YouTuber Review: MobilityWOD

2015-04-28

MobilityWOD (Mobility Workout of the Day) is the channel that got me interested in improving my body. There are almost 200 video workouts that you can do to drastically improve your mobility and your motivation to get better. The first workout is to stay in the bottom of a squat for 5 minutes in a day. When I first started working on this, I could not do more than 20 seconds at a time without a lot of pain. Now I can do a couple of minutes at a time (maybe longer; I have not tried) without a problem.

I think this channel is great at motivating you because Kelly Starrett has a good coach persona. He sounds confident and egging you on to do better in your workouts. The videos are filmed extemporaneously, which gives them character, but sometimes leaves you wondering what you are working on, or why a particular mobility exercise will help you. He uses terms like "internal rotation", and "external rotation", which will seem like jargon to someone who has not studied musculoskeletal mechanics.

I also read the first edition of his book, Becoming a Supple Leopard (link goes to the new 2nd edition), that goes into more detail in a much more organized way. If his videos seem intriguing to you, I recommend getting the book, because it makes the subject a lot more coherent than you get from the short videos. It also has a huge selection of mobility exercises in the back of the book, that you can use as a reference to solve your mobility problems.

Overall, I think going through the MobilityWOD playlist is a good way to get excited about improving your body and learning how to do it with explanations that mostly appeal to someone who is not an expert in physical therapy.