Tight hip flexors can have a negative impact on the body, affecting things like pain, injury, stress, posture, movement and performance. It’s likely that you’ll work with clients affected by tight hip flexors, giving you a unique opportunity to share knowledge and create better routines that set them up for long-term success.
Hip Flexor Tension Affects Core Function and Alignment
We can all agree on the importance of core stability and the alignment of the lower back, pelvis and hips for optimizing health and performance inside and outside of the gym. These areas create our functional “core” and set the foundation for proper posture and movement of a strong and resilient body.
At the deepest level within the body, there’s only one muscle group that directly attaches to each of these core areas: the iliopsoas, your hip flexor. A tight iliopsoas pulls the core out of alignment and affects the optimal length-strength relationships of the surrounding muscles. This impacts proper muscle recruitment, leads to movement pattern and muscle compensations, and ultimately increases injury risk.
When a client has difficulty maintaining core stability, it might not be as simple as cueing them to brace their core more. The inability to do this may be the result of hip flexor tension that must be released before their core function improves.
Identify Common Signs of Hip Flexor Tension in Your Clients
Common assessments like the Thomas Test or a lunge stretch are unreliable and should not be used in this scenario. These tests measure motion and flexibility, not muscle tension. Instead, look for these 5 common signs of hip flexor tension described by Christine Koth, MPT in this video:
- Anterior pelvic rotation and inward rotation of the leg while standing.
- Tenderness when applying pressure to the muscle.
- One foot/leg turns out more when relaxed and lying down on their back.
- Limited internal rotation or pinching when in hip flexion.
- Clunking near the hip when lowering a leg down towards the ground.
Resolving Hip Flexor Tension for Good
Common methods like stretching and glute strengthening aren’t enough to relieve tension in the psoas and iliacus muscles (your hip flexors).
Stretching, even when performed consistently, simply increases the stretch tolerance of a muscle to get into a larger range of motion, but does not have any impact on resting muscle stiffness. Stretching addresses motion tightness, not muscle tension.
Strengthening the glutes and abdominals while experiencing tension in the hip flexors will be ineffective due to the inability to fully recruit those muscles. It is difficult to strengthen muscles that activate 60% less because of tight and restricted hip flexors.
Strengthening the hip flexors directly works in a similar fashion. You can’t strengthen a muscle effectively that is already tight and contracted. For the best results, get the muscles to relax first before strengthening the hip flexors or any of the opposing muscles.
Studies confirm that techniques applying direct and precise pressure are effective at reducing muscle tension. When seeing a practitioner for treatment isn’t an option, a tool like the Hip Hook is a great solution for applying pressure to release tension in the hip flexors yourself. Both the iliacus and the psoas need to be individually released for the system to be fully restored.
Relaxing the hip flexors is an important first step before performing other forms of exercise to strengthen and lengthen the previously tight, contracted and weakened muscles. Skipping this step will make the other stretches and exercises less effective and the results will be short-term.
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