Mobility Vs Strength

Fitness consists of a few categories:

• Strength
• Cardiovascular endurance
• Mobility
• Flexibility

Extreme training one any of the fitness categories would likely result in a deficiency in one of the others. Lots of distance runners tend to lack mobility around certain joints. The bros in the gym that lift heavy all the time likely lack cardiovascular endurance. The group fitness folk likely can’t bench press more than the 45 lb. bar. And the mobility. obsessed folk are likely just mobile for the sake of being mobile.

My “athletic background” (if you can call it that) comes from marathon training. But along the way I learned that resistance training could help me big time as a runner.

As a personal trainer my strengths are definitely cardiovascular endurance, weight loss, and building lean muscle mass. One of my long time clients recently had some shoulder mobility issues. So I educated myself on how I could help this client. The result was a personal record and bench press that looked much cleaner for him(12 reps, 11 & 3/4 reps. Almost got 13 up)!

So what’s best? Mobility or strength?

Muscles move our bones, cardiovascular endurance keeps our heart healthy to pump blood and nutrients to our most vital organs. Healthy mobility keeps our joints moving properly. And flexibility maintains a healthy extensibility of our muscles( ultimately resulting in healthy mobility).

To be slightly more scientific:

The cells that repair our damaged are lost muscle as we age(satellite cells, ie we lose strength). In particular our fast twitch muscle fibers. If we lose strength our bones aren’t moving. If our bones aren’t moving our muscles and joints become tight. And if that happens our heart isn’t working as hard(get it?)

So all fitness aspects are equal.