Why athletes must always perform tri-planar mobility

In everyday practice it is easy to forget how important mobility in all three planes of motion can be.  Even so, its common among rehab professionals to forget about how important this is to our athletic population.  Too often we hang out in the sagittal plane and mobilize without considering other planes of motion.  Yet our players rarely ever stay in one plane of motion. 

So how do we make this easy?  What can we do to help create triplanar mobility exercises?  Arm drivers.   Using arm and trunk movements can create those other two planes of motion quickly.  So how do you do this?  Lets take a basic half kneeling hip flexor stretch for example.  The key components to this stretch are to keep the core engaged (decreasing lumbar lordosis) and involved glute contracted (back leg).  This on it's own could be a good stretch.  But now lets add another plane of motion.  Lets have the involved side arm reach overhead while holding that stretch (see picture).  Another way to gain planes of motion is trunk twist.  Both of these ways helps the mobility exercise add components. 

Now that you have an example of how to add planes of motion to your mobility exercises, I encourage you to play around with different drivers to gain planes of motion.   


- Brian

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