When was the last time your hip flexors got a good stretch? If you find yourself sitting for long periods of time or heavily focusing on lower-body exercises, more often than not your hips feel tight. You may be regularly impacted by tight hips, which can cause a myriad of issues ranging from discomfort to decreased mobility and even pain. A simple way to relieve this tightness is by stretching your hip flexors. Making this part of your daily stretching routine can have numerous benefits for your overall health and enhance your quality of life.
Tightness in your hips directly impacts your spine. This is because the hips and spine are connected by muscles, ligaments, and nerves. In fact, sometimes the targeted pain in your back may actually be stemming from tension felt in the front of your body, such as your hips. This tightness can also cause a forward tilt of the pelvis, known as an anterior pelvic tilt. This misalignment can cause a hunched over posture that can be difficult to correct when there is a lack of flexibility.
Stretching your hip flexors improves its flexibility, helping the pelvis to properly realign. As a result, this can help alleviate strain on the lower back and strengthen the muscles to encourage proper alignment of the spine. By regularly stretching your hip flexors, your posture will be better than ever!
Tight hips can greatly impact sports and fitness performance. For runners, having a healthy range of motion in the lower body is crucial. Limited range of motion can impact the extension and flexion of the legs, resulting in shorter strides. And as we saw above, tight hips can impact posture, which is an important piece of being able to run properly. This is why stretching is an essential part of training for many runners!
Your hips don’t only serve one function. They rotate, bend, and extend, all of which are needed for proper movement! Tight hips can cause discomfort in the simplest tasks such as walking, standing up, and bending. The more we can move with less pain, the better our everyday activities will be! Stretching hip flexors to reduce tightness and improve flexibility and range of motion can result in better movement and better quality of life!
One of our favorite stretches to do at StretchLab is the Side Lying Hip Flexor Stretch. This stretch does a fantastic job of targeting and elongating the hip flexor muscles. It can easily be done by lying on your side and, while bending the knee of your top leg, pulling your foot towards your glutes. At StretchLab, a Flexologist would do the act of pulling your leg, while supporting your body in place to ensure only the desired muscles are stretched.
The benefit of having this stretch done as an assisted stretch is having the reassurance that the leg is pulled as far back as it can be without causing pain, and held in the position long enough for optimal benefits. Our Flexologists also incorporate PNF stretching by having you push your leg against their hand to contract the muscles for a few seconds, and then releasing to allow you to go deeper into the stretch.
Try this stretch, and other great lower body stretches at a StretchLab near you!