The Dark Truth About Human Mobility - Dr Quinn Henoch - #013

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, there. This week, I have the pleasure of hosting Quinn Henoch. Quinn is a doctor of physical therapy. He's the head of sports rehabilitation for Juggernaut Training Systems and the man behind clinicalathlete.com.
He is about as no bullshit as you can get, and I've wanted to have him on the podcast for so long. As far as I can see, mobility is this, like, Charlotte and Rich, a wash world where no one really knows what's going on, and there's so much disinformation that it feels like the Trump presidential campaign all over again. Which isn't good, right? People need mobility. They want to be mobile within particular ranges of motion. They want to be able to do an overhead squat and a normal squat and complete a variety of tasks that require their bodies to be mobile. But there doesn't appear to be any consensus or appropriate information. Quinn does a series on YouTube called Mobility Myths. And as soon as I saw that, I knew that I had to have a conversation with him. And it went better than I could have hoped. I've just about managed to pick my jaw up off the floor after finishing with him. And we go through what the science says about typical approaches to achieving mobility. We look at the word mobility, flexibility, stability. What do all of these words mean in a performance context? What are the typical approaches and their efficacy, their usefulness within training from static stretching to dynamic stretching, to soft tissue work? What do they actually do, if anything? And I think there's some very surprising takeaways. Even if you're not a highly functioning or even moderately functioning athlete, even if you're a couch potato, this information is so important to understand how our bodies work in relation to moving. I couldn't believe some of the summaries that he gave me and some of the conclusions that he's drawn. Hopefully, we're going to save people an awful lot of time in the gym and we're going to improve their ability to understand their body and to adapt their training to the needs that they've got. So I'm going to stop bloviating here because this podcast just speaks for itself. Hope you enjoy it. Here it is, Quinn Henoch.
So, Quinn Henoch, Doctor of Physical Therapy, Head of Sports Rehabilitation for Juggernaut Training Systems and the man behind clinicalathlete.com. How are you today?

**Quinn Henoch** (3:07)
Chris, I'm doing well, man. Thanks for having me on.

**Chris Williamson** (3:10)
Thank you for coming on, man. I really appreciate it.
So, I wanna cut sort of straight to the chase here. Researching Mobility Online, for me, can feel a little bit like a minefield of disinformation. For every article that says yes to one approach, there does seem to be 20 arguing against it. Do you think there's a lack of clarity with what's published online?

**Quinn Henoch** (3:38)
Oh, 100%. As confusing as it is for you, it's as equally confusing to me.
The word mobility is not well defined. It's not really defined at all. You know, in physical therapy school, when we used the word mobility, it was regarding like patients in hospitals, whether they can walk, you know, whether they can roll over in bed, bed mobility. It was like functional things, functional tasks like that. And so I think in the last, you know, five to eight years or whatever, the word mobility, this nebulous term, has probably the biggest buzzword, you know, has been in that timeframe. And I don't think we have a good grasp on it. You know, you'll get, is it synonymous with range of motion? Is it, does it equal the control of movement? You'll see some people describe it that way.

**Chris Williamson** (4:30)
Covers all range of sins, right?

**Quinn Henoch** (4:32)
Yeah, exactly. So when you say, I gotta work on my mobility, we don't, nobody knows what the hell that means. So I try not to use the word, but I have kind of gauged my interpretation of it because it is so popular. I tend to put the word as synonymous with range of motion.

**Chris Williamson** (4:52)
I was going to say, what does mobility mean to you?

**Quinn Henoch** (4:55)
For me, it means the potential for a movement, meaning do you have the hardware to perform the task? Meaning, again, do your joints get into the positions that we plan to train? So if we're talking about the hip, and our positions that we want to train is the deep squat, and we want to squat below parallel, or hips below 90 degrees, if you lay on the table, can I move your hip joint past or through that range of motion without apprehension or issue, or some type of hard block, some type of structural block? And in many cases, the reason I define it like that is because it's a way for me to create the buy-in that most people do not have the limitations that they perceive to have in regards to their structure. I think a lot of people, they blame their structure for not being able to hit certain positions in training when the reality is those positions and or those training modalities are simply too intense and too complex for their particular athletic prowess at the time. And so if we simplify the word mobility to simply, can your joints get into the positions? Let's establish that first.