3 Hidden Mobility Problems Making You Feel Older

Do you ever feel stiff, achy, or just older than you should? 🧓🏼
It’s not just aging; it’s often three hidden mobility problems that quietly rob you of your strength, balance, and energy.

In this video, Dr. Jeffrey Guild, physical therapist, breaks down the 3 key areas of your body that make the biggest difference in how you move and feel, especially if you’re over 50:

✅ Ankles –The foundation of your movement. Poor ankle mobility causes knee, hip, and back problems.
✅ Glutes – Your body’s powerhouse for strength, balance, and stability. Weak glutes lead to fatigue and pain.
✅ Shoulders – The most mobile (and most neglected) joint in the body. Stiff shoulders limit your posture, strength, and confidence.

You’ll learn:
• Simple mobility tests and exercises to restore movement safely
• Why these issues aren’t just from aging, and how to reverse them
• How to unlock better workouts, posture, and everyday energy

This is your roadmap to feeling younger, stronger, and more capable at any age.

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#Mobility #HealthyAging #PhysicalTherapy #StrengthAfter50 #MoveBetterFeelBetter

Here are three essential areas to focus on. If you're over fifty and you want to feel younger and move better as you grow older. This guide will help you get started or unstuck, especially if you're trying to exercise more progress in the weight room or reduce injuries. Here are three essential areas to focus on. Hi, I'm Doctor Jeffrey Guild. I'm a licensed physical therapist, and I've spent the past twenty years working with elite athletes, the general public, and everybody up to age ninety five to improve their movement so they can work out like they want to again and live better by moving better. So today we're going to talk about the three key areas of the body that make a huge difference in how you move and feel. We're going to start with your ankles, your shoulders and your hips. And if you've been dealing with stiffness, nagging aches or pains and you feel like your body just isn't cooperating the way that you want to, we're going to break it all down and go very simple and dive into practical ways to improve. Okay, so let's dive in. All right. Let's start off with from the ground up. Literally. Your ankles may not be the first thing you think about when it comes to feeling younger and moving better. But trust me, they're crucial. If your ankles are stiff, everything above them, your knees, your hips, lower back, and even up to your shoulders and neck, those things have to pick up the slack. And that's where the problems start from the ground up. And that's why it's so important. Think about squatting and picking up an object. If your ankles don't move well, your body has to compensate somewhere and that can lead to knee pain, back pain, and all sorts of issues. And if you're trying to strength train and do things like squats, deadlifts, and even just sit to stand from a chair, your ankle mobility is going to be one of the biggest factors which will determine whether you have good or poor squat mechanics. So good ankle mobility also helps with our balance. It also helps our walking mechanics and even your ability to push off from the ground when you're walking. And so this helps with walking speed, which is highly linked to fall risk. So this is why this is so important. So you might be wondering why do so many people have stiff ankles? And honestly, a lot of it is our shoes, our footwear, and a lot of our modern footwear, especially ones that are thick and have high heels and soles, restrict our natural ankle movement. And of course, sitting in lack of movement. In general, when you're not regularly moving your ankles through a full range of motion, they tend to get stiff, just like any joint. And in a lot of Western societies, we don't often in daily life go into full squat positions like in some other countries like Japan and Iran, just to name a couple, where they might spend their time squatting and and pulling weeds, gardening and things like that, doing the things that they need to do from a full squat position so they tend to maintain their ankle motion into old age. And so one of the big takeaways from this is moving naturally is often the key. And these problems don't just come with age. And the good news is that these problems can be prevented. So how do we improve it? A very simple place to start is just a basic calf stretch. Stand on a step, drop your heels down and boom, you'll feel the stretch. Try doing this daily, especially before your workouts, and that will make a big difference. And especially if you do this stretch before you do squats or Romanian deadlifts or or any type of deadlift, this is going to make a big difference in your movement. It's going to reduce the risk of injuries. I do this every single time before I do any type of squatting type of exercise in the gym. Stretch the calves, then do squats or deadlifts or whatever I'm doing now, moving up the chain to the hips. We're going to talk about glute strength here. So why do why does glute strength matter? Think about your glutes as the powerhouse of your body, both from a movement and power perspective, but also from a stability and injury prevention perspective. I can't tell you the number of times we have people with weak glutes that don't even realize it. We work with people all the time, of all ages, all the way up to age ninety five, ninety seven years old and weak. Glutes are a constant theme. No matter who the person is. And you'll find this with high school and college athletes as well if the problem is not addressed. And what you'll find is the. When the glutes are weak, they're not pulling their weight in the ways that they need to. So what do they do? They stabilize our hips and our pelvis and our knees and all the way down to the foot. They improve our balance, which. So this is very important if you're older. Now these essential muscles are very important for every part of our daily life, such as standing up from a chair, climbing stairs, doing squats, lunges, getting up from the ground and even walking. So basically all of our movement is highly dictated or determined by how well we can connect to our glutes and our glute strength, and the glute muscles in particular. The glute medius and the glute minimus help to stabilize our hips, knee, trunk, and even all the way down to our feet. So why do so many people have problems with weak glutes? It's a very common problem. We see it all the time, and of course sitting all day tends to shut down the glutes. Another common reason is muscular imbalances, where the quads, the hip flexors, the hamstrings, even the trunk are wanting to work on overdrive. And so the glutes never really get a chance to fire. And then it's a back and forth thing. The weak glutes feeds into the movement compensation problem. The movement compensation problem feeds into the weak glute problem. And this is a problem where our bodies tend to feed into this problem. And then so the glutes end up not really doing the work. And then all these other muscles do. And especially in the case of the glute muscle the glute medius and gluteus minimus, where rarely moving side to side. And because of that and other reasons, we have all these other compensations in our bodies that tend to overwork. Instead of these muscles. So they tend to shut down the glute medius and minimus. These are very, very important muscles. So how do we emphasize these very important muscles. So the first thing we got to do is we got we got to wake them up. And exercises such as clamshells or side walking against a resistance band or just side walking in general can help activate the glute muscles, especially the glute medius and gluteus minimus really well. And then that actually can be a way to help us activate the glute max. And so this can be done before lifting. So you can optimize the glute medius and gluteus and and even the glute max to get better glute activation before you do your lift. So once you wake up the glute muscles then you can go into the larger movements the squats, the hip thrusts, the single leg exercise such as step ups, lunges, things like that. And that's going to help you connect better. So a tactical tip that you can use is basically do some glute activation before your workouts, and you'll find that you'll be able to lift more, lift better. And you're in particular the glute medius and gluteus minimus then will help you isolate the glute max better as well, because it can be very difficult to connect to the glute max at times. So going to this glute medius and gluteus medius can be a way to activate the glute max. Then go into your workout. And you might have to do this for actually quite a while, but not forever. Although it can be a strategy you might need to maintain over the long term. But this will completely change the way that your body works and the way it operates, the way you work out, and it will completely change your life because of the problems it will prevent. Now the next part that we want to look at that we talked about is the shoulders. Why do so many people get stiff shoulders? This is actually the most mobile joint in our body. So shoulders are meant to be mobile. And this is the most common areas where people tend to lose movement. But this makes sense given our posture. Our time in front of computers, scrolling through our phones and things like that. It puts us into a position of poor posture, and this tends to shut down the motion of the shoulders. So why does this matter? If your shoulders are stiff, then they tend to pull us forward. And then this puts pressure on your neck and your back and lower back as well. But it's not just about causing pain and discomfort and injuries. That lack of shoulder motion actually also limits your gains in the gym and other exercises that you're going to do. So if you're wanting to progress strength training overhead, you're wanting to progress on military press or whatever it might be, your limitation with your shoulder motion will actually prevent you from lifting as heavy as you would like. So a tip that you can do is basically really focus on your shoulder motion. And this will help you to build to actually lift heavier than you would otherwise. And this can make a big, big difference in the gym. So then you can lift a lot heavier, reduce risk of injuries. And this will give you the bigger bang for your buck. Rather than trying to optimize the strategy of your strength training routine, for instance. And so this can be huge and this can be a big game changer. And so our modern life of course tends to cause the shoulder motion problems. But what else specifically. So weakness in the upper back muscles very specifically tends to contribute to this problem. Also over tightness in the chest tends to polar shoulders forward. And so the natural is then shoulders then naturally kind of round forward rather than being pulled back. So it goes back to posture. Now we can fix the shoulder motion problem by correcting our posture. In fact, it's essential that we correct the posture in order to really make gains in our shoulder motion problem. So that's one way to fix it. So basically open up the chest, shorten the upper back muscles doing rows and things like that. We can also include motions called internal and external rotation. So basically external rotation here and then internal rotation here. So external rotation is for instance what you might see in the extreme motion with a baseball player with a baseball pitcher when they're throwing the ball. Right. These motions are essential for us to be able to have. These are the motions we need to be able to do. And if we can't do these effectively, that's when we get the shoulder motion problems. And then we're not able to make the gains in the gym that we want. We're not able to reach overhead and put plates up on a shelf like we want to. There has to be a compensation somewhere, and that puts us risk of injuries in the neck, the back and of course the shoulders. So another thing we can do also is stretching what's called the upper trapezius. This is the muscle that goes from the shoulders up to the neck. It lifts the shoulders up is what it does. So if we stretch the upper trapezius then that can help drop the shoulders down. And that can help reduce the problems with the posture and reduce risk of injury. So we need to have nice long muscles in the upper trapezius and of course the motion with internal and external rotation. But then we also need to have great posture. So those are kind of the key areas. Think of this as a balancing act where you have the good length of the muscles in the front and then nice short strong muscles in the upper back. And that's how we create this lasting change. So then you improve also internal and external rotation of the shoulder. These are the specific movements really that need to be improved and addressed. So let's let's recap real quick. We covered three big areas of the body. Ankle mobility shoulder mobility and glute strength. These are key areas to moving well preventing injuries and honestly just feeling good about your body. I hope this episode was helpful. Do me a favor, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment for the algorithm, share it with a friend and let's help more people move better, feel younger and remember never. It's never too late to start taking care of your body. So thanks for hanging out with me and we'll catch you next time.