(suspensful sound)
-: Range of motion is one of the most important variables
that you need to individualize for every person
and every exercise because ultimately,
training in the appropriate range of motion
is going to protect somebody from injury
and make sure that the tissue that you're trying to work
is working that entire time because the second you go
to a point to the range where now,
other structures are being loaded,
the weight's now going on joints or other musculature,
you can no longer account for what the metabolic stress
or the neurological stress is going to be for that tissue
because you're essentially loading it and unloading it
by going within a range of motion that it can work
and then out of that range of motion.
So to understand what the appropriate range of motion is,
you've gotta look at basically
the three types of range of motion.
So we have passive range of motion
which is where a joint can be taken to
when there's no muscular tension around the joint.
So this is in a relaxed position,
say having a partner stretch you
or using gravity or something passively
to get into a position.
That's how far that joint can go through an excursion
in any direction when there's not tension around the joint
other than the end tension of the passive tissue.
As soon as we add contractions,
we get into what is the active range of motion.
So active range is going to be when you physically
take yourself there with muscular control, right?
So that means like if you were instead of like
leaning over and touching your toes,
that would be the difference of you say lying on your back
and trying to pull your leg up towards your head, right?
So you're actively contracting versus
just letting gravity pull you down.
So we look at active range of motion,
we have tension around the joint now,
'cause now muscles are contracting around that joint.
So this is now where our body is creating
some sort of stability and it's measuring the forces
around that joint and deciding where is it safe to go
and where is it not safe to go.
So this is pretty close to the range of motion
that we're gonna be able to use in training
most of the time.
That being said we have to take one step further, right?
And there is an instance where we add load.
Sometimes that active range of motion decreases.
So when we look at active range,
a lot of times we're looking at
just with our own body weight, our own control.
As soon as we start adding load,
extra stability is required.
So the more discrepancy there is between strengths
and different muscles like agonist, antagonist
around the joint, or the more imbalances there are
in stability for a joint, right, what you're gonna see is
as you add load, that active range may decrease
because the body is not going to have
the same amount of stability and the same amount
of force production throughout that entire range of motion
because it'll have areas where's either
not as stable or not as strong on both sides of the joint.
So you're gonna get some inhibition
and when the body's gonna try and compensate
and use other tissues or other structures
to be able to support that range of motion.
So this is ideally, this is where we train, right?
Which means every rep that we do is an assessment
of basically how well we're fitting
within that active range of motion.
But testing active range of motion out of sight
of an exercise gives you a really good idea
of what the body's potential is.
So then if we see like okay, as soon as we load,
a person has significantly less range of motion.
We can assume that there's a lot of work
that needs to be done in terms of creating stability
around that joint, right?
So there's a lot of potential for improvement
in the range of motion that they could be using.
But whatever this is,
that's likely what we're gonna use today,
especially if we're trying to have any sort of isolation
on certain tissue whether it be from a approach of the
or a metabolic perspective or whatever it may be,
'cause as soon as we start going out of this,
we start teaching the body to use other muscles
for that movement or we put load on joints,
we start increasing the risk for injury, right?
So our goal is to close the gaps
between what our active range of motion is
and what we can do loading wise, right?
Our goal is not necessarily to be able to train
in whatever our passive range of motion is
because there's a lot of variables that are gonna determine
the difference between those two.
Our big goal is try and make it so that
whatever our active range of motion is,
we have the stability to be able to train
within that entire active range
and then we're gonna be getting the most output out
of that person with what they have available right now.
Okay, so that's gonna make us very efficient.