3 min read.

I’m gonna share something that blows people’s minds at our seminars… but it’s so obvious once you hear it:

 

 

The shoulder and hip joints move in extremely similar ways - they are both ball and socket joints which allows movement in all directions. The end of the femur (thigh bone) and humerus (upper arm bone) is round like a ball, and they fit into the hollow part (or socket) in the other bone. This shape combo gives you so much range of motion.

Don’t worry, that’s not the mind-blowing part yet! It’s how you think about & apply this concept that makes the difference.
 

Every time you move your arm or leg there is an element of rotation!

 
It doesn’t matter if the limb is going into flexion (arm overhead or bringing your knee up), extension (pushing your arm or leg behind you), adduction (limb towards the body) or abduction (limb away from the body) there MUST be an element of rotation at the joint!

 

Picture when you get up out of a chair, your hips rotate, when you raise your arm up to get something out of a high cupboard, your shoulder must rotate! When you walk, there’s a mini rotation, when you run there’s a slightly larger and faster rotation! It’s weird when you start to think about it!

 

So, simply by improving how your ball and socket joints ROTATE, you effectively cover every single aspect of shoulder & hip movement - hitting everything that you need to in one go! You will change your flexibility and have happier stronger joints for it, simply by doing rotation. How cool is that?!

 

Instead, what I normally see (and where people commonly go wrong) is they become too obsessed with one muscle. For the hips it’s usually Glute Med, Piriformis, or they want to stretch their hamstrings to oblivion and for the shoulders it’s the rotator cuff… or, for whatever reason, just one of the four rotator cuff muscles - Infraspinatus seems to be most popular to blame.

 

But that’s not how joints & muscles work!

 
They don’t just go forwards and backwards, they’re able to twist and bend in multiple directions and one muscle isn’t responsible for all that. If you completely disregard this fact and start doing just one specific exercise, for one specific muscle, in one specific direction, you’re missing out on a lot.

 
Now we know this, it becomes obvious that the hyper-specific Rotator Cuff external rotation exercise or the minimal-hip-movement Clamshells that are so often recommended, are actually rubbish!

 

The only time they help is when someone already had great range & strength in their shoulders and hips and is dealing with a specific weakness. But when you don’t have that, you end up training for the clamshell Olympics and feel like you’re getting nowhere even though you’re putting in a tonne of work.
 

In reality, the most beneficial, efficient and effective thing to focus on is…. making big ass circles!

But that doesn’t sound complicated or fancy enough and the problem with us as humans, we think we’re special and need super special secret exercises for our unique shoulders and hips that no one else in the world has…

 

I did it too so that gives me permission to poke fun now!

 

So enough of me gabbing on, let’s get your shoulders moving like shoulders and your hips moving like hips!

Take these two exercises, do them every day for 3 sets of 3 slow reps trying to improve how you’re doing them each time and you will be rewarded with arms that give the best hugs and hips that give the best… erm, I’ll leave that to your imagination….


Shoulders:

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Let us know how you get on! And for more super efficient ways to improve your whole body, check out the Simplistic Mobility Method here!