Hi, everyone. Welcome to YogaLan Yoga Teacher Companion. I'm Jason Crannell, your host.

And what I want to talk about today is the relationship between flexibility and mobility.

And you'll see the first thing that I do not want us to do is insert the word verse or verses between these two words.

I don't want us to think about flexibility versus mobility or versus mobility.

Because that sets up in the mind an unnecessary and a false dichotomy when it comes to these two phenomenon.

So flexibility is a thing. Mobility is a thing. These are somewhat distinct things.

I'm going to unpack that for you. But these things are intimately and inextricably related.

So we want to really think about the relationship between the two without overly prioritizing one or the other.

They kind of have to have an ongoing parity or relationship and we'll see what that is.

The other thing that I want to bring up is culture, especially subcultures, have trends.

Trends aren't necessarily a bad thing.

In the contemporary yoga world, there is a high equity in terms of using the language and the parlance and the packaging mobility.

We kind of seem to like this word in our community now and I think there's actually some good reasons for it.

But that's why at this point as yoga teachers, I think it's really important to understand what's flexibility, what's mobility, what's the relationship between the two,

and how does all of this sort out in my practice and my teaching.

So let me define flexibility for you in just a very, very simple way.

Flexibility is the ability for a joint to be lengthened.

Flexibility is the ability, it's the passive ability for something to go through a range of motion.

The key here when we think about flexibility is that it implies a passivity.

Mobility on the other hand implies that that joint is able to move itself through a range of motion.

Mobility implies dynamic work of a joint.

Flexibility implies passive work of a joint.

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