You’re hitting your CrossFit WODs almost every day but you’re not making the progress you want. You put in more and more effort, but you’re not hitting your goals. What’s going on? There’s a very good chance that mobility restrictions are the biggest factor keeping you from your goals. And fixing those restrictions will unblock your power and keep you from getting hurt. Most people can’t use their joints’ full range of motion, and don’t have very good joint stability. But if you want to be great in a high-performance sport like CrossFit, you need to fix your mobility restrictions. When you do you’ll see serious improvements in your training, including better PRs, easier reps, and fuller recovery.
This months’ mobility we are focusing on the Lats and the serratus anterior. These muscles get tight any time your arms stay relaxed at your sides and are not stretched up overhead. This means everyday they are getting gradually tighter and tighter. These muscles are needed for maintaining a proper front rack position, when elbows begin to drop we end up having a poor front rack position this means we will increase our chances of hurting ourselves. The stretch we are going to focus on now is going to help stretch both muscles simultaneously.
The first thing we want to do is get a band and an upright to connect the band to. From here we will stick our arm in all until the band is above our elbow. From this position we reach for the small of our back and use our other hand to connect hands behind our back. After the hand connection has been made we step away from the upright and begin to rotate our connected elbow away from the rig. This will create tension in the band and begin the stretch of the anterior deltoid, lats, and serratus anterior. Keep up with this stretch a few times a month and should see overall improvement in the front rack position as well as less wrist pain when holding that position. Keep up the good work Bears!!