Will You Also Love This Hip Flexor Stretch? Try A Few Times Per Day

With my new love of hiking and especially those hard hikes with lots of uphills I noticed my hip flexors getting angry with me and tightening up. Glutes are looking good and feeling stronger with my hikes (toot toot…my own horn:) but at the expense of tighter hip flexors. I felt as if I was doing the waddle old peeps walk as we get older and don’t rotate the hips properly or in a large enough range of motion.

Here’s a stretch to remedy that which I have been showing clients for 2 weeks now. This can additionally help your glutes to not hurt as much or be as tight during a glute stretch. Just think how much sitting we do that shortens our hip flexors. How many times have you sat in a car for long periods of time or doing desk work only to have stood up and feel the effects of shorting those muscles. Sometimes if may have even taken a little bit of walking around to get your “normal” walking gate back. Well if you never stretch your hip flexors then that may become your new normal little by little and before you know it your balance is bad, you shuffle walk, take short steps and may have trouble getting up and down from a squat position.

For those of you with bad toes or poor ankle flexibility this one is for you as you don’t even have to involve them. Think about pulling from your back leg and don’t let that front knee go much over the toe for this particular stretch. You can try different heights depending on your balance.

Here’s a few good alternatives since during the day you won’t have access to a weight training bench like I do:

Chair that doesn’t roll
Back of low couch
End of a Bed
Small coffee table
Stair
Curb
Picnic Table Seat
Base of Open Trunk on SUV

As with anything you want to most improve you have to work at it consistently. My advice is that you try this stretch (one with back leg on bench) 2-4 times per day as a stretch and reset for your hips. The other stretch you should try as a flexibility screening and after you get better you will be able to heel your heel down and reach your leg higher up the wall. You will soon realize how quickly this becomes easier as well as how you can tolerate longer hold times and better balance. Should you need to hold onto something when you first try then go for it. Just do the darn stretch however you can to help you get those results of more mobile hips. When you get over the feeling like your back leg hip flexor isn’t going to rip from your body you will relax and notice the inner thigh stretch in the front leg. You can even start to gently rotate the back leg hip towards the leg that’s on the ground for a slightly different variation.  Remember that it takes 3 minutes doing a stretch everyday for 6 weeks to physiology lengthen it but in my professional opinion just like you can do 3 different bouts of 10 minute exercise throughout the day to get “health benefits”, you can also get these same benefits from short bouts of stretching even 30-60 seconds at a time. The biggest thing is consistency. You will then notice that certain activities you do tighten this muscle up as well.

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If you haven’t had a functional movement assessment with a professional observe the way you move different joints and movements with your hips, shoulders, wrists and spine then how do you know you are doing the most effective strength training, flexibility or cardio program? Hire someone like me to get you on track with a program to help you reduce current pain, eliminate pain, improve your current program or enhance your athletic performance.