💪 12 best mobility exercises for smooth movement

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Welcome to The BarBend Newsletter! Here’s what’s going on in today’s edition:

• The pros and cons of using creatine

• PT-approved mobility exercises to limber up

• How hard is it to overtrain?

Supplements

The Yays and Nays of Creatine

Creatine is mostly pretty great. Much like Earth being “mostly harmless,” it’s a not-untrue piece of brevity that may need more explanation if you are really interested in grabbing a towel and exploring.

Getting into the weeds of creatine means figuring out exactly what it is, what it does, what it does not do, and why these things matter. BarBend, conveniently, has an article linked below that goes into detail about this very topic. Lucky you.

Creatine has benefits for both gym rats (improved muscle and strength) and longevity enthusiasts (with positive associations with long-term memory and cognition). That said, creatine still has a few drawbacks and side effects that you should know about, like:

• Bloating

• Cramping

• Stomach pains

• Potential issues for anyone with kidney disease

Are any of the above side effects serious enough to keep you from taking that shiny new creatine supplement sitting in your Amazon cart? Read the article below so you can make an informed decision.

A Message From Hydrow

The 20-minute Full-Body Workout You've Been Missing

Your day is packed between meetings, shuttling kids, trying to prep clean meals, while hopefully squeezing in quality time with friends and family.

Somewhere in there, you've got 20 minutes.

With Hydrow, that's all you need for a full-body workout. And yes, it's cardio—but it’s also strength training, meditation, and adventure in one sleek machine.

But you're not just on a rower, by yourself, slogging through 500-meter intervals.

Hydrow brings immersive, group workouts into your own home led by Olympians and professional athletes. So you're not in your basement alone - you're rowing on a Scandinavian fjord or knocking out a 10-minute core circuit in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Find out why 90% of Hydrow users are still into it one year later. Save up to $1150 for a limited time and use code "BarBend" for an additional $50 off.

Get rowing 🚣

Mobility

Move Your Way to Better…Movement

With the popularity of lifting weights reaching an all-time high, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the reason resistance training is so great in the first place; being stronger and more muscular makes us better at everything we do (in addition to looking sweet rocking some Zubaz on TikTok).

Perhaps even more than heavy lifting, mobility work promotes a body’s healthy relationship with the physical world around us. If everyone out there is honest, they would say that mobility work is the aspect of their training that they skip, forget, neglect, or simply disdain the most. Get out of that mindset and start integrating these 12 simple PT-approved mobility exercises to increase your ability to move through space.

Pictures of things called “gymnasiums” from before the 1950s tell the whole story. Empty spaces for people to move, engage in gymnastic-style training, and generally do things to achieve a healthier body. Using these simple movements will help you feel better, be more able to complete tasks, and maintain positive physical attributes for longer. Isn’t that the whole reason you’re working out in the first place?

Training

Get Over Your Overtraining Fears

The concept of overtraining gained significant traction on the internet in its early years as a resource for strength training. Like left-hand drive and the Imperial system of measurement, it’s kind of just accepted as reality without much thought ever going into it.

While certainly real, actual overtraining is incredibly hard to achieve. Your body is an amazing piece of machinery that can adapt to such diverse strains as hunting bison all day or showing up to an office from 9-5 for 40 years. Give it some fuel, give it some rest, and head to the gym and beat the stuffing out of it; overtraining is likely the least of your concerns.

The more you know about the boogeyman of overtraining, the more you realize he's just a mousey-looking dude talking from behind a curtain. Follow the yellow-brick road to less fear by starting with the article linked below.

Big Lifts

…How?

🪄 Firefighter and calisthenics master @batya_sw shows off some kettlebell magic tricks for a crowd. Talk about a guy who doesn’t skip mobility day. Or core day. Or any day, really.

Quick Hits

💨 Stay Flatulent: Because we have lost the impact of hame in our society, it seems like fart walking is all the rage these days. Learn how this aromatic aerobic activity can actually help your digestive health.

🦵 Raise This: The GHR is still the premier builder of, as its name suggests, the glutes and the hamstrings. Far from being some BS you throw in at the end of your squat workout, the GHR can feel like it’s trying to rip your hamstring off the bone and use it to string a fiddle. Explore the intricacies of terrorizing your hamstrings with the ultimate in posterior strength acquisition.

🏋️ Get Old School: Westside is still the best side for so much in the strength training realm, as this old “Bench Press Secrets” VHS, kindly uploaded to YouTube, demonstrates. Blast back in time to the unique era of ‘90s powerlifting culture and discover new (old) ways to increase your bench.

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