How’s your
squatting going? Any tightness in your hips? Feel that you don’t go as low as
you could. Just ask one of our writers, Laura, about her new discovery of her
hip flexors J
People
quite often do take care of their pelvic region and train their abs and core
but do forget to take care of the hip flexors. More accordingly Ilipsoas, Iliacus
and Psoas Major muscles (see picture on the left). I’ve heard so often people telling that they do
stretch their hip flexors but still have either pains while squatting or can’t
squat low enough. And quite often the quilty part is the hip flexor muscles.
Just
stretching them may be enough if you’re stiff as a tree trunk but for so many
of us the problem usually is that we stretch and stretch but we really don’t
stretch the actual flexors. Quite often peoples Quadriceps muscles are quite
tight and the stretch is actually felt there. This again is understood as
stretched hip flexors. The same problem is if you’re hypermobile and you can’t
feel any stretch when stretching the hip flexors.
Quite often
the only help for it is to do a manual treatment for it, i.e. manually getting
the muscles massaged. This I don’t recommend to be done by oneself but by a
professional as there’s so many things that can go wrong but usually it helps.
The idea is to get the contracted muscle fibers to loosen up. Sounds easy? Not
so J but
doable.
If you
don’t have a possibility to get to manual treatment here’s a few tips to try to
stretch them in a new way. Do the stretches as an own exercise on a recovery
day.
1. Take a swan pose and flex your forward
leg ankle. Try to rotate your hips to parallel and let the gravity do its bit.
Keep the pose for three to four minutes and change sides.
2. Take a deep lunge with the back legs
knee on the floor. Lower your hips to as close to the
floor as possible and then just breath. Let the gravity work its magic again.
Mikko Utecht
Physical Therapist
www.rilaks.fi
http://www.facebook.com/fysioMU
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti