Whenever I speak to 50-year-olds about their training there’s one theme that comes up so often it’s easy to take it as gospel: they wish they’d done more stretching earlier in life. Their advice to the young bucks looking to maintain health and vigour into later life is often to put a big focus on mobility work. Pronto. I tend to nod along, but I don’t entirely agree.

Do You Really Need Stretching to Stay Mobile?

The truth is, dedicated mobility training – think yoga or static stretching – has been shown time and again to be matched for improving flexibility and range of motion by something many people are already doing: resistance training.

That’s not to say that there’s no benefit to mobility work. But if time is precious, strength training done well may be one of the more reliable ways to avoid aches and pains, with studies showing that resistance training significantly improves joint range of motion on its own. Crucially, when studies directly compare resistance training with stretching, the improvements in range of motion aren’t meaningfully different.

Can Strength Training Replace Mobility Work?

Put simply, if your goal is functional mobility and flexibility, full-range resistance training can be highly effective, and often matches traditional stretching or yoga-style programmes. Again, this isn’t a case against mobility work. It’s an argument for not treating it like a moral obligation or a prerequisite.

The seizing up many people experience later in life is more strongly associated with reduced physical activity and increased sedentary time – along with loss of muscle and changes in how the nervous system interprets threat and discomfort. If your body starts to see certain positions as risky, you’ll stop exploring them – shrinking your physical freedom. The typical midlife ‘I’m seizing up’ narrative is also far more plausibly linked to years of desk work and less overall movement than it is to not getting enough time on a yoga mat.

If you’re reading this thinking: ‘But I lift hard and heavy. So it’s not that…’ It might not be a problem with your approach – but with your programming. Speaking from personal experience, as I veered into a more sedentary, desk-bound era of my career, but continued to hammer hard and heavy training, I noticed more aches and pains – back issues, tight shoulders, my posture feeling like it had gone to the dogs. I don’t think this is because because I wasn’t doing ‘mobility work’. It was because I was switching between heavy lifting – often very confined lifting due to time (think heavy deadlifts at lunchtime) and then remaining locked into stationary positions for the other 23 hours of the day. I was overloading muscles, but I wasn’t moving my body through full and varied ranges consistently. That is a recipe for seizing up.

How to Improve Mobility Without Stretching

The solution isn’t to transform into a fully-fledged yogi overnight. It’s simply to move more often. Sit down less. Stop spending so long in one position. That can include dedicated mobility work, but if you’re pressed for time, then make your strength training do double duty. Ensure you’re performing a variety of movements through full, controlled ranges of motion, across your entire body, consistently – not just under maximal loads in high-tension, shortened-range lifts. In short: find your way into positions you always want to be able to get into – and back out of again – daily. Squat deep; hinge fully; lunge, rotate and hang. Ask on each rep, ‘am I getting a good stretch through a full range of motion here?’ Ask each week ‘have I challenged my body through as much range of motion as possible this week?’

The Real Key to Staying Mobile Long-Term

Doing all of this properly, under control and often – without dedicated stretching time – isn’t going to ‘tighten you up’. You’re far more likely to tighten up when you stop doing it. And overall, be on guard against spending too much time in one position. Take regular movement breaks, try a standing desk, drink so much water that toilet breaks force you out of your chair. A couple of static stretches before your session aren’t going to be a replacement for you keeping moving.

With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.    

As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.   

Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.   

 You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.