Hip Mobility for Atlanta Athletes
How are those hips feeling after your workout? Are they feeling sore, tight, or even painful? Do you feel like you don’t have full range of motion? If you answered yes to any of these descriptions, then are you in urgent need of hip mobility work.
If you do not take care of your hips after each workout, they are going to break down because of cascading failures– meaning you will have to put your account on hold because you will be injured. Don’t let that happen to you. We see so many new patients at our Inman Park chiropractic office that were athletes who did not work on hip mobility– and tried to muscle through a workout just to end up injured and having to drop out of classes.
Check out these seven simple exercises to fix your hip pain and restore movement so you can continue working out and doing what you love. If any exercise causes pain, stop immediately. There will be some discomfort with the mobility work; however, pain means stop, and call our office so we can examine you and see what structures are injured so we can help you in your recovery.
First Some Tests:
Before you start to do any hip mobility work, let’s make sure that some of these muscles are actually tight and overactive–compared to weak. If the muscle is weak and you continuously stretch it, you are going to be making things worse. Also, if we can be more specific to your mobility needs, you will save time in the gym by working on muscles that actually need to be released.
1) Psoas (Hip Flexor) Weakness Test
2) Tight Quad vs. Tight Psoas Test
Now The Mobility Work:
All of these mobility exercises are to be done AFTER a workout/proper warm-up.
These mobility drills are mostly static stretches which are to be done after you have finished your workout. If you do them before your WOD you will be statically stretching cold muscles, and that is going to potentially lead to an injury. In general, the rule is to do dynamic stretches to warm up before your workout, and static (long hold) stretches post exercise.
1) Quad/Psoas Release
2) Quad Stretch (Couch Stretch)
3) Psoas Stretch (Cobra Stretch)
4) Adductor Stretch (Butterfly Stretch)
5) Piriformis Foam Roller — Do 1st
6) Piriformis Stretch — Do 2nd
7) Internal & External Rotation (90/90 Stretch)
If you are having pain and discomfort in your hips or any other area of the body that is unresponsive to self-care, please schedule an appointment online so we can do a full examination of the body and see where you may be having structural shifts that are causing compensation in your movement patterns.
Do you have a friend that could use the information you just learned? Great! Share this post with them so that they can be better equipped to do some self-care. They will thank you for it.
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