so in this video i wanted to share a little snippet of the byland podcast episode 131
of which i was a guest emery and i spoke about lots of different stuff over an hour we talked
about the differences between hiking in europe versus hiking in the states we talked about
problems hikers are facing with tight hips from sitting and foot issues from crappy footwear
so i wanted to give a bit of a visual representation and share a short snippet here
also i wanted to share one of the most important stretches that i believe hikers need to be doing
to free up their hips you know we dive into depth in the episode so i really recommend you listen to
the full episode but at the end of this video i'll be sharing that stretch in full detail so check
out emery's channel watch the video and please listen to the full podcast because it's full of
great information let's get into it chase welcome to the podcast man i'm really stoked to have you
howdy thank you for having me what do you see most people have like what's the common problem
that you're seeing people have faith in hips okay yeah let's start with let's start with
should we start with feeder hips what comes from we can start with i think any good approach to
this starts from the ground up so we'll start with we're facing a foot epidemic basically in our
world that we live in because of the footwear that we put on our feet which is essentially
allowing us to compensate for the things that our bodies can't do because we're sitting
and essentially what they did is put a lot of cushion into shoes and created a heel which
created false ankle mobility which meant that the foot couldn't do its job of being and its job as
being a natural spring like it's designed to help us move efficiently over the ground when you take
that direct contact from your foot and the sensory input from the ground when you take that away
you inhibit the foot to be able to do its natural job of being a spring when the hips come into it
is mainly from sitting and i'm not saying that sitting at the enemy like sittings we need to sit
we need to have a break from gravity every now and then have you heard the um there's a saying like
sitting is the new smoking yeah and it's like it's kind of stupid it's kind of true it's kind of true
basically what happens when we sit a lot in the standard position like if you think you imagine
you're driving a car or sitting on the toilet or sitting at a desk or your knees elevated at the
height of your hip the muscles that pick the hip up like hip flexors and it's you know quads and
a bunch of other muscles like solace and all that pretty much any muscle that picks your
hip up if it's in that shortened position for an extended period of time and i'm like on average
people probably spend 10 to 12 hours a day sitting in that position dude yeah the body is re
super efficient it's if it notices that you're constantly sitting in that position
it will recognize that there's energy being wasted there it's like oh we don't need this
we're always sitting so why don't we just tighten those muscles up enable us to be more efficient
so when those muscles get tightened you can imagine like having a clamp
clamps down on the muscles that are right in front of your pelvis all day and then when we stand up
what happens is that something has to compensate like firstly when you stand up you're not you're
trying to stand up straight and you will continue to stand up straight until you reach
70 or 80 and then we prefer that that movement of being hunched over because it's just too hard
but when we stand up straight when you know we're young and quite unquote like healthy with our body
what happens is the hips compensate by rolling forward which uh essentially like switches the
glutes off that's a bad way of saying it but that hit position doesn't enable the glutes to do
their intended purpose which is to fire and push you forward when you're walking and running okay
that's more or less what the glutes are designed to do if we if we're talking about it's a gigantic
muscle right like yeah it was biggest muscle in the body i think and the hips the hips are
the biggest joint in the body and when we when we when we sit and move very one dimensionally
we just lose all that beautiful range of motion that the hips have
like you don't need to be able to do side splits and front splits
it's cool if you can do that but you don't you don't need that much range of motion
we just need a little bit more to enable the to enable us to go into hip extension which is the
opposite of hip flexion and that's when your knee is your femur and your knees behind your pelvis
behind your hips okay so when you're running and walking we need to be able to push off
using the glute to power us forward the glutes are our engine and then that that power has to
transfer down to the foot foot has to act as a spring and the knee is essentially just a
middleman like a shock exhaust absorber basically to be able to bend and flex and enable that that
power transfer from achilles tendon and and the spring ligament in the foot there's actually a
ligament called the spring ligament well it's called something else that i can't remember
but it's a spring ligament and that enables that that transfer of powder pushes forward
so then the job has to be done by something else so if the glutes and the hips aren't doing the job
some something else has got to take up the slack usually it's the quads and the knees so the quads
have to work harder and all that pressure's going into the knee and then on the lower end
of the body the calves what do you think your style is can you kind of dive into
so people have a better idea of how your what your approach is to this kind of a thing like
do you call it mobility what do you what do you call it it's corrective exercise
okay correct okay so the idea being that the body is designed perfectly
and what we do on a day-to-day basis is undoing that perfection and so rather than adding
things into the equation like better shoes or trekking poles or knee braces or something we
actually look at the root cause of the problem and and treat not treat the symptoms but actually
treat the cause of the problem so yeah it's corrective exercise is a weird
domain because you are hands-on with someone usually and you're not really you're not a
physiotherapist but you're not really a fitness guy either like i started teaching fitness because
that's what i thought people needed i thought people needed to be like super strong and buff
or something you know or have or at least have a decent lung capacity which is all true in a
way but if you layer all that on top of the body that can't function the way it's designed to then
it's probably going to do more harm than good so i'm on this really weird world where i'm
like a hiking fitness or a mountaineering fitness youtuber but i've stopped really creating fitness
content because i don't want to encourage people to do something that could potentially damage them
at this stage i'm assuming that everyone's damaged and going from there and because of what we put
our bodies through sitting all day we are most of us are really damaged stretching our hip flexors
super important what happens when we sit all day in this position at a desk these muscles here
on the front of the hip will get shorter over time because the body is very efficient it's
not going to give you extra flexibility if you're not asking for it on a daily basis
so if you're sitting all day i guarantee you've got tight hip flexors this is how we sort that out
so with the hip flexor stretch we want to ankle directly underneath this knee directly under this
hip so we end up with these 90 degree angles here then we're going to drive this working knee into
the ground a little bit and we're going to scoop the hips so we're going to pelvic thrust in a way
scooping down and underneath to try and expose the hip flexor now there's these
deep muscles that lift the hip and they get very short and very tight when we sit all day
this is a really important stretch whether this back toe up is up or not it doesn't matter but
just play around with the position maybe you need to lean in out forward back reach up try and find
where it's tight where it feels good to loosen up so for me i really like to raise that hand
scoop the pelvis drive the knee into the floor here we get a bit of quadricep engagement
but when i really scoop and squeeze that glute and lean forward slightly that's
where we get the hip flexor but it's going to be a little bit different for everyone
best protocol for this is to do this six days a week
30 seconds holding and three sets on each side of 30 seconds let's swap to the other side
so rotating pelvis down and underneath reaching if that if you find that works for you
and the most important thing with stretching is always is to breathe
and relax if we're looking for flexibility gains to lengthen muscle it's going to happen regularly
so that's why i say six days a week three sets of 30 seconds on each side that will get you serious
results in terms of lengthening the hip flexor and being more comfortable in seated positions
it is one of the most important stretches for us to do as a modern human
and just play around with it find the position that works for you find where you get the most
activation right on the front of the hip that is our hip flexor stretch