- What's up, Trainiacs?
This is today going to be a fairly short video,
I thought I'd do something because I get a number
of questions from people particularly those
with desk jobs, or people that drive a lot,
that say that they have problems around this area,
now, a lot of those problems come from two main things,
tight hips and weak glutes, and we're gonna fix
both of those today.
(techno music)
All right, so Trainiacs, when you end up
say, working at a desk job for hours and hours,
just by nature our body it tends to adjust to this,
so what happens is our hips end up getting really short
and then our chest ends up also kind of tightening up,
and what happens when certain muscle groups
end up tightening up is the opposing muscle groups
end up kind of going to sleep.
So with the chest, that ends up being
tight chest and asleep lats, and I'll explain
why that's a detriment to triathletes,
with tight hips it ends up being weak glutes,
now why that's a big issue is when we end up running
we need to run and land, and we need
to be able to be stable.
So when we land with weak glutes, it ends up
shifting every single step, so we end up running
and shifting a little bit of our energy out,
running and shifting a little bit of our energy out.
Energy is leaking out the side, and our body
is having forces that are placed outwards.
So we want to open this up and strengthen this,
and we're gonna show you how to do that.
All right, so what you want to do
when you are a desk worker, somebody who drives a lot,
is you want to do two opposing exercises.
The first one is going to stretch the hips
and how we do that is by just a static stretch
and I recommend that you do this,
this whole sequence really only needs
to take about seven or eight minutes
while you're watching TV at night.
So just set up like this, and to get that stretch
in the front of the hip you want to level out your back
so sticking your butt out like that
is not going to end up causing that hip to stretch,
you want to level it out to the point
that you can feel that stretch.
Now, historically a lot of people have thought
that they are going to stretch for like 20, 30, seconds
a little bit, or maybe a dynamic stretch,
what you want to do to actually make a muscle
longer and looser for long term, for longer
than just a couple minutes after that stretch
is hold the stretch for two to three minutes.
So because we sit and both hips are shortened
we want to stretch both hips for about two to three minutes.
So just hold it like this while you're watching TV.
Then once that's lengthened up
so we are unlocking our hips here,
we need to strengthen our glute med.
And the way that you can do this,
is with just a few exercises lying on your side,
and the first exercise you're gonna do
is we're going to point your toe and do leg lifts.
How I want you to do this, is think about
stacking your hips directly on top of each other,
a lot of people will have a tendency
to lean back and that's gonna place the weight
on the front of your leg at the front of the hip.
We want to, if anything, err on the side
of leaning a little bit forward.
Point the toe, and you can start with five leg lifts
and as you do each of these have your hand
kind of side lower back or glute med
and you want to feel that contract,
you want that area there that your hand is on
to be the first thing that's contracting.
So five to eight of those, then we point the toe up
and do five to eight with the toe up,
do five to eight with the toe down.
Now we want to do clockwise with the toe pointed,
doesn't matter if you start with clockwise
and then go counterclockwise or vice versa,
but just go both directions about five to eight
in each direction, then once you've done
those exercises do a thrust,
this is kind of a dynamic movement
that simulates running, so start with one hand out
and (groans) what you're hitting is the lower glute med,
so a little bit of a stretch and hit it.
All right, so that's fixing us for running,
that's going to stabilize every single foot strike
that we have.
But remember when I mentioned that our chest
ends up getting fairly tight?
What we need to do for that is open it up,
and you can just go up against a wall,
these are called wall angels, flatten your lower back
against the wall, so lower back, shoulder blades
and back of head are all touching the wall,
keep the back of the forearms on the wall,
just move them up and down as much as you can,
eventually your range of motion is going to increase,
we want to do somewhere around 10 of these.
That's going to open up the shoulders
and just that alone is going to allow you to,
when you're in the pool, have a much more forceful stroke
so that when you get your hand on the water
with a really nice grip of the water
when you push back that's gonna come from your lats.
You wanna push back with your lats,
not with the shoulder, not with the little muscles
of the shoulder and the deltoids,
but with the big muscles of the lat.
And likely if you have a tight chest,
you're not even gonna be able to activate that lat.
So the final thing that I want you to do
is we do stretch cords on Team Trainiac
before workouts, if you've done those wall angels
while watching TV at night, your chest
is going to be a little bit more opened up,
and then when you do stretch cords at the pool
you think about activating that lat,
pulling back from that lat, so that is going to give you
a really nice forceful catch, and between
those two exercises, which you really only need to do
maybe three nights a week for a grand total
of about eight minutes each time,
every single foot strike that you have,
if you're doing a half-marathon
and you're landing 18,000 times,
that's 18,000 times that you're gonna be stable
and actually pushing yourself forward
instead of moving off to the side.
If you're swimming a half Ironman
and you are swimming for 40 minutes
so that's gonna be 40 minutes of really nice
forceful movement, going a lot faster
and a lot more efficient, so do that
and you're hopefully going to be faster,
less injury-prone, just a stronger athlete in general.
If you like that video, hit the subscribe button below,
and if you're already subscribed
tell me how it feels when you do your first wall angel,
it's gonna be tight.