the friction in your joint. And also helps prevent injuries. So that's another reason why we do a lot of these dynamic stretching movements before we go into our training. And that way you can move way easier if you can just, you know, you can do that with your neck side to side with your shoulders, elbows, any one of your movement joints, your ankle, if your ankles really sore and you do some ankle rotations, it's going to start to lubricate all of those little joint areas.

The only one and only time that I had a finger, and that was how it happened. So now I've learned warm up slowly, with even the hands, even the fingers. think for me it was summer camp. So, a lot of martial arts schools, they'll have summer camp and you know, we take them to like six flags, took all our kids to six flags.

And you know, they're, they're like eight years old, running around the water park. They wanted to play tag. I'm out there. I hadn't warmed up or anything. I'm just out there with them after these kids. And changing directions and all the next thing you know, I'm like, I pulled my back. I'm like, I'm gonna go sit down.

Andy Freebird: That's actually if I,

Master Victor: believe it's the movement of that fluid like rushing in and out of the space of the But what's happening is this, as we get, as we get older, our body's ability to maintain water composition decreases, basically your body almost starts to like dry out the older you And so that's a big part of why warming up and keeping your joints healthy is more and more important as you Yeah. Even in your muscles and skin, all your tissue is better at holding water when you're

Andy Freebird: younger.

And,

Master Victor: know, this is also really important for recovery. So let's say you exercise, you don't know, like a lot of hamstring stretches or hamstring workouts, hip raises.

And if you don't stretch after your workout or maybe the next day or two, then it's going to increase the likelihood of it shortening reducing your mobility and flexibility. So, not only Does stretching help the recovery and you're not feeling a sore, but it helps the recovery and lengthening the muscle fibers and then healing in a longer format.

So one of the things you can do in addition to stretching after is do exercises that almost incorporate If I do a hamstring curl like in Victor's I like to set the weight low enough. that I can adjust the machine to get the best stretch possible. I want every rep, when my leg is out here, I want to feel this whole hamstring stretching first.

So the higher I can set the machine up here, more stretch than if I had a bend or I have it down here. Now, in order to do that, you have to make the weight lighter. The same thing with a bench press. Like barbell bench press, not a deep Dumbbell bench press, light enough that you can control it, come all the way down here.

Oh, you're going to feel that stretch. A lot of my mobility in my upper back and shoulders has come from prioritizing stretching my chest on exercises like the bench press or pack fly and that's Probably one of the biggest areas I would say most people have an issue with because not only how we sit, we all kind of go like this.

And the spine, which can be decreased or increased depending on the skeletal Yeah, so if you're internally rotated and your chest is caved in, you're actually putting more pressure on the heart. that's making it work harder, it's more compressed, that's a good So, stretching not only has preventionary measures for, preventing injury, recovery, but also everyday benefits that can improve your quality of life, improve your flexibility and your mobility.

You lose bone density too. That's critical. don't have good mobility and you fall down, you're way more likely to break a bone than when you were young. Yeah, that could be, take you months to heal because your recovery time is already It could literally be actually really elderly once they have a fall, a high percentage of those people die within the next couple of years.

Because then they're not moving as well. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like everything else just goes downhill. Yeah.

Andy Freebird: And

Master Victor: maintaining a good level of flexibility and mobility is going to help you heal faster because you're allowing more blood to get into the different parts of your body. You know, I have noticed that too.

It's like the, you know what I'm saying? This almost like blissful ignorance you get from not worrying about, Oh, my hip aches, my back aches like, you know what I mean? I can't bend down and tie my shoe. Like you just don't even think about that stuff anymore. That's a good point. Yeah. And. You know, especially in martial arts, if you don't have that mobility, you're not going to be able to perform certain techniques properly.

They're, they compromise their body Rotate more. Yeah, and what ends up happening is after their kick, they're more vulnerable to an Because their body position, their dactyl positioning has changed. They can't put in as much power or speed into that technique Right. Because the technique, just in doing it properly, allows you to do it faster and deliver more power into it.

In how you turn the hips, in how you turn the foot, it opens it up a specific way that let's say if my hips are facing forward and I try to do this kick. I'm not going to get the same as I turn my head and put all of this force that's coming from the ground into my kick. Right. Yeah. Just like a punch.

Yeah. And then some people will really just focus on learning these techniques and forget like, Oh, Hey, I really have to lengthen my hamstrings to be able to kick and they don't see that importance in how it affects themselves and other aspects of their life and especially in their training. And they don't ever focus on that.

That's a big judgment. I think to, to. the training lifestyle,

Andy Freebird: you know, yeah

Master Victor: I think you're probably right that the hips probably are the most important. Like the hamstring, the hips, probably the most important part of the body for. Taekwondo being that there's all of these kicks. I mean, you don't need a ton of upper body flexibility to deliver most of the hand strikes.

Mobility through this animal flow. I love to play around with that kind of

Andy Freebird: of stuff

Master Victor: and when I go out on the trail or I go out on the climbing wall, I feel more like an animal like a panther and it feels so biomechanically fluid. You This is one of the reasons I love brazilian So for our brazilian jiu jitsu warm up, we do you. We call it like the animals. So you do

Andy Freebird: the monkey.

Master Victor: Yeah, I've done that one. You do the alligator. I've done that one. The bear. Sometimes they call it. The shrimp, I need to do more shrimping because I know that's like a big BJJ thing. Yeah. Yeah. And all of these work on your mobility and how your body's moving and you learning how to utilize different muscles.

You just do it again. You can actually move completely across the ground just only using your head. Yeah. Yeah, okay. It's almost like an upside down inchworm. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. Just get good at moving every possible position with any possible point of contact. And you're just going to be that much more fluid.

Exactly. And this kind of comes back to the thing. Something you mentioned in the first episode where The human body has a such a large array of possibilities and the ways we can move infinite, and it's all about our creativity, know, and our flexibility and our ability to get our bodies ready to be able to perform those and safely like you pointed out, don't, you know, pull your back chasing some kids at the

Andy Freebird: theme park with

Master Victor: You could have just warmed up and then you probably would have been smoking these kids.

Your body doesn't, But the importance in maintaining either the length of those fibers or the strength in that area. So mobility is something we constantly have to work at, you know, can, can like from a seated position. Can you get down into a yogi squat where you're basically seated on your feet like this?

Can you get up from that area? That's probably one of the biggest things that a lot of people neglect is like, can you even get up without using Yeah, so there's certain aspects of mobility that are much more, like, than others. So the two main ones are going to like, yeah, can you squat down to the ground and pick something up?

They can't go like this all the way. They're kind of locked here.

Andy Freebird: So

Master Victor: that would be the most practical. There's other forms of flexibility that are going to have health benefits, but for the average person aren't as important. For example, being able to bridge backward. You almost never need to do that. But if you're doing jujitsu or something, you you know, like suplex or something like that. Yeah, you better be able to do that. Umpah, roll them over. But it's way more important for most people to just be able to bend forward. Because have our eyes in front of us, our hands in front of us. We walk forward. know, why are you bending over? I gotta pick this thing off, I gotta tie my shoe.

Yeah. You know, how you sit. Do you have good posture when you sit? Do you, you know, compromise yourself while you're doing all these activities and working on your flexibility and makes you more aware of how you're living. You know, like when I sit next to somebody who has a really good posture, I'm like, I need to improve my posture.

Like I'm starting to feel a little bit of back pain, you know? Yeah. And they, I think they do make some feedback devices for that. Wear it around your neck or I think they make one that's even Essentially I think it vibrates or buzz. Yeah, when you start to kind of, I guess it has maybe an accelerometer in it.

Really took out a lot of the pain that I was feeling in the second that I'm not thinking about it and I start to slash more. I started to drive more. I'll start feeling those pains coming back. Yes, I'll try to take advantage, you know, in the car, things like cruise control. So I can kind of sit a little bit more symmetrically and know your limits if you get really good at mobility, flexibility, it's likely that you'll be able to sit in a position like this a lot longer than someone who didn't work on that.

Yeah. whoever you are, when you start feeling some kind of tightness in your shoulder or your hip, if you've been driving for hours, like, pull off the side of the road, do a couple hip circles, do a couple shoulder circles, get back in. How much time did you waste? 30 seconds. That's it. But now you feel great, you can drive a few more hours.

I like to do this one too, I like to put my ceiling. Yeah. With the opposite hand holding and then I'll switch and with this hand. That's so good. Yeah. Yeah. And like these are little things that you can do. Also, one of. My other favorite ones is while I'm sitting, if I'm starting to feel hip pain, I'll squeeze my

Andy Freebird: butt. Oh, and

Master Victor: squeeze my belly and that helps activate the glute that goes to sleep while you're sitting.

Maybe do a forward fold if you're able to without having lower back pain. And what's really important about stretching

Andy Freebird: is

Master Victor: you're gonna feel pain stretching is painful. Yeah. But there's a difference between when you stretch and feeling sharp pain versus the stretching pain. It's like a discomfort.

Yes. More so than a pain. Yes. And if you feel sharp pain, a knife going into that,

Andy Freebird: joint impingement that

Andy Freebird: lean into it. Yeah.

Master Victor: I got a lot of the parents of my, my, my students will. We'll call me a mask against for this because I'm like, this is that good pain.

Yes. Do it. Let's go. That's because my brain has dealt that pain with something that's good. It's not necessarily a bad pain. It makes it easier to lean into it. Exactly. It's, it's a pain that you want. In order to get something good out of it. Yeah. But the second it becomes sharp, that's the biggest key. If it's sharp, you're probably not doing it right.

Yeah. And a lot of our stretching, a lot of any stretching, the spinal posture becomes Yeah. If you're slouched in any stretch, it is not good for your the spine is probably one of the most important things you need to take care of while you're training, while you're stretching, while you're moving.

Unless the goal of that stretch to round the back, right? So sometimes when we're folding, for example. We want to prioritize more of the hamstrings to do like a seated fold. You want your back to be pretty much straight, but if you're doing a standing fold, we're trying to get that mobility in the spine.

Yes, we actually do want to curve back. Yes, And some, some modifications you can do for a standing forward fold is bending the knees. Until your belly touches the top of your legs. Mm-Hmm. . And that's gonna reduce any pressure in your lower back. Mm-Hmm. . And then you can slowly start to straighten your knees out until that you can do a full forward fold where your chest is down on top of your legs.

And, you know, if you're trying to make progress, you're definitely going to be stretching longer periods of time. But, you know, let's say you don't have time and you only got five minutes, do a little bit of stretching. It's going to do you way more benefit than not stretching at Yeah, I think also the more you do this, the more you start to notice when you need to stretch and what stretch you need to do.

And that's all it takes for me to maintain. You know, at this point, pretty much to put my whole body as well like a while to get there, but it took way more work to get there to maintain it. Exactly. Exactly. And once you get to a specific range. You need to do a little bit of work to make sure you progress.

Yeah, exactly. And that's really important where if you're really trying to increase your flexibility, you need to really put focus and time into increasing that whatever exercise you're doing at least three to four times in a set. If you're doing the splits and then you're doing the frog splits and then you're doing the butterfly, do that three to four times and hold it for at least a minute if you can.

That's pretty much covers like a lot of what the flexibility and mobility aspects. Do you, do you have like any stories or anything you want to share? Well, I guess on what you just said you know, I was reflecting. So I, you know, mentioned a couple of times that hot yoga class. There was one portion where we're working on backbending, right, like arching backward.

And this is something that I have been working on a lot, particularly in the upper back. People tend to be inflexible in their upper spine too flexible in their lower spine because their lower spine is compensated for how inflexible their upper spine So I've been working a lot on making my upper spine

Andy Freebird: And

Right. I also had a question for you that I thought would be a great thing to explain to our viewers. How do you get an ideal headspace for stretching, because it is uncomfortable? And how can you use breath work to assist with, like, getting in that meditative, calm state? Yeah, I was just gonna say the breath work.

Now, when you get into that stretching state that everything's really screaming at you, you want to relax the muscles. So like, let's say I'm doing my splits and I feel people feel it under their knees. Some people will feel it in their growing. Some people feel all the way at the connective tissue inside the hips.

And if you fight it, if you're squeezing your muscles. You're not going to be able to open Yeah. So it, you have to bring your mind, you're focusing on your breath. You have to bring your awareness. Like, where am I feeling that tightness? You feel it. Maybe you even put a hand there where you're feeling that.

If you like touch a certain muscle, you can feel it solidified. Yeah. So it's same thing true with getting the muscle to relax. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you have plateaued essentially, where you're not making progress in your stretching, what you can do is add force So let's say you're, in the frog splits, so your knees are on the ground and you can't go wider.

You're not as wide as you can go. You don't want to do this like at the max width. Gently. Gently. Very gently. So you want to push your knees into the ground, maybe at medium because you're already stretched. You don't want to maximize your strength. You're going to pull something. Yes. So I'm going to squeeze into the ground for like five seconds and that's going to bring heat in the muscles.

Do you think that's a good? Yeah, Absolutely. Especially like if. say you've had an injury. Your, your body's going to be subconsciously tightening that region to protect itself. Yeah. Right. Like I, I have a extremely tight right hip flexor and I've actually lightly pulled it multiple times from doing just an extraordinary amount of kicks.

So, for example, the quadricep makes your knee go, extend the leg, the hamstring, the plexus, thing with the bicep or the tricep. So one of the things you can do is actually contract. The opposite muscle and it will lengthen the other one. So let's say that you're trying to increase your hamstring flexibility.