All in the Hips| Part 1: Mobility

by Molly Rausch, Certified Personal Trainer and Certified Athletic Trainer

Hello everyone! This week’s “Fitness Tip of the Week” is the first of a two part series. Our topic for the next two weeks is going to be about your hips! This week will be focused on improving your hip mobility and next week is about hip strength. 

Hip mobility is so important! The hip joint is designed to have multi-directional movement and rotation. If any direction is limited, this creates changes elsewhere in your body to compensate. These other body areas are not designed to do your hip’s job, so it causes breakdown resulting in weakness, pain, and injury. Depending on what motion is restricted at the hips, the compensation problems can be with the knees, back, or both. Tight hips can also cause a whole lot of trouble with core and glute strength, which is our bodies foundation to building full body strength. 

To better help you understand how this happens, this example might help. When you sit, the muscles on the front of your hips (known as your hip flexors) are stuck in a shortened or tightened position. When you go to stand, your hip flexor muscles are elongated (stretched). Normally, this wouldn’t cause any issues, because your hip flexor muscles wouldn’t stay tight for long thus restoring normal range of motion. If you sit for prolonged periods of time; however, it becomes harder for your hip flexors to adjust. When the hip flexors become tight and stay tight, they pull on your lower back and cause your whole hip complex to tilt forward. This is know as an anterior pelvic tilt. Your hamstrings then become stretched, because they attach to the opposite side your hip complex. All these imbalances can cause lower back pain, weak core muscles, and movement limitations. 

Tips to Stretch those Hips:

Tightness around your hips can be caused by a lot of different muscle groups, not just your hip flexors. You need to give them all some TLC to make ensure good hip mobility. Hip flexors, groin muscles, IT Band, and glutes are a few of the big muscles to focus on. Below are some examples of great hip mobility exercises to help you get started.

Couch Stretch: -Keep core engaged, push hips forward -Hold 30 sec per side	Quadruped Adductor Rockbacks:  -Keep spine straight -10 reps per side
Spiderman Lunge: -Can place knee on ground to modify -Alternate sides, 10 reps each side	Deep Squat Hold: -Feet flat, back straight -Hold 30 sec
Figure 4: -Grab behind uncrossed knee, pull to chest -Hold 30 sec per side	Pigeon Pose:  -Keep hips straight, lean forward until stretch felt -Hold 30 sec per side

If you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to contact me at mrausch@healthworksfitness.com or comment below! Thanks for reading!