Tight Hips Affecting your Performance? 3 Ways to Loosen up & Recover
When you’ve overdone it and your hips are fried, how can you make them feel better? Tight hip flexors are a common phenomenon in the athletic community, especially for runners and bikers. The insertion of the rectus femoris (one of the primary hip flexors) has a big impact on the entire hip tissue system. Most people will feel discomfort in the front of the hip, but there are ways to manage it and get your hips feeling good again.
3 Strategies to Eliminate Tight Hips
Active Recovery with Marc Pro
Marc Pro will decongest and bring blood flow to the hips by activating the surrounding muscles. Hips that are lit up from intense work will loosen up and relax after using the hip flexor pad placement.
Pad placement around the hips can sometimes feel like a little bit of a mystery. Here are some best practices for placing the pads:
- Place one of the pads on your rectus femoris, which is in the middle of your quad.
- Place the other pad where the rectus femoris inserts into the hip, which the bulk of muscles on the front of your hip.
Tip: To make sure you are targeting the correct tissue system, avoid placing the pad on the femoral triangle. If you are unsure of exactly where to place the pad, it’s better to veer out towards the TFL, instead of inwards towards the femoral triangle.
Using Marc Pro will address the insertion of the rectus femoris into the hip, which often gets tight and overused. Remember, it’s not just about a single muscle. In times where your hip is completely lit, you need to address the entire system to get your body back to normal.
Hip Mobility Exercise
This mobility exercise takes only a few minutes and is an easy way to reset your hips. Hip function can get a little bit off with intense activity, so it’s important to take the necessary steps to correct hip mechanics.
Putting your legs up on a wall is a great way to get your hips to drop back into the socket. Once your legs are up, relax and add in some rotation, wobbling back and forth until it stops feeling good. This is a wonderful restorative position when your hips are feeling cooked. By creating some passive motion, approximation to the joint, and a little bit of easy rotation, signals are sent to the brain that everything is good here.
Soft Tissue Work
The next exercise to restore hip function involves a mobility ball and some isometrics. Targeting the rectus femoris with a mobility ball is a great way to break high tension in tissues that are overworked.
Keep working the tissue until you feel an improvement in your formerly tight hips. With some help from these three simple steps, your hip flexors will feel good and ready to perform again in no time.
- Grab a mobility ball and get down on the floor.
- Get into a comfortable position with the hip flexed on the side you are going to target first.
- Place ball right into the mass of tissues surrounding the hip. Target the insertion of the rectus femoris on the hip and surrounding tissues.
- Roll around on top of the ball and let it dig into the hip
- Isometrics: You can also add in some isometrics here by taking a big breath in, contracting, and slowly exhaling to relax. Stay in the position until it stops hurting.
Keep working the tissue until you feel an improvement in your formerly tight hips. With some help from these three simple steps, your hip flexors will feel good and ready to perform again in no time.
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