By: Lee Taft

www.speedinsiders.com

It doesn’t matter if you work with adults or kids, mobility is important for all ages. I love using mobility drills with youngsters because it gives me the opportunity to coach them on new skills. Sure, I can have them perform isolated mobility drills that don’t have much functional transfer to actual movement or I can teach the kids how to use their body in function with functional mobility.

The goal of functional mobility with kids is to have them move through full range of motion using balance, flexion, extension, rotation, different level changes, and linear and lateral movements. It is important to allow youngsters to experience how to move the limbs in all planes of motion. It is also very important to teach them how to move the body around a fix limb. The mobility exercises I use with my athletes and adults are based on this very premise, move in all directions with and without fixed points of stability.

To make it clearer, here is an outline of a few of the mobility categories I frequently use:

Category- Walking

knee hugs

monster walks

lunging

quadriceps walking stretch

Sideways crossover walks

Category- Crawling/down stationary

Inchworms

Crab walks

Alligator crawl

Slow mountain climbers

Groiners

Category- Low box (check out www.lowboxtraining2.com to view more)

Knee drives

Side knee drives

Low Step through

Multi-directional lunge

Agility hops

All of the above exercises in each category are pretty much self explanatory. Don’t focus on the individual exercises but more the various exercises you can use to teach movement.

Mobility exercises are more than simply gaining range of motion. They allow coaches and trainers to take advantage of valuable time to coach movement skills. Clients typically don’t have great understanding of how to move the hips during squatting or bending so mobility training is a perfect time to coach this. Many do not understand how to properly move the shoulder complex (scapula, thoracic spine, upper arm) in all three planes of motion. We not only gain mobility for our clients, but educate them how the movement should occur.

This post is about Mobility for Kids, but I approach mobility training the same way for my adults. Have fun implementing you mobility program.

P.S. – If you want to learn more about Low Box Training- mobility and stability…go to www.LowBoxTraining2.com. It is so easy to learn and implement.