The Surprising Way Mobility Exercises Keep You Young, According to Experts

Let’s be honest: Mobility exercises aren’t the sexiest thing to do at the gym. Nobody’s going to be impressed by how well you roll your ankles around in a circle or curve your back in a cat-cow. Yet more and more fitness pros are buzzing about the potential of mobility training. Experts say it can improve your athletic performance, fix your posture, and generally just make you feel better in your day-to-day life. 

As a quick refresher, the term mobility refers to our ability to control movement throughout our joints’ full ranges of motion. That’s not to be confused with flexibility, which has to do with finding length in a muscle. However, mobility does require a certain amount of flexibility—and strength—in order to work our bodies through those end ranges. “I always like to think of mobility as the foundation,” says Meredith Witte, MSEP, CSCS, a functional strength coach and yoga instructor with a master's in exercise physiology. “Mobility allows us to move. Without it, our movement would be incredibly limited.”  

Fortunately, mobility exercises don’t need to be complicated or eat up a huge chunk of your time. Plus, if you approach them strategically, you’ll pretty quickly see the benefits that are getting everyone so fired up these days. Intrigued? Here’s what you need to know.

Why there’s so much hype around mobility 

Probably the biggest argument for mobility training is that it can help us maintain healthier movement patterns. When you’re able to safely move through your body’s entire scope of flexion, extension, rotation, etc., you’re less likely to strain or tear a muscle—“especially if you're just jumping into an activity,” says Jacob VanDenMeerendonk, DPT, a physical therapist with his own mobility app. Even if you’re not used to swinging a golf club, for instance, a mobile body will be ready to work through all the positions necessary for a hole-in-one (or maybe seven) without getting hurt. 

VanDenMeerendonk adds that mobility work can also be a major game changer if pain keeps popping up in a particular spot during your favorite workouts. “Say that you're trying to play pickleball, but having tendonitis show up every single time in your shoulder,” he says. “Obviously, get that addressed [by a physical therapist], but a lot of times it's just working on your mobility.” Sometimes you can literally feel immediate relief from opening up your range of motion. (Like when you finally roll out your shoulders after hours of tensing them up.) But he says even people with chronic issues can often see a long-lasting change within just a few weeks of regular mobility exercises. 

Witte adds that mobility also allows you to exercise more effectively because you’re able to move through bigger ranges of motion. Say you successfully improve your ankle mobility—well, now you’ll be able to sink deeper down into a squat so you can challenge more muscle fibers in those glutes and quads. And it’ll be easier to keep proper form while you’re at it so you can avoid the kind of pesky injuries that could land you in the PT’s office. 

Mobility training isn’t only for gym lovers and rec league champs, though. Maintaining a healthy amount of mobility will keep our bodies from compensating dangerously during daily life stuff too. “We need to access ranges of motion all of the time to bend over to pick things up, if we're running to get something, if we accidentally trip off a curb,” Witte says. “If you don't, your body has to make up for it somehow.”  

Even if you don’t get injured, lacking mobility could just leave you feeling generally achier and creakier. Simple things like putting dishes up on the top shelf or crouching down on the floor with your kids or pets might be harder. “Having a strong, mobile body is a way to make sure that you're moving with good form and in a way that feels good,” Witte says.

How our mobility changes as we age

When we’re kids, our job is to play—and a lot of that play is super physical. “You see [kids] rolling around, they're tumbling, climbing, hanging from bars, jumping from heights, crawling under things. They're doing all the stuff,” says VanDenMeerendonk. When was the last time you challenged your body in those same ways as an adult? “The longer you live, if you're not mindful of it, the more consistent your movement patterns become, the less variety there is, the more sitting there is,” Witte says. Along with that comes a decrease in our mobility—a prime example of “use it or lose it.”

However, it’s not only changes in behavior that impact our mobility. As we get older, our bodies naturally become stiffer thanks to the simple facts of biology. “Our tendons, our ligaments, our muscles, they become tighter; we lose fluid within the joints,” VanDenMeerendonk says. 

The good news: Doing mobility exercises regularly can combat these effects of aging. “As we start to stress out the body in variable ways, we can teach the body not to age so rapidly,” VanDenMeerendonk says. “We can prevent the tendons from tightening or joints from losing their synovial fluid. We can improve the elasticity of our muscles and our ligaments.” With consistent practice, VanDenMeerendonk says mobility exercises can help us feel and move better for longer in life—or as he puts it, “they help us just age better.” 

How to incorporate mobility exercises into your weekly routine

Mobility exercises can honestly be pretty low-key. Rather going through an hour-long routine, Dr. VanDenMeerendonk suggests simply spending five minutes on mobility work every day. “It doesn't need to be super lengthy—we just need to stay consistent with it,” he says. That's because your body will adapt to whatever you’re frequently exposing it to, he explains. 

Witte recommends following a short morning sequence that hits all the most mobile joints: ankles, hips, upper back, shoulders, neck, and wrists. “You can choose whatever exercises that you really like to make it something that feels good for you,” she says. She suggests keeping the approach pretty casual so it doesn’t feel like a chore. “I'm usually doing some ankle circles while I'm brushing my teeth and I'm mobilizing my shoulders as I'm making coffee,” she says. Don’t stress over exactly which mobility exercises are best—Witte emphasizes that it’s less about finding the perfect moves, and more about just getting in a habit that you like enough to stick with for the long haul.

She adds that if you’re following a well-designed strength training program, mobility work will naturally be programmed into the warmup, and even many of the exercises themselves. Think about it: Doing an overhead press will work your shoulder mobility while a deadlift will tap into your hip mobility. “If you're moving through a full range of motion in your exercises and building strength there, that's mobility,” Witte says. So you might already be getting more mobility work in your day than you realize. (Score!)

What’s also helpful is that mobility exercises can be kind of addicting—in a good way. That’s because they basically offer instant gratification. “You feel so much better afterwards,” VanDenMeerendonk says. For him, getting down on the ground to open up his back with thread the needle pose, for instance, releases pent-up tension and immediately makes his body feel a little less wooden. “You just feel, I don't know, you feel younger,” he says.