What are your favorite ways to improve mobility/range of motion?

[MetalBoar]

So, as I've said in a number of threads I've always been very inflexible. About the only time in my life when I might have been considered fairly flexible was the last couple of years I was training in Hapkido, after about 3 years of working on it on a daily basis and I was in my 20's back then. After years of strength training I'm much more flexible at 48 than I have been for most of my life but I need to pick up just a little bit more free range of motion to do the kicks I would like smoothly and cleanly.

Historically, most of the flexibility and mobility work that I've done has ranged from inefficient at best (taking a very long time to make progress) to worthless. Hopefully the knowledgeable crowd on this site can give me better info than I've found elsewhere.

What exercises, stretches or other methods have you found to produce fairly quick results for increasing mobility and flexibility?

 

[Buka]

Quick results? You mean other than beer?

I don't believe there are any quick results. At least none that will last more than a few minutes.

 

[spidersam]

A standing desk at work (put together with scraps from the office ) made an incredible difference in my flexibility. I stretch regularly throughout my workday to maintain my ROM and then during class and after the gym I hard stretch.

 

[MetalBoar]

Quick results? You mean other than beer?

I don't believe there are any quick results. At least none that will last more than a few minutes.

I did say fairly quick results . Outside of my time in Hapkido I've never really cared about increasing my range of motion much beyond what's required for health and daily life so this isn't an area I've spent a lot of mental clock ticks on in the last 20 years. I just sort of assume that there are better ways to achieve results than what I've done in the past.

To use strength training for example, in my 20's I lifted weights and read some books and magazines and made some progress with a kind of scattershot approach of doing what the "experts" were recommending. Then when I was about 30 I found a really good, systematized approach that utilized an efficient protocol and consistent, detailed record keeping and I saw more strength gains in the first 6 months than I had in the first 2-3 years with my previous method and I spent a lot less time in the gym to boot. It's a brutally hard way to train but I love it and it still gets me great results almost 2 decades later. I guess I was hoping that someone here had found something similar for improving mobility.

I can and will go back to what I've done in the past but it feels exactly like the scattershot approach I was taking to strength training. It'll work, eventually, but there has to be something better.

 

[MetalBoar]

A standing desk at work (put together with scraps from the office ) made an incredible difference in my flexibility. I stretch regularly throughout my workday to maintain my ROM and then during class and after the gym I hard stretch.

Yeah, I work in IT so I've made a routine of getting up regularly to move around and do some stretching and I'm sure that's contributed to me having better flexibility now than when I was 25, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to take me much farther than it already has. For whatever reason I have to be very careful stretching after any kind of workout as I find it very easy to strain things without ever having felt like I was approaching a danger zone. It makes for slow going if I rely on traditional post workout stretching but I've learned the hard way that if I'm not extremely cautious I'll injure myself and it'll take even longer.

 

[jobo]

So, as I've said in a number of threads I've always been very inflexible. About the only time in my life when I might have been considered fairly flexible was the last couple of years I was training in Hapkido, after about 3 years of working on it on a daily basis and I was in my 20's back then. After years of strength training I'm much more flexible at 48 than I have been for most of my life but I need to pick up just a little bit more free range of motion to do the kicks I would like smoothly and cleanly.

Historically, most of the flexibility and mobility work that I've done has ranged from inefficient at best (taking a very long time to make progress) to worthless. Hopefully the knowledgeable crowd on this site can give me better info than I've found elsewhere.

What exercises, stretches or other methods have you found to produce fairly quick results for increasing mobility and flexibility?

don't train flexibility y,train mobility , there's a subtle but important distinction, that being movement, move through the tightness until its isn't tight any more then increase! the range of motion and do it again.

one such is to put a sweeping brush between two chair backs, stand next to it, with your legs splayed under it and duck under, repeat, when it loosens up, splay your legs more repeat, then lower the brush re!peat

 

[Danny T]

Mobility exercises working through one's range of motion and slightly past it. Static stretching if you do it should be done after your workout as the final part of your cool down after doing an active cool down