I absolutely hate those videos where the title lure's you
in like click-bait.You click it and then
they don't give you the answer.
or they give you half an answer right at the end.
This is not one of those videos, though.
The world's greatest, most important best stretch
is a kneeling hip flexor stretch
Hips at 90 degrees, poke the butt back,
tuck it under, belly-button in,
and you are going to contract the right glute
and move forward gently into the stretch
If you put a gun to my head and said I can only do one stretch,
this is the stretch I would do.
But it takes a bit of explaining as to why it's so important
Remember back to that video I posted about TFL?
It's a little muscle here on the front corner of your hip.
It flexes and internally rotates the femur
putting it into a valgus position.
Consider it like the evil villain to your superhero duo of glute max
and glute med.
When I posted that video to Facebook, what I said in the comment was that
"If Bane was TFL, then the Joker would be the psoas."
But that's not 100% correct.
See, the Psoas is kind of good but also bad.
It has a good side and the evil side.
So it's not only like the Joker, it's more like Two-Face.
The joker chose me.
Because you were the best of us.
He wanted to prove that even someone as good as you could fall.
And he was right.
First a little bit of anatomy.
Now, Psoas is a bit of a tricky muscle to explain,
unless you've got a picture, and even better than a picture,
a rotating gif.
Psoas attaches to the front.
It's like the front side of your lumbar spine.
It runs under your organs, across the top of your pelvis
and then it attaches to the front of your hip bone.
The cool thing about the psoas is its action and its functions
are very similar.
They're both basically
to flex the hip and bring it up to above 90 degrees.
So, back to the psoas being Two-Face.
I’ve had enough.
You first.
The psoas has a good side and for a full rundown of that,
I recommend you go back and check out the videos
I did on Knee Drive and Arm Action when it comes to sprinting.
No psoas, no knee-drive and no sprinting power.
But now it's time for the bad news.
Because we spend so much of our life in a seated position,
that psoas basically lives its entire life
shorter than it should.
Over time, because muscle adapts to the environment you put it in,
that muscle and the tendon will slowly shrink,
shorten and tighten up.
Now it's time to dig deep into the functional anatomy.
Our muscles work in pairs or in coupling.
The biceps and the triceps, they kind of work in opposites.
One flexes and one extended the elbow.
But for that to happen, the body and the brain,
the nervous system, has to coordinate that control.
So while one is being turned on the other is relaxing
and kind of chilling out.
If it didn't, if they both fired together,
we'd be frozen solid or the muscles would rip each other apart
with the strongest one always winning.
This rule is called "reciprocal inhibition".
One muscle turns on, the other will switch off
and relax in order to allow the movements to happen.
Anyway, back to the psoas.
The Psoas lives in a force couple with your glute max.
Glute max extends the hip, this psoas flexes the hip.
But, if that psoas lives chronically short and tight
from all the sitting we do,
the nervous system kind of recognises that tightness as hyperactivity,
like a tonic muscle that I talked about a couple of weeks ago.
Over time, that tightness and that hyperactivity through here,
the brain will shut down our glutes, act like a defence mechanism,
like a self-preservation method so that we can't rip our own psoas
which is tight and hyperactive.
So, we can't rip it apart by extending the glutes.
The Glutes get shut-off and become electrically dead.
That's why this stretch, the kneeling hip flexor
is the world's most important.
Remove that literal handbrake to your athletic power in your glute
and hip extensions and remove that reciprocal inhibition
to allow your Glutes to wake up and return your pelvis
to a normal alignment and switch that psoas off.