A Quick and Simple Airport Mobility Workout

Greetings from Barcelona,

I’m here for the next 2 weeks to speak for the #DCBCN conference this week put on by the Tropical MBA guys. I’ll be doing a 2 part workshop on the paleo projects that I’ve been building over the past couple years.

I’m finishing up the talk presentation today, so I should be ready to go this weekend and I’ll try to record it if possible. I’m pretty excited about some of the things coming up that not very many people are talking about and it should be helpful to other people in their own projects. I’ve been ramping up speaking engagements a bit this year and hopefully have a few more in me before the end of the year as well.

However, apparently what I SHOULDN’T do is give booking advice because despite not being that far away geographically, my itinerary out here was less than ideal.

San Diego to Barcelona Itinerary

SAN => CLT => EWR => HAM => BCN

I love traveling (the actually part of traveling, not just the fun part), so I don’t mind the airports and planes, but the SITTING over those long periods of time is what kills me. I think a lot of people feel the same way.

Almost everyone – as soon as the airplane pulls up to the gate, stands up IMMEDIATELY and makes some sort of small talk as they exit the plane (“I just need to stretch”, “my back hurts”, “I can’t wait to get off this thing”).

For a while I assumed that this was normal and that there wasn’t much you could do about it. Then I started getting more into mobility work and decided to change a few things.

Quick Airport Mobility Workout

If you find yourself sitting down on a plane a ton or have even a half hour or hour to kill on a layover, try out this quick mobility workout and it should help.

I shot a super fast video demo of it, on location in Hamburg, Germany to walk you through the whole thing. Start to finish it should take less than 8 minutes – which is just about enough time for that person in front of you to find some space in the overhead bins for their luggage that clearly has no chance of fitting.

Quick Airport Mobility Workout Video

http://youtu.be/XO_9eHHD9Mc

Quick Airport Mobility Workout

If you didn’t watch the video, here’s the list of movements right here:

• Couch stretch (right / left) (60 seconds each side)
• Couch stretch groin (right left) (60 seconds each side)
• Hip flexor (right / left) (45-60 seconds each side)
• Quad (right / left) (I left this out of the video, but you can add this if you have time).
• Legs Up The Wall (90 seconds or longer)

The last one is the finisher, so if 90 seconds is good for you – that’s awesome. But if you’ve got a long layover, feel free to just hang out there for a while. I did this in Hamburg and literally just hung out on the floor for 10-15 minutes relaxing.

I did this myself just yesterday morning in Hamburg and it made a WORLD of difference for me the rest of the day.

http://instagram.com/p/4Lyb2RzFqk/

If you’re worried about looking weird while doing this – don’t be – people do all sorts of weird stuff in airports. They sleep on the floor, open their bags and rummage through their stuff, they run with bags that are entirely too big to be practical. If you’re worried about looking weird – don’t be – they’ll be distracted by everyone else. And if you still can’t get past it, realize that everyone else is probably going to be worn out and hurting from a long day of travel while you can spend the rest of the day feeling good & performing well. Turn looking weird into a positive and prioritize feeling good.

===

If you guys like this stuff, check out the MoveWell app. It’s free for iOS and has a ton of stuff like this & I might even add this routine to the mix. For more info, check out the main mobility site.

===

If you have more areas where you find yourself needing a mobility routine, let me know and I’ll see what I can do 🙂