Mobility vs Stability: What is Your Real Issue?

Mobility vs Stability is a hot fitness topic of late, and it’s not without cause.

Mobility is important as without it, you cannot complete movements needed to perform in the gym or on the athletic field without compensating somewhere else in your kinetic chain to complete the movement. And with compensation comes an increased risk for injury. For that reason, it’s important to address and correct mobility issues, but first, you need to determine if your problem is truly rooted in mobility.

Mobility vs. Stability

In fact, your issue could be stability-based. To get to the root of which you’re dealing with, you will want to visit a professional like those here at Core Health Chiropractic. We have the necessary training in assessing movement and may do a test called either a Functional Movement Screen (FMS) or Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA).

The FMS test is often used by personal trainers, coaches, and health care professionals to check if you can move properly through seven basic movement patterns. It doesn’t necessarily identify a specific problem, rather, it tells the screening individual that there is an issue somewhere. If you were to fail an FMS screen, or experience pain during the movements required for it, you should then seek help from a licensed professional to do an SFMA to pinpoint the specific problem areas in your kinetic chain and to develop a treatment plan. The SFMA test will reveal if you are experiencing a mobility issue or a Stability Motor Control Dysfunction (SMCD), or possibly both.

There are times when an objective movement assessment will reveal that you do not have a mobility problem, but instead, a lack of the stability motor control needed to properly utilize the existing mobility you have. If this is the case, your brain and muscles are not working to coordinate a movement using mobility. Fixing this issue requires performing a series of corrective exercises to retrain the brain and muscles to move through the dysfunction pattern. This plan must be developed by a trained professional. Another possibility is that the dysfunction can be corrected through chiropractic adjustments if it has been discovered that structures of the spine have shifted. Such shifts can distort joints, ligaments, muscles, and tendons in the affected area, causing a wide-ranging effect on the body. Chiropractic adjustments can resolve this.

At Core Health Chiropractic, our mission is to make Berks County healthier one spine at a time, through chiropractic care. Our goal is to set people free from their current health conditions and to help them reach their optimum potential through neurologically-based chiropractic care. Call us at 610-750-9131 or visit CoreHealthBerks.com.