Hi, I’m Dr. Eric Cobb of Z-Health Performance.
We are going to be looking today at two different exercises focused on eccentric, lengthening of the hip flexors.
These are incredibly powerful improving for improving both hip pain and in flexibility, as well as performance.
Before we jump into that.
If you’re new to Z-Health, I just want to make sure you understand that we are an education company. For the last 20 years, we’ve focused on educating, world-class doctors, therapists, trainers, and coaches in a brain-based approach to improving movement, pain and performance.
That’s what we do. We also have had a commitment for years to help over a million people get out of pain and improve their lives. In order to do that, We have been building free content for again almost 20 years. So there are over 500 videos here for you.
We have online course, we have free ebooks you can check out so make sure, if you’re not in the field, that you utilize those resources. Now today, like I said, what I want to get into is looking at hip flexors.
These get a very bad rap, you know, everyone talks about hip flexors are tight because I run but then I sit all day at work and there are a lot of ways to work on hip flexors because we have a bunch of them.
We have some that cross, the hip and the knee, we have others that come from, the lumbar spine and the pelvis. So, it is unusual to find one exercise that solves all of your problems and that that’s unlikely. The thing that I want to focus on today, is the fact that many people spend a lot of time stretching hip flexors.
They do a lot of lunging and other things. And those are great exercises. We use them.
In general whenever we are progressing people through a rehab process dealing with hip flexor issues, eventually, we want to add some strengthening work to it because often, if we can improve strength, while we’re working through a healthy range of motion, the changes last longer.
So what I want you to do first is just take a walk, get an idea of how your hip flexors feel.
If you want to get down and do a little bit of mobilization first just to see how much tension you feel through the leg down by the knee up to the pelvis and the low back.
And that’s great because we always want you to assess, do the exercise, and then reassess.
Having said that, what we’re going to focus on first is an isometric lunge. All right.
This is a really powerful way of working on building awareness for the hip flexor while having it in a lengthened and tensioned state.
Super simple idea. We’re going to get into a lunge position.
Now, I’m not going to get super particular here, but what I do want for this one, because we’re going to be working more on hip flexors, I would like for your spine to be more upright than here.
Want to put a little bit of load on it.
We’re going to drop down into we’re almost 90 degrees. For this version, I’m keeping the foot flat.
You can also do it up on the ball of the foot If you really want to make this hard.
Two things are going to happen now.
This heel is going to pull back.
So I’m tightening up this hamstring.
This foot or knee is going to now pull forward.
So I’m getting tension here and I’m getting tension in my hamstring.
So as I’m pulling, I’m going to now try to hold that for 10 to 20 seconds, and then I’m going to relax.
The idea is to eventually build up to about 3 minutes per side.
All right, that is a lot of isometric work.
But in doing that you’re going to increase your strength here and increase your stability.
You’re also going to over time, hopefully, lengthen some of those tissues if they need that.
As a brain-based practitioner we don’t really talk that much about tissues that need to be stretched or whatever, because the research on that’s pretty sketchy.
What we do know is that the amount of tone being held in the tissues is controlled by the brain, and as we convince it that it needs to release that we can change the tone and usually that feels like we’ve developed more length in that area.
That’s exercise number one. Exercise number two is called an eccentric wall push.
So I’m going to go over to the wall.
Your job here is to get your hands at about shoulder height, lock your elbows.
You’re now going to get into a position where you feel like you can push the wall, because I want you to actually be driving into it.
Now, as you’re driving into the wall, you’re going to slowly bend the rear knee and count to five as you go down to the floor and then come back up comfortably.
Notice throughout you going to try to keep pushing into the wall.
Normally what happens is as soon as you start to lower the knee, you reduce pressure.
I need you to keep pushing because we’re trying to create that load on the body, as we’re moving into that lunge position.
So if I had to give you two exercises to take to the desert island to work on your hip flexors, this would be two of the most important ones.
All right, soo give these a shot.
Let us know what you think in the comments, and we’ll see you next week.
