Mobility and Flexibility Secrets You Need to Know [ #3 #mobility #flexibility ]
In this solo episode of the OWN IT Podcast, host Nicole Hollar explains why mobility is more than just flexibility, emphasizing the need for both strength and range of motion. She describes how joint laxity and muscular imbalances can cause pain, using personal anecdotes (hip‑flexor tightness, a client with duck‑footed gait) to illustrate the problem. Nicole outlines practical interventions: vinyasa or balance‑focused yoga, unilateral movements, resistance bands, and simple tools like a playground ball to target weak stabilizers. She then differentiates two categories of stretching—short, dynamic warm‑up stretches for daily use and longer, passive elongation stretches held 2–5 minutes for true flexibility gains. Guidance on timing (morning, mid‑day, before bed), breathing techniques, and the use of props (bolsters, straps, walls) is provided, along with encouragement to stay consistent and integrate mobility work into everyday life. The episode ends with a call‑to‑action to follow her coaching platforms.
Chapters
Welcome to the OWN IT Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar, where we're gonna talk about stuff to help you get out of your way, take charge of your life, and, well, other stuff too. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the OWN IT Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar. I just finished working with somebody and we were discussing mobility and I wanted to jump on and do a podcast talking about it because I also received a really great topic to discuss, which was about types of stretching and when to do them. So I thought, what a great opportunity to combine the two, because mobility is not about flexibility. It is about being strong and flexible simultaneously so that your body can move through all of its planes of motion. Now, if you're an older person and you've never really felt mobile, well, your muscles have become very tight. Your joint has a certain shape. There are certain limitations that you might have developed over time as well. But everybody can become more mobile, more flexible, and stronger. And I can tell you from my own experience, as somebody who's always been very flexible, and I always thought pretty strong, I also am not immune to issues. A couple of years ago, I was at a spin class and I felt my hip flexor get really tight. And I was like, oh, I stretched it. And I knew well enough that it wasn't an acute injury that I suddenly had. But what I didn't realize was the real source of the problem, because like probably many of you, I, you know, sort of powered through things most of my life. I've been pretty strong, but I knew that I had some small muscle imbalances, meaning the tiny muscles, the stabilizing muscles, and other things going on. And sometimes it is the straw that breaks the camel's back. It isn't a specific aggressive acute injury. You know, we often joke that, The worst of injuries aren't very good. They're, you know, I slept wrong with my pillow or I stepped off of a curb or, well, I had an injury once to my neck because somebody called my name and I turned my head too quickly while washing dishes. They can be silly. But when it comes to joint mobility, we're often talking about shoulders, hips, knees, and feet. I think that that is mostly the experiences that I've had with people, low back. You know, the major ones. Well, I want to tell you that all of these things have the ability to be remedied, meaning you have the chance and the ability to become more flexible and stronger. But it's important to understand the relationship between strength and flexibility of a joint. In order to be strong, you have to lift weights, but you also want to have flexible muscles, even if they're strong. Now, if you don't have a lot of muscle, you might think, well, then I must be really flexible, and that's not really the case. In fact, that means you probably have muscle laxity, or I should say joint laxity. And what that means is that your joints are just weak and unstable. So most often people stretch when they feel pain. Well, pain might be coming from actually the pain experienced by a muscle that is being overstretched anyway, or you might be experiencing pain from a muscle which is actually tense and tight. Well, joint laxity, your muscles are tense and tight. In fact, that was the case with me. Like, my muscles were so tense and tight in order to protect my hip joints because this hip flexor was working really hard and the other muscles were like, no, we don't want that. So they were tightening in order to fight back. I mean, it was bad enough for me that when I would lay on my right side to sleep, and the problem was on my left, my left side would hurt. And if I laid on my left side, it hurt to lay on my left side. So if you're somebody who has hip pain from laying down and it's not specific to the joint or the bone, it may be from overstretching of those muscles surrounding the hip joints, around the knee. I would sit at a dinner and I would just rub the palm down my leg because, because it hurts so much. And finally, I got some dry needling done to help really get into the joint space where I couldn't really get with massage or trigger point balls or other means. And I did acupuncture as well, which is very similar but of course different. So another way that we might experience pain other than the joint laxity and that overstretching of the muscle is because the muscle is actually tight. But why is the muscle tight? Is it spasming back in order to combat a muscle imbalance? Because that's something that happens a lot as well. In fact, I had a client once, she had some pretty good muscle imbalances through her inner thighs and her glutes and the external muscles of the hip. She walked kind of duck-footed. She used to sit with her legs cross-legged even at work. And she said she did that because her inner thighs hurt all the time. And I said, well, knowing you, I don't think that it's that they're tight. I think it's that they're weak and they're being overstretched because your legs want to constantly bow outward. So the homework I gave her was I gave her this playground ball. And with that playground ball, I said, I want you to hold it between your knees for 5 to 10 minutes, 3 times a day. And of course, do some glute stretching so that she could help to relax those muscles. They weren't constantly pulling outward. And she's like, wow, this, this really helped. And she wasn't really in the pain she had even the next day. So that talks about The muscle imbalances. So again, we have joint laxity and we have muscular imbalances and creating that fight and that pull. Now, exercise that can help you when it comes to joint laxity are things like vinyasa yoga. Vinyasa is the kind of yoga that you might do with standing balance poses. Anything that's unilateral, meaning you're working one side and then the other side, because if you do things together, They can't— they feed off of each other and create a stability together. So you want your body to do that stability on its own. So vinyasa yoga, you might use things like balance discs, balance balls. Another thing I did with a client earlier was I put a band around the lower part of the right knee, and I attached it to something on the right side of the body and said, let's do some squats. So you're doing a regular squat, but because of that slight external force, you have to pull your knee inward to maintain the normal knee-to-toe position. So those external forces can also help to create more strength in the joint in the case of joint laxity. The reality though, everybody, is that everybody should be doing some type of mobility training when it comes to strengthening in that way. So if you're not currently doing it in your fitness routine, Go for it. If that means you're standing on one leg doing lighter weight bicep curls, do it. But you want to make sure that you're stable and you aren't just fighting it the whole time. If you need to use some other tools in order to help you stabilize, that is okay. What's most important is we want to gain control over the joint, not just fight through it. The other thing is muscle imbalance, and like I already mentioned, the client who had The leg issue. One of the biggest muscular imbalances that I see comes from people who sit at a desk all day. You have tight chest, your back's hurt, and that's a muscular imbalance because your back is not strong enough to help hold you up. I told a client many years ago, I said, the hardest exercise I could ever have you do is getting you to sit up straight with your shoulders back all day long. I said, if you do that, you will feel like you had the hardest workout you've ever done. She came back to me 2 days later and said— I feel great. My back is so sore from sitting up straight all day. And I said, yep, I know. So that's an example of a muscular imbalance. The really tight pectoral or chest muscles are pulling you forward. Meanwhile, the back muscles, which aren't so tight, they're overstretched or sore. And so you want to stretch them, I've heard plenty of times, because it feels good. Now, some people actually do stretch the stretched muscle. By maybe interlocking their finger, leaning forward. Or sometimes I've seen people say, well, I'm stretching my back. And what they do is they lift their arms up like field goalposts and open their chest. I'm like, well, you're actually stretching your chest and flexing your back, but it feels good to squeeze your back. And you might even be doing that right now that I'm telling you that because you're like, oh, that does feel good. Because what's happening is that your back muscles are firing in a normal and natural way rather than in this spasmodic case of trying to help keep your body from falling forward onto your desk. So those are things to consider. It's that dance between strength and flexibility. And now I want to address that really great question of what types of stretches and when to do them. And so this, for the purpose of simplifying it, I'm going to break it down into what I'm going to call warm-up stretches and daily life stretches. So that's one category, warm-up daily life stretches. And the other category is elongation and flexibility stretches. The warm-up stretches are the ones we've always done every day. You know, before you want to work out, you grab your foot, reach for your toe, stretch your arm out, cross your arm over your body. You probably did it 30 seconds to a minute. I've seen people do it as little as seconds long, 3 seconds, which is really doing very little for you. These are the kinds of stretches that are great to help loosen up the muscle belly of the muscle so that you can, you know, get some movement in. Maybe you're in the middle of a run and your quadricep hurts or your calf, so you stop to do the stretch, which by the way, if you're ever doing a fitness activity and you're experiencing some type of stabbing, jabbing, and shooting, please don't power through it. Stop, stretch. It's worth the time. I promise you of this. These are the kind of stretches that you might do in the middle of your workday when you are sore and tired and stiff. So you get up, you move your neck side to side, you reach for your toes, you do some torso twists, some basic hip circle calisthenics type activities. Morning stretches, another great time to do these brief stretches. Sometimes you might add a slight gentle bounce and make it a little bit more ballistic. These shorter, big muscle group stretches are great any time of day, definitely for a warm-up, a midday energizer, waking up in the morning to get your blood moving and your body going. The other kind of stretches for elongation, if you really want to increase the length of your muscle, are stretches that you're going to have to hold for 2 to 5 minutes. This is something that is a commitment to your flexibility. Whatever it is you are trying to achieve, if you want to lose weight, if you want to gain more muscle, if you want to become more flexible, it will require you to be consistent with whatever it is you are doing. It doesn't matter. It's so important to remind you of that. And much like so many other things like weight loss, well, I ate well and, and now I lost weight. And so I'm going to go back to not eating well, or I, Exercised and I got more fit, and so now I'm not exercising anymore. People often do that with stretching too. I don't hurt anymore, so now I'm going to stop stretching. Guys, I highly recommend that we just incorporate flexibility training into our day and into our lives, no matter what it is. As little as you can do or as much as you can do is fantastic. In the case of these elongation stretches though, you do need to hold them for 2 to 5 minutes. The second thing is that they are a passive stretch, meaning you want to allow your body to relax into it. Your neurology is going to fight you back. We've all done a stretch and you're like, I've been in a yoga class where I'm like, my body just doesn't do that. So you need to do a modification of it. And that's okay. Because as you continuously do these modifications, you'll be able to do more and more and more. And that's the benefit of blocks. Straps, chairs, bolsters, whatever it is that you need to do. Doing a hamstring stretch where you push your butt up against the wall and your feet are up on the wall, it's legs up the wall, it's called in many yoga poses. That's a passive yoga, that's a passive stretch. Letting your body hang toward the ground like a rag doll, another passive stretch. So finding passive type relaxation stretches. The best time of day to do those would be maybe before bed to allow yourself to ease into the night. In order to really be effective in these stretches, you also need to have good quality breathing. You want to inhale and exhale, and with each exhale, allow your body to just relax a little bit deeper into that stretch. You'll find yin yoga and restorative yoga if you're looking for a practice to follow. That is going to be more in alignment with this type of flexibility training. So 2 to 5 minutes, passive stretching. Use your breath to allow yourself to ease into the position. It doesn't mean you're going to get an extra inch. It means you might get a couple extra millimeters each time. And each time you want to try to progress just a little bit more. You're not trying to win overnight. You're trying to just make small progressions. So when it comes to stretching, you've got your warm-up style stretching and you've got your stretching for long-term flexibility. Your muscle will naturally want to shorten to its shortest length, and this is the kind of stretching that we need to do that you'll see martial arts people doing in order to continue to allow their flexibility and movement in their practice. I can tell you, I was a martial artist. I have a secondary degree black belt. I used to be able to drop into a middle split. And now I'm like, oh no, if I dropped into a middle split right now, I assure you it'd be the last one I did for a very long time. And as I talk about doing this, I'm inspired even to get back into really focusing on mobility and flexibility training. Because the reality is when it comes to fitness, nobody is ever going to have a straight line and do everything great all at once in a synergetic fast You've got to decide what your goal is and then set it accordingly and have a structured plan in order to reach that. So if your goal is to become more mobile, strengthen your joints, and really focus on your flexibility, if you want to have more flexibility because you want to improve your posture, get rid of shoulder, back, chest, hamstring pain, then really decide that you are going to incorporate a flexibility training program into your life. You can absolutely do it. It's just about making time for yourself, and this is your time. Thank you guys for being here at this podcast. If you liked it, go ahead and give it 5 stars, and of course follow it so you can continue to get updates of when I post again. You can follow me on most social media platforms at Nicole Holler Coaching, and of course check out my website nicoleholler.com. You can submit A request for another topic, guests, learn more about my coaching, books I'm writing, as well as book me for speaking. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Nicole.
