♪ Bob and Brad, ♪
the two most famous physical therapists on the internet. ♪
- Hi folks,
I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- We are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course.
- Talk about how to unlock your hip flexors
with these stretches,
which is good for hip pain and low back pain.
And we're gonna show you right now.
I'm gonna jump right into this, Brad.
- Okay let's do it.
- I'm not gonna waste anytime.
So yeah, get him.
- Yeah, let's get him situated.
There you go.
- All right.
So this is one of the main hip flexors, the iliopsoas,
and as you can see, it's actually tucked,
hooked up into the spine here.
- [Brad] Sure.
- And then it goes down and hooks up to the hip here,
lesser trochanter.
But can you see, if this muscle is tight,
how you would actually pull you forward
and that's what can give you back pain.
It can give you into that anterior pelvic tilt
and it can also give you kind of, keep you flexed.
- Right.
So it puts more stress on the back muscles,
as well as the spine and the discs.
- And the hip itself.
- Sure, it's all connected.
- You also have muscles that go across
both the hip and the knee, like the rectus femoris
and the sartorious and the tensor fasciae latae.
So if those are tight,
those are all gonna pull on this whole complex too.
- And actually they'll connect right up to the AIIS and over
which gives 'em a little more leverage.
- But it'll also pull down.
- Right and tilts that more anterior tilt
even more probably.
- So what we're getting to,
the point we're trying to make here is that you need...
- We're boring people, Bob.
- You need to stretch this.
You need to stretch these muscles
and we're gonna show you how to do that.
By the way, if you are new to our channel...
- Oh yes.
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And that's not saying much, is it, Brad?
- Well it's better than nothing.
- Yeah, I guess it is.
- Let's get him out of here.
- And even he wants to leave.
All right.
Let's show, let's show first, Brad
how you can tell whether or not your hip flexors are tight.
- Sure.
- One way, just a basic way is,
if you're laying out on the ground here
or on the floor and you can't even do a pelvic tilt,
like there's a gap right in here.
If I can't take my and flatten my back.
- Here, move your hand, there you go, Bob.
Do that again.
Cause you, you can see his belt and go that again.
So, he's arched here.
There you go.
So he's pushing that stomach down.
It's a, it's kind of hard to see,
but his pelvis is rotating back.
- But we got a better way here, Brad.
Let's show the better way.
- A little clearer.
- So Brad's gonna be the patient here
and you can do this yourself though.
And you can just see yourself.
I'm gonna show you how to look at things.
So you're gonna sit on the edge,
Well, I guess you can do it on the edge of a bed.
It'd be better on the edge of a bench.
- Yeah, you need something firm.
- Something firm.
- So it might be hard to do at home.
- Yeah, all right.
Lay back, Brad.
So he's gonna lay back and he;s gonna pull up on one leg.
So we're testing this one here.
And Brad's a good subject here, because look, he is tight.
The first thing you're gonna look for is,
is the back of the thigh hitting the bench?
And his is not, it's actually raised up a little bit,
which tells me that the muscles
that cross his hip are tight.
Now the second part, the muscles that also cross the knee,
They're also tight, cause look at his knee,
it's almost straight here.
Generally, with someone who's not tight,
it would go up to at least 70 degrees.
90 is a right angle.
You feel that, don't you Brad?
- Oh yeah, Bob, thank you.
- So, and 70 would be about right here.
That's about normal, but his is about,
I don't know, 40?
- Well, well what do you see, Bob?
You know, that's the way life is.
But let's take a look at the other one.
- All right, let's look at the other one.
So now he is gonna go ahead, we're gonna compare.
He's gonna go a little bit off on the angle here.
And this one goes out.
Now look at this one.
This one goes down.
The thigh is actually hitting the bench.
The knee is still bad.
So your, your quads and your tensor fasciae latae
and your sartorious are all a little bit tight yet.
Not as tight.
So you're a little bit better on this side.
You're gonna have to focus on this side, Brad,
and a little bit on this side too,
especially your quads.
- And lo and behold, it does make sense
cause I have had injuries and whatnot on my right side.
And if I do have some problems, it's my right side.
So it all makes sense.
- He's had injuries more than that too.
So, alright Brad, let's first start off with bridging.
Do you want me go ahead and do this.
- Should we move this out of the way?
- Yeah, let's move this over.
- Get centered, Bob.
- Now what you might wanna do is even start off
with actually just doing a little bit
of a plevic tilt.
- Pelvic tilt, yep.
- So he's gonna tighten the abdomen
and make that pelvic rotate backwards.
- The reason I want you to do that now is
because then you can also do it
while you're doing like bridging.
So, bridging, you can start off just by going up this
and you're stretching the hip flexors here a little bit
even a little bit of the two joint, you know, hip flexors.
- Sure.
- And when you get up into this point,
now you can actually do a pelvic tilt here.
- Now, if you've never done this before,
it takes a little practice.
- Yes, it does.
This is not that easy a thing to do.
And also if you wanna make it even more advanced,
Brad, put your heel closer to your butt.
- All right, so he's bringing this closer.
- And now I'm stretching across the two joints again,
the hip and the knee.
And then I'm doing the pelvic tilt.
- So he;s getting that sartorious and that biceps femoris,
all those lovely long muscles.
- Not the biceps femoris.
That wasn't one of them, it was the tensor fasciae latae,
was the other one, so.
Oh, we forgot to mention, by the way, if your leg goes out,
it's the tensor fasciae latae tight too.
- Right.
The biceps femoris is biarticular.
- Well, it is, yes.
But it's on the back.
- We, they, we can talk about that.
- All right.
Next one, Brad.
We're gonna go ahead and do...
- No, it's on the front.
It's right here.
- All right, we'll have to discuss it later.
All right, now we're gonna go ahead and do the,
we're gonna do, this is a standard one.
This is the one I like to do,
Brad, you're gonna go ahead
and you're gonna get a pillow usually
because it's kind of uncomfortable
when you kneel on the floor.
But I'm gonna go ahead
and I'm gonna lean forward like this and pull forward.
- Here, move this arm, Bob.
So there you go.
You can see.
- You can see my microphone there probably too.
- Yep, so he's got this angle here and this angle here,
that would be the hip extension
that we're working for to get these muscles to stretch.
- Now you can, we have found too,
if you do stretch down like this,
it does give a different stretch
and it does stretch it more.
- Yeah and we didn't, you know,
we actually did this cause we we found it on another study
and it's like,
we didn't think that was really gonna work well
but it actually does to a degree.
- Can you hand me the strap, Brad?
- Yeah.
- So we gotta use the stretch out strap,
if you wanna get advanced here.
Some of you can probably grab this.
- Rectus femoris!
- Yeah, rectus femoris (laughs).
I knew you were wrong. - Brain fart, yes.
- He was saying bicep femoris.
- Yeah, Bob, you got me again.
Well, you know we gotta see
what our listeners say about that.
- So this is an advanced stretch.
If you got your stretch out strap,
we always list our products below
in the comment section there
and in the description section.
But you can go ahead and get a great stretch here.
- Oh, I bet you can really feel that right now.
- Yeah, yeah.
This is a nice advanced stretch.
This is, you know, if you were only gonna do one stretch
this might be the one I'd have you do.
And if you want to actually stretch the rectus
or not the rectus, now you gott me saying rectus femoris,
iliopsoas, you actually can lean over this way a little bit.
- Ope, we got skin showing, Bob.
This is a family show.
- Yeah, you remember how it attaches
to the side of the balls?
- Right, yep.
We're gonna get that, the TFL,
that muscle up in here goes all the way down to the knee.
There, stretch that out.
- Yep, and you can actually do
some pelvic tilts with this too.
You can actually do the pelvic tilt here.
Oh, I actually do feel that when do that.
- Oh, yeah.
So this is really,
I mean you gotta be pretty agile to put yourself in those.
- Yeah, to do all those.
But you can certainly start with this one
and then work your way up to adding the strap on there, so.
- And don't do it on a table.
Go down to a floor to do it.
- Right.
All right, nother simple one, Brad.
Believe it or not, this is good for your back
and for your hip, is actually,
now you got me all tied up here.
- Well of course, I didn't want you to get away.
- Is just prone press ups.
- Oh yeah.
So we always advocate for these, for the low back,
for most people with back issues,
this is a great one to do.
But you're also stretching your hip flexors
when you do this.
- Oh yeah, right in here.
We're getting a nice hip flexor stretch.
- Now imagine if you go like this,
you stretch your two joint a little bit,
don't you, Brad?
Feels a little weird.
- Try it with both legs, feel how good you are, Bob.
Oh wow, do you feel it more?
- Yeah, yeah you do.
It's you know, it's not a one that I would do
probably because I like doing the other way instead
but the prone press ups do do work well for that.
All right.
I think, oh, I was gonna show this one, Brad.
This is a different one here too.
You're on this side.
If you wanna do this, you can put your, you know
one leg on the bed like this.
And then you go up like this.
- Yeah, right in here.
- And again, if you went like this,
that would stretch the two joint here, so.
- Be careful about a hamstring cramp
if you're, if you get those easily.
- They can fire up pretty easy here.
But this is a little wacky,
but this this is a great stretch.
- Yeah, you're really getting after it there, Bob.
- Yep, I am getting it after.
- And that's going through the whole chain.
- All right, Brad, do you wanna show the foam roller?
- Oh yeah, I love the roller.
So if you want to use a, you know, a device,
we like this one from,
we have it down in our product section too.
Cause it's a little bit softer.
It's a little bit easier on the body.
- It's a good quality.
- It's a good quality foam roller.
It's from OPTP.
- Okay, so we're gonna do a little
interior hip stretch here.
Is that what you were thinking?
- Yep, yep.
- All right, so I'm gonna get on that.
I'm actually gonna start up higher,
just below that pelvic line, that pelvic working that way.
And I'm gonna work here
and you usually have to put a little bit of an angle on this
so that you can get into that muscle.
And you'll know cause you'll feel it.
- Yeah, and plus you could get the tensor fasciae latae,
which is goes into the IT band.
Cause that's gonna all work that too well.
- Now this actually feels like a really nice massage, Bob.
I'm real happy right now doing this on that TFL.
- I'm glad you're happy, Brad.
You wanna finish like, all right.
Well then you can work your way down the quad too,
if you like, so.
- You know, and you could bend the knee up.
So you put a little stretch on that muscle
and I'm just gonna do one leg at a time
cause I can kinda rotate and get force on there.
- Get a little more pressure on there.
- And you can feel, you know,
if you got some tight muscles,
this roller really does a nice job on working them
right up to the knee.
I'm just doing this cause it feels really good
right up in there.
And I'm gonna roll all the way back
and work the whole thing.
- And the final thing,
if you have one of these pure wave massagers
you could certainly work with that too.
You could go ahead and, and you know, turn it on.
You could go ahead and work on stretching that hip flexor
while you're in this position
and giving a little bit of massage
while you're working on it.
- You bet.
- So we like these massagers.
They have percussion and not just vibration.
- Right, and they get in deep.
It's probably, it's the deepest massager I've ever worked.
- Yeah, I just worked,
I used this on a patient and he was just amazed.
I mean just, I mean, it was one of those things
I like don't get too over confident.
I'm sure, I mean, it's not gonna make a difference
in one treatment but it seemed like,
"I can already dance around",
he said "I can feel a lot better".
So it was kind of cool, but.
- All right. - All right, thanks.
Remember Brad and I can fix just about anything.
- Except for- - A broken heart.
- Oh, that, yeah, there it is.
- But we are working on it, hard.
- And we're never gonna stop, we're gonna persevere.
- Thanks for watching.