If you’re serious about improving the way your body functions and performs, then you’ll want to get familiar with the term range of motion and incorporate it into all your training.

Range of motion is the foundation of movement. Any personal trainer worth their salt would say a good range of motion is a minimum requirement for increasing strength, reducing your chances of getting injured, and improving your athletic ability.

There are two types of Range of motion (ROM)

Mobility

Generally called your active range of motion is your ability to move and move around a particular joint.

If you have excellent mobility, you'll be able to move well and efficiently with little or no restrictions and difficulty.

You could visualise mobility as how far you can move through a specific exercise like a lunge or how far a load you’re carrying moves on each rep like a squat.

Good mobility is particularly effective for reducing your risk of injury when completing dynamic movements, e.g. resistance training session or competitive sports.

Flexibility

Which we’ll call passive range of motion

Includes static holds, passive movement, holding a position for a certain amount of time or slow static holds.

Static holds get more blood flow to the muscles and will reduce your muscle soreness following exercise. This works best on muscles already warm so that you can apply a better stretch to the muscle. 

For this article, we’ll look at how mobility can benefit you across three different types of training purposes.

• Increasing muscle mass

• Increasing strength

• Increasing athletic performance

INCREASING MUSCLE MASS

Range of motion is an important component for someone looking to build muscle. How important? Recent studies have found that resistance training with full ROM can significantly increase muscle growth in some cases.

‘The authors reported average increases in muscle size of 1.16% per week when training with joint angles > 70° compared with just 0.47% per week with angles ⩽ 70°. ‘

If you look at the range of motion as how much work you ask your muscle to do, it makes sense. A larger range of motion for a given exercise means the muscle will have to do more work, which in turn will stimulate more muscle growth.

A statistician might say the study mentioned above is inconclusive due to the small sample size, i.e. 135 people. However, several other studies show similar results. 

The most promising or positive results have been on tests of the larger muscle groups.

Like, your glutes, hamstrings, quads, pecs, delts and lats.

Using a larger range of motion will also provoke muscle growth in more regions of your muscles, giving you more balanced muscle growth and improved general strength.

Using a larger range of motion will often force more muscles to contribute to the lift. For example, completing barbell curls with a full range of motion may stimulate more growth under our biceps (brachialis) and our forearm muscles (brachioradialis), producing more overall muscle growth in our arms.

Full ROM squats, for example, will stimulate extra growth in your adductors and glutes (study).

INCREASING STRENGTH

What about strength training. Well, if you talk to the average gym-goer, they might say that strength training reduces your ROM and makes you stiff. Counter-productive to trying to improve ROM.

In reality, that’s not the case. Strength training, when done correctly, can help improve mobility and flexibility. There are even studies that have proven strength training is more effective at increasing ROM than static stretching.

If your strength training, then obviously, you’ll want to be lifting close to your maximum loads. The problem is maxing out loads generally requires smaller and smaller ROM’s.

If you’ve ever used a back squat as part of your training, you’ll have noticed this. There’s no doubt you can lift a much heavier weight by only squatting down to, say, a 45-degree angle vs what you can lift through a squat, to say, a 90-degree angle.

A study published in the journal of strength and conditioning research found that even at 25% lighter loads, individuals who performed exercises with a greater ROM outperformed (increased strength) those who used a shorter range of motion over a reasonable period (12 weeks).

Not convinced, take this hypothetical example from stacked.com ‘Two athletes of equal height and weight are squatting 200 pounds. The first athlete goes down 13 inches to reach parallel. The second athlete performs a deep squat, lowering down 17 inches. The second lifter was lifting for eight more inches each rep (four more on the way down and four more on the way up). In a set, that could add anywhere from 24-80 extra inches of work.’

What’s the balance here? Well, if that study is anything to go by, dropping your loads by up to 25% to ensure you’re working through a full ROM for any given exercise is going to help you increase strength faster than maxing out your loads and using a smaller ROM for any given exercise.

Your ego might take a hit by dropping a few plates, but the gains your body will make should more than makeup for it.

INCREASING ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE

We think there’s a lot to be still discovered about the human body in terms of optimal athletic performance, and it comes with a lot of fine print.

Given the purpose of this article is to give you a few useful takeaways and not to get lost in the nitty-gritty, we’ll stick to fact rather than theory here.

The first point we’ll touch on is injuries. You can’t perform to the peak of your abilities if you’re injured, and some injuries lead to lifelong impairments where peak performance can never be regained. So reducing the chance of getting hurt is beneficial for athletic performance.

Many times I’ve heard a personal trainer predict how someone was going to get injured.

Why? Poor movement mechanics = greater risk of getting injured.

Training with greater ROM can enhance your functional movement patterns by increasing the range of motion through which you are in control. As lifting through greater ranges of motion requires more muscle activation and control, this, by default, will improve your movement patterns.

A short and inactive muscle is a weak muscle that will inhibit a muscle groups movement. As a result, your body will compensate by recruiting the wrong muscle groups to complete the movement—resulting in injury.

Sport is about movement; whether you’re a runner, a tennis player or a swimmer, if your body moves better than your opponent, then you’ll have an advantage.

Take a sprinter, for example, your opponent might have the same number of fast-twitch fibres as you and a 2-inch stride advantage, but if they’ve got tight hip flexors, you’ll likely beat them. This is because tight hip flexors will mean they have a shortened stride and need to make more strides to cover the same amount of distance.

Take a rugby player bridging at a ruck to secure the ball. If they’ve got tight hamstrings or a tight lower back, they’ll be weak in the bridge position and won’t be able to recruit their postural chain properly and easily get blown out of a ruck.

Overall with increased ROM, You’ll move faster, be stronger in certain positions, have better balance across movements and stay on the field longer. Thus, giving you a significant advantage over your opponent in any sport.

Also

Don’t compensate form to increase ROM.

Don’t throw form out the window just to increase your training ROM. As we’ve shown, a bigger ROM is beneficial in all facets of training but not at the expense of good form.

As a general rule, your ROM for an exercise is the range in which you can still complete the movement correctly and safely. Poor form to increase ROM is a terrible tradeoff and will increase your chances of getting injured.

Movements need to be performed correctly, or you’ll be teaching your body to move incorrectly, which is detrimental rather than beneficial.

WHERE CAN YOU START

We’d advise you to start by talking to one of our trainers who specialise in ROM and Performance training. So, for example, Shane Calder and Mike Mitchell would be a good place for you to start.

Two excellent resources you can also check out:

1. The book called the supple leopard.

2. Knees over toes guy- His methods have helped many athletes, including NBA players, by increasing their vertical jump & preventing injuries by increasing ROM & lengthening muscles.

Special thanks to Shane Calder for input and feedback for this article - World Fitness Personal Trainer, Kaikorai Prems Rugby Player and GC.