What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
What are we talking about today?
Take a look.
Take a good, hard look.
Take a close look.
Get your mind out of the gutter and look up here, but we're focusing on what really matters.
That is your hips, your pelvis; everything you're probably forgetting about.
And I'm going to make them – Jessi – make them the star of the show.
They're going to be the star of the show here today because they need to be if you want
to start avoiding things like back pain because the biggest thing that I see across every
single person working out is an inattention to glutes.
An inattention to strengthen their glutes, especially into extension.
Now I'm going to give you a little bit of a sobering though.
The glute itself will only extend anatomically 10 to 15 degrees.
That's it.
Pure hip extension.
10 to 15 degrees from 0.
0 would be right here, okay?
So it's not that we have to train it into extension so much.
What we have to do is get to neutral in the first place because when we look at how we
do a lot of different exercises we never consciously try to even get to 0 to get from sort of a
flex position.
If you think about posturally how we stand, we kind of stand like this.
That means that our hips are in some sort of flexion here.
We need to have them straight up into extension.
0 degrees at least, back into neutral.
The only way we're going to do that is to consciously contract your glutes.
Literally squeeze your ass as hard as possible to get yourself into a neutral position.
Let me show you how this actually plays out.
If we did a deadlift, you take a deadlift and you get to the top it looks like this.
Down, here, engaged, press, and I come up.
Now that looks like the top of a deadlift.
But we're not really in extension.
I'm in at least 5 degrees of flexion here.
If I did this and I squeeze my cheeks together I just got myself into full extension, and
now I'm back up to the top.
Now I can hinge, hinge, down, press, squeeze into extension.
So we want to complete the rep every time.
Complete the rep.
Squeeze here.
Okay the next thing.
if I were to just squat, even if I was just squatting here, we tend to go down into our
squat and when we come up we usually squat like that and we stop here.
What we want to do is be able to squat into full hip extension.
So just engaging the hip again by squeezing.
We have that added benefit by squeezing the glutes together.
Sometimes our hips tend to stray during a squat, whereas they open a little bit, or
they open the other way.
It depends on imbalances in the hip.
Let's say they open a little bit this way.
If we squeeze our glutes together we're going to re-center ourselves and be in alignment
again, ready for the next squat.
Down, up, squeeze.
So we're always setting ourselves up in the right direction.
Another thing, again, hip extension.
People do barbell hip thrusts.
Great.
It's a great exercise for doing that and we're working on it.
We're trying to address it this week.
So we get in this position, push into our thighs here, and we drive up.
But look at this.
Look at the amount of flexion that's still in this hip.
It's dropping like this.
My thigh is coming down, and then it's angling back up again into my hip because I'm still
in flexion here.
Like that.
I think I went to the top, but watch how much more I have.
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze; all the way up.
Now I'm in neutral.
Now I can actually feel my glutes working a lot.
A lot more than here, but we do this.
We crank away at the reps thinking that we've done what we're trying to do, but we really
haven't until we go all the way up into extension.
So why does all this matter?
Because if we don’t get extension through the hips we're going to get it somewhere else.
We're going to get it through the low back.
So if I come up here and I'm trying to extend and I get that far, I'm going to try to arch
my back to get up even further.
I'm going to get the extension from my lumbar spine.
If I'm up here doing a deadlift and I come up and I don’t get extension I'm going to
do this.
We see it all the time.
Extend through the lumbar spine so that we look like we've reached full extension.
But that's not what we want.
As a physical therapist, you should be trained to be able to look for somebody and say "What's
hurting you?"
My low back.
"Okay, great."
The first place you want to look is either somewhere right below, or somewhere right
above.
If we're looking above we're looking into the thoracic spine.
If we're looking below we're looking to the hips.
There's something not doing its job that's causing the area that's hurt to be asking
for help and being asked to be called in for help when it's not really supposed to do that
job in the first place.
So all that extra extension through the lumbar spine is too much of a demand when the hips
are well capable of doing the job if you strengthen them the right way.
The last thing I would say is, a great exercise to focus on – again, a lot of people do
this wrong, too – step up.
Then you get both hips working in the same exercise.
So we get up here.
We see people do this.
They've got dumbbells in their hands, they're going to do a step up.
Okay, here, step up.
Here, step up.
How many times have I seen people doing this?
Here, step up.
Not once did I go into full hip extension.
Now, if I wanted to come up here and I didn't do full hip extension, if I lift myself this
way, here, if I lift my shoulders up, lumbar extension, but it's not hip extension.
So again, asking my back to do the job that my hips weren't doing.
If instead I actually finished all the way through, now I can ensure the hips are doing
the job.
So what I like to do is finish with my knee up.
If my knee comes up, this is driving this glute forward into full extension, or at least
into full neutral.
Then when I come back down I actively engage the hip here in extension.
I don’t just let it sit.
I engage the hip.
Boom.
Extend it here.
Here.
Drive up.
Boom.
Down.
Boom.
Down.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
Not only are the mechanics better, but you'll be stronger.
You're plugging those energy leaks that happen when we loosen everything up in the kinetic
chain, when we really should be focusing right here.
It all starts here.
This is your center mass and unless you start paying attention to actively contracting it
you're going to be leaving a lot on the table.
All right?
Guys, I hope you've found this helpful.
Remember, a weak ass is never a good thing to be, or to have.
I'm trying to correct you guys and help you not to be weak asses.
Be strong.
Be built functional, like an athlete.
If you're looking for a step by step plan for doing that head to ATHLEANX.com right
now and get our ATHLEANX training program.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what else you want to see and I'll do that in the days and weeks ahead.
All right, see you.