Stiff Joints? Try This 20-Minute Mobility Biohacking Protocol

So you want to look, feel, and perform the way that you maybe did when you were 16 or 18 or 24. But inevitably, if you're like most humans, you wake up with aches, with pains, with random things that feel tight. And those over time can result in an actual injury, or they might just nag you and bother you and drain you of energy throughout the day. This is one reason why something called mobility is a very, very important component of my own program, all the more so as I age. I'm 44 years old. I feel fantastic, but I spend anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes every single morning engaged in mobility enhancement. Now you can find a ton of great mobility resources on the internet. I love guys like Kelly Starrett or Jeff Cavaliere, Stu McGill, or all these people that focus on support for the hips, the low back, the calves, the knees, the elbows, the shoulders, you name it. And these techniques are all great, but I, for better or worse, have attained the status of biohacker. So a lot of my mobility actually involves technologies, some very simple tools which you will see, and some more advanced biohacks that really move the dial for mobility. So if you're ready for a unique exploration of mobility-enhancing tactics that you may have never seen before, keep watching the video and stay tuned for the end for one quick, simple, and effective way to modulate pain no matter where you are. All right, so we're going to start things off kind of simple without a lot of advanced tools. You may have heard of foam rolling before. Foam rolling, you uses, uh, pressure application to help to remove cross-linking and adhesions that might occur in your tissue that result in low mobility. I like this one because it has these little ridges in it that really dig into tissue.

It's called a Rumble Roller. First is pretty simple. It's just basically a pass through the back with a rollover for the hips. So all I'm going to do is put my body weight against the roller, roll the back, bring the arms up overhead. When I get into this position, I can dig. I can do a little bit of internal and external shoulder rotation.

This move right here is just great for opening up the shoulders after you've been working on the computer for a while.

When I finish a pass, I roll the left hip over, so now I'm hitting right up into the iliacus and some of those deep outside or external hip muscles, and then I roll to the other side. And that's just one of the key moves that I'll typically do right when I get up to stretch out the back. Another really, really great move you'll develop a love-hate relationship with this one on the roller, is for your IT bands. Okay, so they travel from the outside of your knee up to the outside of your hip. I'll plant my body over the roller and basically traverse the length of the IT band. And one thing that you don't want to do as you're rolling is tighten up the face, tighten up the muscles, make like lots of grunting noises. Instead, if you can, if you find a tight spot and it's painful or uncomfortable, just take a breath, hang out in there for a second. Big breath in and breathe out.

Just let your body sink into and relax as you target that section.

So basically I can roll up and down like this. Okay. I can also kind of flush the tissue from side to side as I travel up and down the band. Feels incredible. If you get knee pain, you get hip tightness, you've been walking a lot, running a lot, Another move for the roller is I'll basically put my calves right on top of the roller, and I'll do this with both legs at once.

If you want a little bit more pressure, you can cross one leg over the other. Just kind of depends on how much you want to hit the calves.

But basically you can go up and down the calves. I put my feet out, I'm getting a little bit more of the outside of the calves. Put my feet in, sometimes you get some crunchy spots in there, and all you're doing is just finding some of those spots. Floss them out. I think that gives you enough homework with a basic foam roller, so we're going to move on to another tool. By the way, if you have a specific issue that you really want targeted help on, whether it's tight IT bands, painful knees, painful elbows, painful shoulders, painful low back, painful everything, um, sometimes you actually need a blueprint.

You need a program. And that's what me and my coaches at Triumph Coaching specialize in doing. Like, we will look at what's hurting, what's immobilized, what needs help. We can do digital mobility screenings. We can work with you on all of that. So if you want me or any of my coaches to create a done-for-you, not just mobility program, but training program, nutrition program, etc., using the best that science has to offer, then check out jointriumphcoaching.com and you can claim a consultation call with any of my coaches at jointriumphcoaching.com. All right, so sticking with the simple tech-free stuff right now, just objects that you can work your body with, and talk about the spine a little bit. You may have seen tools, uh, like a couple of lacrosse balls or balls that are strung together. This one I believe is called a Beastie Stick. Uh, this is made by a company called Kineon. Basically a device for anything from spinal work to work on the outside of the hips or the legs.

But one of the ways that you want use these devices is you take off any jewelry, uh, that's going to hang around your neck, necklace, anything like that.

I'll typically start at the base of the, uh, the glutes.

Okay, so I'm working right from the bottom, right at the butt crack, and now I'm going to go all the way up my body and I'm going to bring the arms up overhead, dig as far up as I can up the cervical spine, back up into the occipital area behind the neck. So Full pass back down the body— dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb—and sit up. Now that's one pass. You could just do that 5 times. The other thing you can do though is dig into some of these areas. So let's say I get about right here and find a tight spot. Okay? Cross arm over arm on cross position and I can just kind of roll around a little bit, play in that position, find some of those areas in the spine that are super tight. Come up, find a few more spots. Usually get some great crunching and popping as you work way up the spine. Cervical spine, same thing. Notice how I'm bridging my hips up. I'm bridging my hips up so that I can get a little more leverage when the device is underneath my neck. I can turn my head side to side to floss that area a little bit. And again, I can also rotate side to side, come down those spots.

We've also got your lacrosse balls or devices. I think these are from Jill Miller, tune-up therapy balls. Again, I can roll these up and down the spine.

These travel a little bit better. TSA likes them because they don't look like a weapon. But same thing, I can find a spot, I can hunt it down, I can cross my hands over, roll side to side. And then the final option is something like this, more of an immovable object that you're going to basically place underneath the spot in your back. Like, for example, uh, my wife had some, some really, really tight ribs the other day, and we were just finding the spots. We had pinned them like this, put the hips up, and then you can either work and floss that area by bringing the arms up overhead and back down, or by setting your butt down, sitting up, and shifting side to side, just basically hunting, tacking down an area pinning it and doing the deep tissue work. So those are a few examples that we can use directly along the muscles that support the spine.

I'm going to show you one move, one single mighty move that rules them all with a ball like this. So I start by placing the ball right underneath my coccyx at the base of my spine, and then I'm going to rotate out to the right side or left side. So I'm going on the right side right now. All I'm doing here is I'm hunting down with this ball with the ridges on it all the tight spots in my glute. Okay, outside of the hip, you can even go right underneath the attachment, the hamstring, kind of roll around in there.

I'm going to spend about a minute or so here just exploring those spots. And then once I've done all my work, I'm going to slowly shift to the outside. Okay, right there on the outside of the, uh, the iliac spine and find some other spots. I can even bring my leg out and in and floss those spots. And then gradually I'm going to turn over. So now I'm rolling on top of the ball and I'm bringing it up into my psoas. Now the psoas is basically one muscle that's probably, if tight and adhesed, results in low back pain for a ton of people and flies under the radar. Sometimes people stretch and move and roll their back, but they don't hit the psoas at all. And I'm just using this ball. You want to be careful. You got organs in there. You don't want to put too much pressure on.

You want to avoid anything that feels painful.

I can feel that nice ropey psoas right in here, and I'm just flossing through that, finding spots, tacking them, pinning them, breathing through it. And then gradually, once I'm done with the psoas, I'm going to roll back over. But now you'll notice that the ball is coming under the body, and now I'm going to roll all the way up the body, up, up, up, up, up to the shoulders.

Some of you might be thinking, Ben, that's not biohacking, that's just physical physical therapy. All right, so now we're going to play a little bit with what's called pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. So this is a current that passes through the body that results in improved blood flow and depolarization of the cells.

And if a muscle is cramped or tight or adhesed, I have found that using a square pad or any other PEMF device that you can lay on is a game changer. Now this one's made by a company called PulseCenters.

Uh, all I do is I plug this square pad in, okay, turn it on. I mean, I have it set for 90 minutes right now, so I'm not going to run out of time during this video.

I'm going to set it about 7.8 pulses per second.

Uh, I'm a glutton for therapy, so I'm just going to turn the strength all the way up.

So let's say that I've been on an airplane for a while.

I've got a tight low back..

I want to mobilize the back. I want to use PMF to relax some of these areas. I'm going to show you some of the key moves that I do. I just showed you some deep tissue work on the psoas. I can lay the psoas over this pad like so, and I can hang around in here and play on top of the PMF, which already feels pretty good. But I can also, from this position, start to activate the glutes as I'm working on the psoas. So this is just single leg glute extensions with the body laid over the PMF mat. Okay, that's move number 1. That's great if your back's tight. Okay, move number 2 is gonna hit a muscle, kind of a deeper muscle called the piriformis. But if you do this in conjunction with the pad laid right over the SI joint. If you've been told like you have a tight SI joint or a stuck SI joint, this is a great mobilization to do. All I'm going to do is trap one leg with the other leg. Okay, take a quick look at that for the video. All I'm doing is using this leg to trap and open up that piriformis, and then I'm letting the entire body fall to one side, and I'm going to just draw some mini circles right here with the body over the PMF mat. Now, of course, You can do this stretch without the PMF, but the PMF, which stands for pulsed electromagnetic field, it allows— what you will find if you use something like this for a much, much deeper relaxation of the tissue, and it's a game changer when you compare doing a stretch like this on the mat versus off the mat. And then the other thing you can do But you can move this back directly underneath the shoulders, open up the shoulders, do a few hip bridges in this position. And this one is a great one to do in conjunction with some of those other exercises I was showing you, like with the foam roller, with the ball, to kind of free up the traps. So if you do PMF before or after, it amplifies the effect, and you'll find that it restores mobility much more quickly when you use this thing. We're going to go one level up. We're going to graduate a little bit. Now we're going to get super crazy. You may have seen devices like this. They're not super expensive. You can find them on Amazon. They're basically low back stretching devices. If I were working on stretching, I could do a basic stretch where I just sit on this thing and I roll my back over it, being super careful, avoiding any pain, bringing the arms up overhead. And when I first got this, I thought, okay, so that's great, but how can we amplify this stretch? Well, what if we add some PEMF into the actual stretch? Okay, so that's level 2. Now I've got PEMF plus I've got this low back mobility that I'm developing. And this one's just great because I'm opening up some of those tight muscles. So if I'm doing like— you can hear the PEMF like vibrating through my voice, so powerful it is. If I'm doing psoas work and then I'm finishing up by putting my psoas on stretch with an exercise like this, I'm really driving home some of that mobility. And then I thought, well, why couldn't we graduate a little past that and use something like acupressure to get some of the endorphins that will really relax that tissue? So then acupressure on top of that. Now you can sit down and if you own any of these tools, you could do just the acupressure mat with the stretching device. You could do the acupressure mat with the PMF or all three. Now we're getting into some really intense stretching therapy. So I've got acupressure, I've got PEMF, I've got this full body stretch. Let me show you a few other tools here. So gave a head nod to this guy earlier, vibrating foam roller. Okay, so I press a few buttons. This one's made by HyperEyes and it'll vibrate. A lot of people will be like, okay, well, I'm going to do the old you know, the one you showed me before, Ben. I'm just going to go here, I'm going to roll the spine, and that's all great. But these things that vibrate, they have a great potential for what's called proprioceptive stimulation. So let's say that I want to protect my back while stretching my hamstrings, and I want to mobilize my glutes. Well, I could take this thing and I could just put it between my legs, trap it between my legs. I'm squeezing my adductors, turning on my glutes, and now with my glutes fully engaged Now I can come down in a little bit of a hamstring stretch, play around in here a little bit, come back up. And what I'm getting the bonus of when it comes to stacking is I'm getting some deep tissue work done in the adductors because as this foam roller is vibrating, it's kind of doing a bunch of little bit— bits of mini flossing on those adductors. But let's say I got a tight BMO, a little bit of knee pain. I can move that down in between the knees again, trap it. I can just stand here and kind of do some hip circles, get a little bit of knee therapy just with the foam roller between the knees vibrating. But I can also do— again, squeeze the legs, squeeze the glutes, check the back, drop into hamstring stretch here, play around a little bit, come back up. All right, so I'm going to flip off this, uh, PMF mat now and finish by showing you a few other tools that I'll use quite a bit, um, when I'm working on mobility, injury rehab, or anything like that. People love to golf, people have played tennis, people have played pickleball.

Uh, you've probably dealt with the inevitable golfer's elbow or tennis elbow, right? Pain on the, uh, on the medial side as the tendons rub over the medial epicondylitis, or lateral side. This is, uh, two muscle massage sticks that are stuck together. Uh, there's also a device specifically for this called the ArmAid, which works pretty well also. I think my wife stole mine because she's big into tennis, but this device also works pretty well. So all I do is I find a spot— you see, I'm just using my knee to hold one side of the stick, and I'm just pinning and rolling. Let's say in this case it would be tennis elbow, right, that lateral area over the epicondyle. And what you can do also is if you find a spot, you can just hold it there and then use your wrist and draw wrist circles, go up and down, move through range of motion, trap. And I mean, if you have elbow pain, having something like this where you can kind of sandwich the muscles and roll is a great idea. Scraping tool like this, also a great tool to have around.

Let's say we're talking about, uh, like pain in the lateral calf or some calf adhesions. Okay, usually you'll apply like a little bit of like a lubrication fluid.

You could use coconut oil, you could use some of the, the fluid that typically comes with one of these scraping devices.

But this is called scraping.

These tools are made by Rocktape, and these do a really great job on areas like the calf, the Achilles back here.

Okay, if you got a lot of adhesions or pain in any of these areas, these scraping tools can be used.

And what I like now— I mean, I know we're in an era of self-driving vehicles, etc.— I can literally be working on myself Well, I'm getting from point A to point B. Uh, these things do not, as you can imagine, do well with TSA. They look like weapons, but they are incredible for hitting any spot that just feels tight and adhesed that you want to do a little bit of work on manually. And then the last piece that I want to show you before I give you one final tip for managing pain and increasing mobility is these percussion guns. Now, a lot of people are familiar with these.

The grab them and, you know, they'll work on an area, you know, like shoulder, chest, neck, outside hips. But ideally, so think, think about this concept. Let's say you have a rope and it's got knots in it and you pull the rope tight, you're going to make the knots tighter. But if you first get rid of the knots, right, get rid of a lot of the cross-linking and adhesions, which something like a massage gun could do. So what I think is deep tissue, scrape, massage, percuss, floss, and then mobilize, right? So let's say I've got tight hips and that's leading to tight back. Well, before just going in and stretching the hips, I can use a foam roller for this. I can also use a massage gun for this, but basically I'm digging into that area and now I can do a hip exercise or hip stretch. Like let's say a pigeon, right? So now that area is adhesed, or it's free of adhesions, now I'm getting into this position and I can kind of move through some dynamic stretches, just basically hunting down some of those tight spots that I just mobilized with the gun.

So before I get to a couple of final things, what I do, I wake up in the morning, I usually will put on whatever podcast or audiobook or track that I'm going to listen to. Uh, for me, 99% of the time. I'm playing my daily audio Bible. I come down to my little lounge here. I do a lot of the different moves that you just saw in this video, work my body for around 20 minutes or so. And, uh, it's one of the best ways to maintain what I would call young muscle. If you like these moves, leave a question, comment, your feedback below. Remember to hit subscribe.

And here's one last tip for you.

So I hope some of these, uh, unique tips on biohacking mobility have been helpful for you. When we talk about biohacking, no matter what, you will have occasional aches, pains, or areas that need a little bit of extra TLC. This thing's pretty cool. It's called a Kineon Move+. This is infrared and laser therapy that you can specifically place in very close proximity to any joint that needs a little bit of support. So, let's say my knee's a little buggy after pickleball, I can basically take this red light, wrap it around my knee, latch it closed, and set this for 5, 10, or 15 minutes. These things travel very well anywhere in the world. And what I learned when I interviewed Kineon's founder Forrest on my podcast— frequent use results in very good modulation of pain and also assists with the connective tissue support needed for recovery. So again, I can go knee, I can go ankle, I can go elbow. I don't know if I'm supposed to say this, but if I did want to target around my neck, I can even do vagus nerve stimulation using red light. Little known tactic that a lot of people don't know about. So this thing can be used anywhere. I have it strapped somewhere on my body every single day. So I want to thank Kineon for helping to support this video so that you can be better, stronger, faster, and feel great.