HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR HIP FLEXIBILITY
If you don’t know how to stretch your hips, don’t feel overwhelmed or intimidated, It’s really easy and feels great when you are done! The “hip” isn’t one specific muscle but an area of the body. For the purpose of this article we are going to say the hip is made up of the glutes (back/side of hip), psoas (front of hip) and adductors (inside of hip). Below are a few stretches you can can start doing to cover each area, and soon you’ll be surprised how much better you feel
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1. Reverse Cossacks
This movement starts off our list because 97.6% (made up number) of people don’t do anything for their adductors. Almost always lower back pain patients would tell me they were doing some sort of glute or psoas stretch, but never the adductors. If you want strong legs, you work the quads AND hamstrings. Strong arms, triceps AND biceps. Healthy hips, you need to be working all aspects, which include the adductors. We can think of the adductors as the inner thigh or groin muscles.
2. Diagonal Lunge
Next up we are going to address the front side of the hip or the Psoas muscle. As you can see on the right, it starts in the spine and runs to the thigh. A traditional hip flexor stretch hits the bottom part of the muscle (where it attaches to the femur) but fails to address the spinal aspect of the muscle. Thats why I have had such great success with the diagonal lunge, it hits the top portion of the muscle as well.
3. Piriformis Stretch
We are going to finish this out with everyones favorite, the Glutes 🍑! It’s funny I’m saying we are working the Glutes and we are doing the “Piriformis Stretch.” While this stretch is designed to hit the Piriformis, it also hits those backside cheek muscles nicely. I prefer this stretch since 99.9% of all other Glute stretches tend to place unwanted stress on the outside of the knee. If the variation below is too difficult, check out this modification.
WHY MORE IS NOT BETTER
Remember, when starting any new activity/exercise, you don’t want to do too much too soon. You need to build up your tolerance to it. For that reason 2-3x’s a week will be more than enough. Below is how I would structure this routine for a client 👇
3 rounds at your own pace:
Reverse cossack x 5 reps/side SLOWLY
Diagonal Lunge x 10 reps/side + hold the last rep x 10 secodns
Piriformis stretch x 30-60 seconds/side