THE MOBILE OFFICE
Reverse modern life’s negative impact on your body by making mobility a habit. All Kelly Starrett needs is a few minutes of your time
KELLY STARRETT
If your desk job has your body in knots, mobility champion Starrett will unravel the issues to free up your potential
Try this right now: get off your sofa and sink into a full squat with your feet flat on the floor. Now stay there for 10 minutes. To physical therapist Kelly Starrett, you’re not truly fit until you can do that. This simple challenge, issued six years ago on Youtube by the mobility maverick, addresses a weakness that most men ignore, and it exemplifies his philosophy.
Starrett preaches that working out should produce more than chiselled abs and bulging biceps. He wants the gym to restore mobility – that is, the raw range of motion that modern life, desk work and commuting rob from us daily. Classic exercises alone can’t fix this, which is why Starrett talks about foam rollers and recovery balls as often as he mentions kettlebells and dumbbells. It’s also why he posted the squat challenge. “I wondered why no one had a basic understanding of how their body works,” he recalls. “I wanted people to focus for 10 minutes a day on their mobility.”
It’s a radical premise. According to Starrett, the point of going to the gym is not just to become leaner or stronger, but also to restore normal, baseline physiological function. After all, greater mobility gives you a foundation on which to build better strength and superior athleticism, while insulating yourself from injury. All of which you want.
That feeling of athleticism eluded Starrett in his younger days, when he was a world-class paddler on the US Canoe Team. Back then he was like everyone else, so uninterested in mobility that he made fun of a friend who stretched before practices and events. “Who cares about position when you’re young?” he says. “I’d never stretched before and had tons of back and shoulder pain paddling.”
All that pain led to a nerve-root issue in Starrett’s neck that doctors struggled to solve. That led him to chase his own answers – and uncover the benefits of simple mobility. “If you give guys postural exercises, they can clean up their movement issues so that many common injuries never happen,” he says. It’s more important than ever in today’s working environment, one that often forces your body into uncomfortable positions that compromise good, clean movement. Thankfully, the “problems” of today rarely require complicated fixes. All you have to do, says
Starrett, is reinforce good body position habits. “Practice doesn’t make perfect,” he says. “Practice makes permanent.”
Consider all the time you spend seated, trapping your body in a hunched posture. Your shoulders roll forward and back muscles weaken as your hip flexors tighten and glutes and hamstrings loosen. You’re probably doing it now.
Make this the month you reset your baseline by spending a total of 10 minutes a day mixing things up between just two moves – the couch stretch and the deep squat ( above). Aim high – with Starrett’s help you’ll be upwardly mobile in weeks.
“Mobility gives you a base on which to build better strength”