Mobility: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How We Train It

Mobility gets talked about a lot, but it’s rarely defined clearly and never trained correctly.

Is it stretching? Foam rolling? Doing yoga? Moving around barefoot?

Maybe a little. But at Uptown, we look at mobility as your usable range of motion — how much control, strength, and awareness you have at your end ranges. It’s about what your body can actually do, not just how far you can reach in a passive stretch.

Mobility isn’t just for warm-ups or injury rehab. It’s a crucial part of performance, longevity, and feeling good in your own body.

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What Affects Mobility?

Mobility is a mix of several factors, not just one. Here’s what we look at when we train it:

1. Muscle Length

Muscles create movement by attaching to tendons and ligaments that cross joints.  Muscles can restrict movement because they’re short through either under or overwork. Others tighten up as a central nervous system protective response from previous injury or movement fear. Either way, limited tissue length can hold back a joint's ability to move. We use a combination of stretching and active movement to increase range in a way that actually sticks.

2. Strength at Length

Especially at the edges of your range. Being strong in mid-range is easy — but life and sport happen in the awkward zones. If you can’t control those, you’re more likely to get injured. That’s why we train strength specifically in the places that we havn’t been exposed to load.

And for people on the hypermobile end of the spectrum — the ones who already have a ton of flexibility — this work is even more important. If you have more range than you can control, that range becomes a liability. In these cases, we focus less on accessing new range and more on building strength within smaller, safer windows. Staying slightly out of end range, keeping joint angles a bit tighter, and emphasizing contraction over stretch — these strategies help restore control and protect overstretched tissues.

Mobility isn’t always about getting more. Sometimes it’s about learning how to manage what you already have.

3. Joint Health & Rotation

Each joint needs to move independently. The hip needs to rotate without relying on the low back. The shoulder needs to move without hiking up into your neck. We do focused work to improve each joint’s capacity — especially rotation, which is often overlooked but critical.

4. Movement Integration

Once individual joints are working well, we connect them. That’s where flow and sequencing come in. Your body doesn’t move in parts — it moves in patterns. Mobility needs to show up in full-body, real-world movement, not just isolated drills.

What a Mobility Class Looks Like

Mobility sessions at Uptown follow a clear structure — one that helps build awareness, open up new ranges, and then reinforce them with control.

Like all of our training we follow this simple framework:

• Explore – Notice where you have space and where you don’t. Start with what’s real, not ideal.

• Evolve – Apply targeted strategies to improve specific areas. Load them, move through them, repeat.

• Express – Use your range. Integrate it. Make it part of how you move, not just something you do in drills.

You can read more about that idea here.

1. Warm-Up with Movement

We start with simple, rhythmic motions — bouncing, shaking, swinging limbs — to get blood flowing and signal to your body that it’s safe to move.

2. Joint Exploration

Using techniques like Controlled Articular Rotations (CARs). The first set we explore how each joint moves through its available range. In the later sets we work incredibly hard to make sure the joint is working independently without compensation.  It’s a mix of exploring and training that builds better awareness and control.

3. Lengthening with Opposition

For joints to move, muscles on one side of the joint must lengthen while on the opposing side of the joint the muscles must contract. 

Let’s say you want to be able to open your hips more (hip abduction). First we’ll stretch the inside of the tight (muscles that control hip adduction). Then we immediately strengthen the opposing muscles, in this case the glute med and min. Multiple sets of this back-and-forth is what evolves new, useful and sustainable ranges of motion. 

4. Integration and Flow

We finish by using the new range in real movement. That might be a flow sequence, a strength pattern, or a task that demands coordination. This is where mobility turns into something you can actually apply. This is the time to express movement. 

Why We Care So Much

Mobility isn’t just about creating space — it’s about owning that space. And ownership looks different for everyone.

Some people need more access. Others need more control. For hypermobile folks, training often means working within a tighter range, reinforcing muscle contraction, and avoiding overstretching. For others, it might mean gently expanding what feels stuck or limited.

The goal is the same: to move better, with more awareness, and less risk.
We don’t chase extremes. We train for adaptability.

Mobility training is really just strength training, think of it using the same ideas of progressive overload. 

It is what allows you to keep training, playing, and doing the things you love, longer and with fewer setbacks.

It’s not about being more flexible. It’s about being more capable.