This “Mobility Case Study” is on my pal, the beloved Tamara. Many of you know who she is because she posts on the internet at least 37 times a day. I think some of you misunderstand her because you think she’s a pain in the ass. In any case, she likes me because I’m a pain in her ass (figuratively, not literally).



Tamara has a host of mobility issues that I can sum up in saying that she’s “jacked up”. Not in that “she’s so muscular” kind of way, but more along the lines of “she moves like James Harrison was getting paid to hurt her” kind of way. Let me show you:







In this picture you can see her toes out, knees tracking in, left knee shifting medially, and her right knee pushed forward inside of her right foot (with the assumed collapsed arch in the feet). Nonetheless, she’s decently strong for a 36 year old woman with a history of knee problems and only lifting for a couple of years. Tamara is primarily an Olympic weightlifter who front squats and low bar squats a lot. Recently she hurt the radial ligaments of her right wrist while missing a clean. As a result, she can’t rack a front squat without pain and has been using safety bar to squat. This flared up her peroneals (lateral portion of the shin) on her right leg. She also has a pretty crappy bottom position in the snatch.



Here are some videos of a heavy clean, snatch, and front squat — you can see how the mobility limits her. She’s losing a lot of her force application due to the inefficiency. In other words, all of her strength is not being applied to the specific movement of each lift.



This stuff is hard to talk about in text, so I made a video that analyzes Tamara’s faults and provides a “mobility prescription” on what she needs to improve. There is a short and long version. The short version is just the intro and the summary; the long version shows all of the elaborations on what she needs to do (it’s specific to her, but will apply to everyone else).



Short video:



CONTINUE READING



Long video:





Tamara’s chronic positional issues need to be rectified if she’s going to improve her lifting efficiency. She can address the specific acute instance of peroneal pain by working on the peroneals, but she needs to address the underlying cause by improving her mobility in her hips, knees, and ankles. I recommend that she:



– work on her external rotators with a lacrosse ball (while keeping the hip in flexion, like the bottom of a squat) for at least two minutes each side, every time she trains



– use anterior joint distraction at her hip with a band for 1 to 2 minutes each side (and each leg), contracting and releasing her glute and “exploring the joint capsule” (as Kelly says) to find her tight spots. She can also contract the glute and then a) sink the hips forward or b) rotate the torso to find her end ROM



– use the two couch stretch variants after doing the joint distraction. This will free up the muscle belly of the quadriceps so that the couch stretch opens them up better. There are two variants: a) keeping hands on floor, torso horizontal and sink the hips forward with contracted glute and b) posting up so that the torso is vertical, which will open everything up from the hip to the knee. In both variants, keep the lower abdominals tight to avoid anterior hip rotation.



– Tack and stretch the supra-patellar pouch of the distal quadriceps (right above the knee and patella). This helps alleviate tension at the knee from the superior aspect (above it).



– Anterior and posterior joint distraction at the ankle while going into dorsiflexion and lightly pushing the shin lateral with respect to the foot



– Lacrosse ball work to free up the foot arches while using foot strengthening exercises to help establish the arch integrity over time.



Tamara has a lot of stuff to work on. Typically these things are important for everybody, but they are more important for her since her lack of mobility is causing problems in other places. In this case, her lack of hip/knee/ankle mobility is causing peroneal pain due to the weird knee torsion that occurs. If she works on them diligently, we can expect her to improve her overall ROM and subsequently the efficiency in her lifting.

