♪ 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, Bob.
- Today we're gonna go over the top treatments/exercises
for a pulled groin muscle.
So unfortunately, Brad, you think you may have done this,
or are you not sure?
- Well, we can talk about that later Bob, but
- All right, you don't wanna talk about it now, okay.
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- All right Brad, so what are you going to reveal now,
or what are you doing?
- Well, the groin injury is
a pretty commonly injured problem,
we have people requesting some videos on it,
we've done a few in the past,
but we got some new exercises this time for it.
- Gotcha, and I think you see it a lot of times
in soccer players, especially with the lateral motion
that they have to do with their legs.
- So the groin injury is your adductors.
It pulls your leg in, or across,
going this direction, so it's the muscles right in here.
- Yeah, they start down here,
and they attach up into the groin,
so that's why people think a lot of time it's a ...
I don't know what they think they're pulling,
but they're pulling a muscle.
- Right, it sits in the pubic bone and over,
so it's one of those things that's very painful.
- Yeah.
- I've pulled mine just running.
- Oh, have you really?
- Yeah, right, not that seriously,
but I've done that, particularly in the spring,
when I haven't been running all winter, when I didn't do--
- Haven't been warmed up.
- When I wasn't a treadmill runner, and I'd go out and run,
but it did, it's only when I was older,
I was over 50 and it started.
You know how the aging thing goes--
- Yeah, with the aging thing it doesn't take
much of anything, you can get out of bed
and you pull a muscle.
(laughing)
- Anyways, if you do have a pulled groin,
I see a lot of videos
and I hear a lot of people talk, stretch it!
Get that stretched out,
and that's the last thing you wanna do
right after you pull it.
If you pulled it today, you're not stretching it today.
- No, no.
- You're not stretching it tomorrow, you're gonna wait
until it feels better, maybe a few days,
so do not stretch it.
- You gotta start allowing that healing process to occur.
- Right, you got the inflammation going on,
so you're gonna take a cold pack, get in a recliner,
relax, read a book, and get that cold pack on there
and just let it settle down, get some ibuprofen.
Again, this may be a two or three day process,
depending on how severe you pulled it.
If it's just a tweak, you may be stretching it
within a day or two, maybe.
- Now, the body's trying to heal it,
and that's why it's sending in
all this fluid in there to help heal the tissues,
but it overdoes it, and that's why we use the ice
and the ibuprofen, because it goes a little crazy, so.
- Yep, and once you get through that phase,
after a day or two, possibly three,
then you're gonna get into that muscle
and you're gonna feel if there's any tight spots,
because sometimes a muscle will respond to an injury
by getting a knot or tightening up.
And you really need to get that loosened up
so that you get circulation into the muscle,
and those injured tissues can heal more rapidly.
So you can simply get in with your fingers,
and I did notice this, I had a pulled muscle, groin,
well that's a long story, but I could feel clearly a knot.
So I start working it, and again, I was just
in my recliner relaxing, and I was able to get it to relax
and loosen up until that muscle's pliable again.
- He's going across the fibers.
The fibers run this way, he's going across them.
He's going pretty deep, and the thing is,
even if there's not a knot there,
let's just say there's a lesion, there's a tear.
You wanna do this because it's starting to form scar tissue,
and you wanna get more blood flow to the area,
so you do wanna do the massage, no matter what.
- Right, and you're gonna do this for a few minutes.
Your fingers are probably gonna get tired.
If it's really tender and it just gets worse,
it means it's too early, get the cold pack back on it,
but otherwise you're gonna get in there
until your muscles are tired and you'll shake them off,
and that'll be good for a while.
- And you can try one of the handheld massagers,
we like this one, we've been starting to use this RENPHO one
because it's less expensive, it's only $40.
And all the other ones were like $100,
and we thought what a great device,
does the job, comes with different heads on it,
and it can work, yep, just spins right off, so, yep.
- So that's an option, otherwise use your hands.
- We'll put a link below in our,
it's in our favorite products, I believe.
- Sure, so once it's starting to feel good,
you're walking without pain,
you can go up and down steps without pain,
then you can start your stretching.
This may be three, four, maybe a week later,
and one of my favorite things to do that is a really
passive way to get things moving, go to a stairway
or get a step, get something to hold, I got the,
what do we call it?
- The Booyah Stick.
- The Booyah Stick, or if it's a stairway,
get a hold of the rail which works really good,
and just let the leg relax.
- So that's the injured one, is your left one.
- Right, my left one.
- This one right here, yep.
- And I'm just gonna swing it
forward and backwards in a really
- Really gentle, yeah.
- Relaxed, and if this goes good,
then you're gonna go right and left because this is the way,
it's gonna be a little more sensitive if it is.
And if you can do this, swinging it back and forth,
so it feels like it's starting to loosen up
and it's pain-free, then you can start to get
a little more aggressive with the stretches.
- You see a lot of athletes warm up this way.
It's active stretching in a sense,
but you really wanna emphasize here,
is that you don't wanna feel any pain with this,
and you don't wanna go too far to start off with.
It's just gentle way of starting,
it's just like the shoulder pendulum exercises.
- Precisely.
- You're just trying to get some, some gentle movement there
without injuring it.
- So, the next one, you're gonna have to move Bob,
this is a nice way, from the pendulum, the next stretch,
everything's going good there, you can swing,
you're not gonna swing really aggressively on that.
You know, maybe at the end of the rehab,
but this is a nice way.
You can take, we got the stretch-out strap here,
put it around your foot,
let's say my injured side is the right one.
- Some people actually use a dog collar.
- Sure, (laughs) I've got another option here too,
but this is nice 'cause you can grab it like that,
and I'm gonna double that up, and you're gonna lift it up,
and then you're gonna stretch out to the side.
Now, if we had a camera from the top view,
I'm stretching the adductor out to the side,
and that's the way you can stretch it,
you can go way out, I'm getting a nice stretch here.
Of course, this side is not pulled.
If you were injured, you may only go half that far,
but then just you can work back and forth.
If you don't have one of those but you have a cane,
like this, that works pretty good.
You can put that around your foot
and take some of the weight off and stretch.
Now you can do this on the floor,
and it's nice on the floor if it's a hard floor,
it's slippery and you can just slide your leg--
- Do like a wall angel, or like a floor angel.
- Yeah, yep, exactly.
Okay, the next one you can do
when that feels good, is the clamshell.
Just get in the hookline position, I call it,
feet together, knees together to start with,
and just allow the knees to relax and go out.
And you can put a little passive range of motion
with your hands on your knees,
you can work one side then the other side.
- Can't let pain be your guide.
- Yes, you gotta remember, you got...
If these are the tissues that were pulled,
you wanna get them to heal and stretch nice,
but you don't wanna rip them apart
and start all over again.
- Right, you wanna have them healed, lengthened as we say,
but you don't wanna have them re-injure again.
- Exactly, so these stretches, you're gonna go pressure on,
pressure off, on that cadence, ten times,
or if you wanna do a 15 to 30 second hold,
really relax and remember to breathe and relax,
monitor the pain level, you're not getting any sharp pain.
And then the next one is--
- On the stairs?
- On the stairs, or you wanna show the one on the knee?
- Yeah, sure, you can go ahead and just kneel,
if I'm stretching this side here,
you can just go ahead and bring it out like this,
and you can lean forward over to the side,
and you can start to feel the stretch here.
This might be a little aggressive for you to start off with,
I mean you may, I like the stairs for,
You can put it on the lowest step first.
- Yep, here.
- You can put it there, yep, and see how you do with that,
and then you can work your way up.
And a lot of times you have the railing
of the steps to hold on to too,
and so it works out really good.
- So you can do this, or you can drop this knee
and stretch that way as well,
and you'll feel that stretch in that groin area.
And again, pressure on, pressure off, and repeat that,
or you can go just hold it for 15 to 30 seconds,
breathe, relax, let the muscle stretch, not too hard.
- But again, notice, we went through three steps
before we began stretching.
So it was held, we held off here.
- And then finally, one thing you can do I like,
is to get some resistance.
A beginner way to do it is get some banding.
- Yep, tubing.
- And you gotta find a way to attach it to the wall,
we got our handy dandy wall anchor there,
it fits right on there,
and usually they'll give you an ankle clip here,
and then, you can start to strengthen it this way.
Now I'm gonna suggest, this is strengthening
the adductor muscle, but I'm gonna suggest
do four directions and get the whole hip.
Because it's been injured, the whole hip needs to be, rehab.
- Yeah, the whole hip is probably gonna be weaker.
Because you haven't been, you've been protecting it,
and when you protect one muscle you're protecting them all,
so he's going in all four directions,
abduction, adduction, extension, and flexion.
- And I'm gonna recommend a goal
of 30 seconds of repetitive motion.
Should be pain-free, should just be fatiguing the muscle,
getting it tired, and make sure you do it on both legs.
Take the strap off, do it on the other leg,
so that both legs get the chance to work.
It's gonna help your proprioception,
get you back into your sport and be at the top of your game.
- By the way, if you do decide you wanna get a wall anchor,
get it from our website because you'll get one extra one.
Normally you get three, and free shipping from Amazon,
which is still us, but if you go to our website,
we'll give you four, and free shipping.
- Same price.
- So it's a better deal, and you can use them
all over the place for strengthening, so.
- There you go.
- All right Brad, you got anything else to pipe in with?
- Nope, and we can get a little more aggressive,
but that's gonna get you the rest of it.
At that point you can start jogging, you can start running,
working some lateral motions right to left,
but do not go too aggressive too fast.
- Yeah, you're gonna work onto that very slowly.
Don't go out and run five miles the first day.
- (laughs) Yeah, no sprints (laughs).
- Yeah, you jog to the end of the block
and see how you tolerate it, and probably some walk-jogging.
Do some walking, to some jogging, so.
- We'll have to do another video for advanced strengthening
for this perhaps.
- Sure, that sounds right, thanks for watching.