Controlled Articular Rotations – C.A.Rs

Controlled articular rotations (C.A.R.) are the exercises supporting the active and controlled guidance of a joint through its largest possible radius of movement. The advantage of C.A.Rs is the improvement of your versatility in movement, which are achieved by exercising different positions and in different intensity levels. It is up to you how intensive you want to use this mobility opportunity.

• Exercising CARs daily with a low intensity maintains joint health and range of motion
• Exercising CARs in warm up on a higher intensity will improve your performance
• Training CARs on a maximum intensity in combination with additional weight can be used for improving your motion range and strengthen your muscles

The correct execution of C.A.Rs is always balances by the interaction between the controlled rotation of a joint and the tension in the whole body. Therefore, it takes time and care to build up intensity to improve the rotations and increase the tension in the entire body. On one hand, this prevents our body from moving while we rotate a joint, on the other it activates more receptors and we achieve a greater effect for the joint we are currently moving. This means, before we start the rotation, we build up tension. Then we start the rotation.
We recommend you to exercise C.A.Rs daily. A short set of exercises on mobility takes between 10 and 15 minutes. As we already mentioned in other posts, our everyday life consists for the most part of sitting and lying, which means that we hardly ever move our joints through the largest possible radius of movement.

Our body is a complex construct, which can learn movements and positions like the balancing act, but if we do not use them your muscles forget the movement. In other words, if we do not remind our body of the maximum radius of movement of a joint on a regular bases, the body will keep this maximum position as useless and muscle ligaments will begin to shorten themselves because the body doesn't feel the need to keep the muscles longer.