Maintaining strength and flexibility in your hips is arguably the most important measures you can take to keep your overall posture good and avoid chronic joint pain as you age. Tight hips change the alignment of your pelvis, moving your upper body away from its’ neutral center of gravity. This causes certain muscles to have to overwork to hold your pelvis up. The most common area of pain due to tight hips is the lower and mid back, this comes from tight hip flexors shifting the pelvis down in the front and up in the back. Today, we are going to work on developing strength and flexibility in your hips by working specific exercises that target all of the major hip muscles. When your goal is to increase range of motion, technique becomes even that much more important.
It is not important how deep you go with each given exercise, what is desirable is a visible increase in range of motion from the first rep to the last. I ask only that you challenge yourself and your flexibility appropriately with each rep. What is important is that you don’t try to move deeper into any exercise by deviating your form.
Today we are going to perform eight reps of:
Goblet squats - Keep your back flat, and try not to lean forward on this lift. The squat is pelvis down, your knees tracking your toes. If you get to the bottom and your pelvis rolls under your body and rounds your lower back, you’ve gone too far.
Cosack squats - Keep your unloaded leg straight at the knee and point your toe upward, keep the loaded foot completely flat. Put your hands out front as a counter balance. Develop full depth cosack squats by increasing the depth one rep at a time, don’t force anything.
Bodyweight lunge - This exercise is meant to diminish tightness in your hip flexors, one of the most common areas of tightness leading to back pain. Make sure you keep your body completely upright, don’t lean forward as you lower the back knee or push back out of the lunge. Keep your core tight as you push away, push forward with your back foot and up with your flat front foot.
Stiff leg deadlift - This will open up your hamstrings, and send your nervous system into overdrive as your muscles are trying to stabilize, balance, lengthen and lift the weight. A slight bend in the knee of the planted foot is fine. Pivot on only the axis of your hip, do not let your back round! A tip that helps is to think of your back foot raising up, and your upper body moving down on the pivot point of your hip.
Take a quick drink if you need and catch your breath, you are going to repeat this circuit three more times for a total of four rounds.
When you lengthen muscles during exercise, you can always expect them to be more sore the next day than if you were to work those muscles throughout their usual comfort zone, so be prepared. That feeling of soreness that may accompany you everywhere you go tomorrow, will give way to better posture and better motor patterns in your workouts and in your daily life.
Thank you for working out with me today, and for being a part of the Kettlebell Movement!
Leave a Reply