Can you explain what Controlled Articular Rotations are and how they are beneficial?

Question

Colin Diment · Answer

Hey, Lee, this is a great question. Controlled Articular Rotations, or CARs, are simply mindfully and intentionally taking your joints through their full range of motion. They're beneficial because movement is what lubricates and hydrates and maintains the health of your joints. Most traditional exercises and certainly training for sport is working through the same patterns of motion over and over and over again. And in doing that, we tend to only use a really small percentage of our total mobility. Now, the body is a great adaptation machine, in that the things that you're doing and the patterns that you're expressing, your body will give you more of, and it will get better at them. And the patterns and the ranges of motion that you're not using, your body will start to restrict and limit, and you won't have access to those ranges of motion anymore. So CARs are a systematic, routine way to make sure that on a regular basis, you're taking each individual joint through its full range of motion, which helps maintain and improve your mobility and maintain the long-term health of your joints.

Dr. Kari Martin, PT, DPT, OCS · Answer

Can you explain what controlled articular rotations are and how they are beneficial? So a controlled articular rotation or a CAR is an active rotational movement of a joint through a full end range of motion. So you're kind of differentiating between the mobility of a joint as well as the flexibility of you know that muscle in there. Flexibility is defined as your muscles ability to passively move through a range of motion. So I could stretch your hamstring for you to determine its flexibility. Whereas your mobility is your own ability to move a joint through an available range of motion. So your mobility encompasses flexibility as one of those factors but also would include the joint stiffness, your strength, your neuromuscular control and kind of those factors. Whereas your flexibility is really just kind of dependent on actual physiological muscle length. So for a neck CAR or a controlled articular rotation you're just going to move your neck through an entirely full range of motion. So you're going to come through into flexion, tip all the way to one side, do that lateral flexion, you're going to rotate all the way through to extension and then kind of come in through that way and then you can click it back the other way around, flexion, lateral flexion, rotation, extension, lateral flexion, back to flexion there. You can move through that with any joint in your body, your shoulders, your hips, you can move it through your spine, your wrists, your feet, your ankles, all this bit. It's just going to be kind of dependent how much range of motion you can get based on the ligamentous structure of your joints. These are beneficial because if you don't use the mobility that you have at any certain joint you will lose it. So you want to just kind of maintain as much mobility as you have to maintain optimal function of your joints. Always move through a pain free range of motion though.

Swimming

Strength

Triathlon

Photography

Track & Field

Nutrition

Physical Therapy

Running

Pets

Cycling

Podcasting

HealthCare

Musculoskeletal

Hockey

First Responders

Integrative Medicine

Chiropractic

Cross Country Skiing

Adaptive Sports

Climbing

Mental Health

Surfing

Tennis

Military

Mind Body

Scholars

Criminal Justice

Liquor

CrossFit

Golf

Soccer

Pickleball

Hunting

Public Speaking

Venture Capital

"Can you explain what Controlled Articular Rotations are and how they are beneficial?"