I am no longer Cross with CrossFit! And I am now a HUGE fan of MWOD

It is 9am and I am in Paris, France at the Centre Sportif about to learn the Starrett System: A Movement and Mobility course designed so that users will be able to quickly identify movement inefficiency and have a dynamic order of operations to know where and what to cue or correct.

In this course I learned how to recognise common movement errors that can cause pain and/or musculoskeletal dysfunction and rob you of speed, power, endurance, and strength. As a coach and practitioner who is trying to define athleticism, I just needed to do this. I learned strategies that would help restore function to joints and tissues and prevent injury, optimising athletic performance, sign me up.

This mobility class was taught by the co-founder of MobilityWOD.com itself. Kelly Starrett, a coach, physical therapist, author, speaker, and creator of this blog, which has revolutionised how athletes think about human movement and athletic performance.

His 2013 release, Becoming a Supple Leopard has become a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. This blog was voted #4 in Outside Magazine’s Top 10 Fitness Blogs of 2011, Breaking Muscle’s Top 10 Fitness Blogs of 2011, and Health Line’s Top 100 Health Blogs of 2011. Kelly and his work have been featured in Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Body, Competitor Magazine, Inside Triathlon, Outside Magazine, Details Magazine, Power Magazine, and the Crossfit Journal.

He teaches the wildly popular Crossfit Movement & Mobility Trainer course and has been a guest lecturer at the American Physical Therapy Association annual convention, Google, the Perform Better Summit, the Special Operations Medical Association annual conference, police departments, and elite military groups nationwide.

Coach and Dr. Kelly Starrett received his Doctor of Physical Therapy in 2007 from Samuel Merritt College in Oakland, California.

Before starting his own physical therapy practice at San Francisco CrossFit, one of the first 30 CrossFit affiliates, he practiced performance-based physical therapy at the world-renowned Stone Clinic. In his current practice, Kelly continues to focus on performance-based Orthopedic Sports Medicine with an emphasis on returning athletes to elite level sport and performance.

Kelly’s clients have included Olympic gold-medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world and national record holding Olympic Lifting and Power athletes, Crossfit Games medalists, ballet dancers, military personnel, and competitive age-division athletes.

Kelly’s background as an athlete and coach includes paddling whitewater slalom canoe on the US Canoe and Kayak Teams, and leading the Men’s Whitewater Rafting Team to two national titles and competition in two World Championships. In his free time Kelly enjoys spending time with his wife Juliet and two daughters, Georgia and Caroline, surfing, paddling, Olympic lifting, hot-tubbing, and so-you-think-you-can-dancing.

Since I am not a CrossFit trainer and I don’t have my CrossFit Level 1 Certification, I prepared myself for hell but knew I needed to do this for own health let alone took this class for pure educational reasons. As those who follow me know, I have MS and have had a few injuries, been through a way too many surgeries and have daily reminders of those in the form of pain, more pain and even more PAIN. I was made aware of MobilityWOD and its founder, Kelly Starett, through a fellow event planner on a Fam trip to the middle East and have since watched every video, I can make time for, and I have found numerous methods to help alleviate a lot of pain and discomfort I go through on a daily basis.

KStar ( that is what his mates call him) is extremely straight forward, which was great for getting straight to it. It was all so easily broken down, the MobilityWOD approach to mobility and recovery so it could be applied to my own needs.This seems to be the main reason most people take the MobilityWOD Cert class. The majority of the afternoon was spent talking Spine, Feet and VooDoo bands, weight bands, lacrosse balls, the MobilityWOD Supernova and partner stretching in order to learn how to Test and Retest various ways to fix our body.

One of the most important factors of the MobilityWOD process is Test and Retest in order to make sure that what you are doing is actually making a difference. A great example of this was the testing of our squat. We were asked to do a few air squats, focusing on how the squat felt. We even did 21 different positional squats that we later worked through the fascia on the top of our quads. While lying on our backs, we used the 2 lacrosse balls on the top of our quad. This may sound like a very minimal exercise without much impact, but it changes the way your squat feels entirely. My right side had more of a “ tight or beef jerky/biltong” feel than my left, where the fascia was much tighter and needed to be loosened up. After both sides were treated, I retested my squat and it felt as though I was so much lighter into the squat position. It was a real “EUREKA” moment for me, which helped to emphasise the importance of the Test and Retest aspect of the process.

My original purpose for taking this certification class was purely selfish: I wanted to learn more about MobilityWOD so I could apply some of their teachings to my own mobility and recovery program for Multiple Sclerosis however while listening attentively to Kelly talk to the coaches in the room about applying this information to their CrossFit class, I realised there was a place for this in every room and place where people were. I have listened to too many event people and athletes of all kinds complain about body aches, sore joints and other common ailments that they need to be doing something about. Hopefully I will be able to shed some light on why we have certain pains in specific places and ways to bring some relief to those areas in some of the talks I give or at one of my own events.

As I continue to write about this topic and offer methods that can help us as professionals, think about other areas in life where these practices can apply. One that is easily overlooked is sitting at a desk for 8+ hours a day. Getting up a few times during the day to do some air squats, stretches or even a quick foam roller session, is a great way to prevent the body from taking excessive impact from sitting.

Sitting is the new smoking!

Although I am not a doctor I have spent a lot of time learning about my body and the best ways for me to alleviate pain. Feel free to experiment on your own with any methods I discuss or any others on MobilityWOD.com. We should all become practitioners and be able to gauge complete and incomplete areas and heal thyself.

Please comment below if you have specific issues you would liked addressed or if you would like to talk more about this subject. Also check out the book DESKBOUND..it will change your life.