My thoughts on Jeff’s comment are similar to Smitty’s, but a bit different.

I feel ALL athletes need a base level of mobility first, and this would be joint mobility work for EVERY joint, taking it through a full range of motion. If you want to speak a foreign language (new movement) you need to know the letters first. Basic joint mobility for every joint is the letters.

Putting them together in words is the next step, so you work to combine them into more movement based approaches; and these appear more sports specific.

Smitty is dead nuts on, that all of this is based of an analysis of the athlete’s current weak points.

Hope that helps!
Rock on
Mike T Nelson PhD(c)
http://www.ExtremeHumanPerformance.com

For athletes, the analysis of the program must be regressive. Start and analyze the movements of the sport(s) and then get a baseline for the athlete. What is the gap between what movements the athletes can make (and can the athletes make them powerfully and with strength) and what the sport requires. Then build exercises and movements into the program to address these gaps.

Smitty, in terms of flexibility versus mobility, is the natural progression (assuming restriction) to restore a little bit of flexibility at a time and then immediately lay down stability in the “newly” acquired ROM? And then to work on maintaining that new ROM by incorporating various mobility drills?