The debate in most gyms isn’t whether mobility matters. It’s where it fits and when. Before or after training, on rest days, or between sets, everyone has a preference, and most of them contradict each other.
Rather than add another opinion to that pile, I asked coaches and training professionals a more direct question: how do you actually structure mobility into your regular workout routine?
The answers varied. The underlying logic, across very different training contexts, largely didn’t.
Prime, Reinforce, Load
The most common mistake people make with mobility is treating it like a checkbox. Five minutes of stretching before a session, then on to the real work. Dr. Jamie Bovay, owner of KinetikChain Physical Therapy in Denver, described a different approach.
I start with full-body dynamic movements and eventually target more specific movements, such as single-joint rotations. After I’ve primed my brain for the movements and improved my range of motion, I use my workout to reinforce it and focus on control within that range for the first set. After that, I start adding more weight to start to build strength in the new ranges of motion.
Bovay’s sequence moves from priming the joint through full-body dynamics to reinforcing the new range with controlled reps at the start of a working set, then progressively loading it as strength builds. This isn’t mobility before training. It’s mobility as the opening chapter of a session, with the rest of the training responsible for finishing it.
Opening a joint and owning a joint are two different things, and if you’ve been treating the warm-up as something separate from the real work, that distinction is worth sitting with.
Match the Work to the Goal
Benjamin Payson, CEO of Heat Hydration, takes a broader view. Rather than fitting mobility into each session, he organizes it across the week with three dedicated sessions, each built around a different purpose.
I organize each session around a slightly different goal. Recovery mobility focuses on active stretching and controlled movement to improve blood flow and reduce stiffness. Athletic mobility is more dynamic and movement-based, with less emphasis on long static holds. Long-range mobility uses deeper positions and longer holds to restore length and control through full ranges of motion.
Recovery work, athletic prep, and deep range restoration are not interchangeable, and compressing all three into a single session without intention produces work that doesn’t do any one thing particularly well. Payson’s approach keeps each session accountable to a specific goal, which changes both what you choose to do and how you approach it. As he puts it:
I treat mobility the same way I treat strength or endurance training: short, intentional, and consistent rather than occasional long sessions.
That framing matters. Consistency built around a clear purpose is what actually moves the needle over time.
Make It Non-Negotiable
Dr. Jason Saltmarsh, a USATF Level 2 Endurance Coach with 25 years of coaching and 31 state champions, doesn’t treat mobility as something that can be adjusted. It’s built into every session, structured around specific training demands, and non-negotiable regardless of conditions.
The mobility and durability work isn’t optional. It’s part of the program. Before anyone takes a step, the whole team goes through the dynamic warm-up together. Lunge matrix, leg swings, dynamic drills. That’s not filler. That’s neuromuscular preparation. We’re getting the hips and lower extremities ready to actually do what you’re about to ask them to do. If you skip it, you’re running cold. We don’t run cold.
The post-session work carries the same weight.
Core stability and posterior chain maintenance are what keep high-mileage weeks from becoming injury weeks. The glutes, hamstrings, and lower back are your primary running engine. You don’t leave the engine unprotected.
Saltmarsh isn’t doing mobility work because it sounds good in a program overview. He understands what high mileage does to hamstrings and Achilles tendons over the course of a season, and he’s addressed that specifically. The context is high school distance running, but the logic holds anywhere.
Mobility isn’t what you do when you have time left over. It’s what makes the harder work survivable across a full training life.
Build From the Joint Out
Lou Ezrick, CEO of Evolve Physical Therapy and Sports Rehabilitation, with nearly twenty years in the field, approaches mobility from a clinical progression that most coaches outside a rehab setting rarely use.
My structure follows a specific progression: evaluate the joint, heal restrictions through manual therapy, and then strengthen. I integrate dynamic stability exercises, such as standing on one foot or plank variations, into every warm-up to prep the ankle and shoulder joints for load. I also include eccentric negatives, like slowly lowering into a squat, to improve tendon stiffness and resilience against injury.
The evaluate-then-strengthen sequence is worth borrowing even when you’re not working in a clinical context, because most people skip straight to loading without a clear picture of what the joint is actually working with. The eccentric loading point is particularly relevant; tendons respond well to slow, controlled lengthening under load, and building that tolerance is what allows joints to handle repeated stress over time without breaking down. That’s not a warm-up strategy. It’s a long-term joint management approach, and if you want to understand more about how tension-based training fits into that picture, the isometrics piece covers that ground in more depth.
Make It Pattern-Specific
Joy Grout, owner of Personalized Fitness For You and a Functional Movement and Orthopedic Specialist who works primarily with women over 40, leads with a principle that reorganizes most generic mobility programming from the ground up.
Mobility is pattern-specific, not a random stretch list.
Her structure follows directly from that.
Three to five minutes of reset (breath, gentle spinal length, rib and hip positioning), then five to seven minutes of targeted mobility for the day’s main lift. Hip hinge day means hip hinge drill, thoracic rotation, and ankle rocks. Then lift. During strength work, I add 30 to 45 seconds of micro-mobility between sets that support form.
The case example she offered is one most coaches will recognize.
A busy client coming out of PT has a strong habit of rounding their back. I make her mobility hinge-based: practice hip hinging before lifting, then between sets, do three controlled hinge reps to a wall and 20 to 30 seconds of postural opening. So the movement pattern becomes automatic in workouts and daily life.
What Grout is describing is mobility work that has a destination. The client isn’t just opening a hip or stretching a thoracic segment in isolation; she’s reinforcing the exact pattern the session is built around, repeatedly, until it becomes the default. Range built without that connection tends to stay in the drill. Range built around a pattern that actually matters is what mobility as capacity looks like in practice.
The Common Thread
No single structure works for everyone, and that deserves more than a passing acknowledgment. The five approaches here come from people working in different contexts, with different athletes, toward different goals, and what works for a high school cross-country team at peak mileage won’t necessarily map onto a general-population client coming out of physical therapy. The question worth asking isn’t which structure to adopt. It’s whether the structure you’re using is actually built around what your body needs, or whether you’ve borrowed someone else’s answer to a question you haven’t yet figured out how to ask.
What does your training actually require? And is your current approach honest about that?
Brian Murray is a mobility coach with sixteen years of experience helping people move better, feel stronger, and train without pain. He’s the founder of Motive Training, a personal training facility in Austin, TX, and the creator of Motive Mobility, an online platform focused on joint health and movement longevity. Drawing from Functional Range Conditioning (FRC), WeckMethod, and years of hands-on coaching, Brian’s approach bridges the gap between mobility and performance—making complex concepts simple and actionable for anyone who wants to train and move with purpose.
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