Why do Daily CARS
(Controlled Articular Rotations)
CARs stands for controlled articular rotations. CARs are an extensively researched mobility routine that takes your main joints through their largest, safe range of motion.
What is the goal of CARs?
The goal of developing a daily routine of doing CARs is to take each one of your joints through its full range of motion. This is important because when it comes to our bodies, if you don’t move it, you lose it. We want to take our body through its full range of motion so our bodies continue to understand where we can move.
The brain and body constantly cut neural pathways that don’t serve us any purpose. So if you haven’t moved your hip out into abduction (away from your body) for years, your body is going to stop being able to do that. If you haven’t extended your shoulder back behind you, your brain isn’t going to trust your body to do that, so you won’t be able to. But if we consistently take our body through the full range of motion it's capable of, your brain will know that you can and do move those ways, and you’ll retain those abilities (outside of exterior factors like injury and disease).
So we want to do our daily mobility routine so our brain and body continue to trust all of the ways we can move, and we retain those abilities. It’s worth 10-15 minutes in the morning, or at another part of the day that fits better for your schedule. Think about someone you know or have seen online who is 70+ years old, and still actively moving freely. A daily CARs routine can help you be that person who doesn’t lose mobility as you age.
Dr Andreo Spina, who founded Functional Range Systems and worked to map out the CARs pathways, says that the foundational benefit of CARs is allowing you to ‘Keep the range of motion you have.’
So What are CARs?
CARs are a routine that takes each one of our joints through a particular path, working through the largest range of motion you can with that joint without compensating with other body parts. The body is always looking for the path of least resistance, which means it takes effort to isolate particular joints without bringing in other parts of the body. These compensations are what often allows people to demonstrate huge ‘joint circles’ on social media. CARs are the base level of the Functional Range Systems, which is the system that my Functional Range Conditioning mobility specialization falls under.
A brief explanation of the science behind CARs
Another important aspect of Daily CARs is that it helps provide your joints with the nutrients they need to stay healthy and heal. Our joints are made from a connection of muscle tissue, to tendons, to ligaments, to cartilage. Progressively these have less blood supply, which is why muscle tissue is the quickest to heal, and tendons heal slower, ligaments even slower and many people think cartilage can not heal at all. The cartilage that makes up our joints has no blood supply, which is what leads to people thinking it can’t heal, as it is a very slow process. Cartilage receives oxygen and nutrition through a process called diffusion. Diffusion is when the cartilage receives oxygen and nutrition from surrounding joint fluid, and this happens through movement. When we move our joints, the pressure sends waste products and fluids out of the cartilage cells, and then the fluids diffuse back into the cartilage cells with the oxygen and nutrients they need to heal. While some injuries definitely necessitate surgery and cartilage will never heal quickly, the CARs daily mobility routine helps give us the best chances of building new cartilage. It also simply keeps our joints as healthy as possible by making sure they get the nutrients they need for healing.
