What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
A couple weeks back I showed you a drill you could do for your shoulder to eliminate the
popping, and the grinding sensation that you feel in your arm every time you raise it over
your head.
It was a short-term fix, and we did it with an active muscle solution.
Basically, reprogramming the muscles of the shoulder to reposition the shoulder back where
it needs to be, to help you eliminate all those sensations.
Now, we can do the same thing with our hip, and we do it in a more passive way.
We can do it here with a band and a hip mobility drill.
I say ‘mobility’, and I say it very much in a reserved way because I get very annoyed
by people throwing around mobility drills like they’re candy.
They’re not.
They should be used in a very special way, and they really should be understood, if you’re
going to use them.
As a physical therapist I do feel like I understand them.
It’s what we do for a living.
What you need to do is, you need to respect what we call the “open pack position”
of a joint.
What that means is, you’re placing the joint in the most loose position so the capsular
structures around it are loose, and allow you to actually mobilize it.
If you perform a joint mobilization out of a closed pack position you would basically
be trying to pull a joint, or mobilize a joint within itself that’s already all the way
tightened up, and taut, and has not room, or play to move.
That’s not going to get you anywhere.
You’re just going to be wasting your time.
So for the hip, what you want to do is get in the open pack position.
What we do is put the band up, as high as we can to our groin, and we get to the side
of the resistance.
So we’re trying to create a lateral distraction.
Remember, when we look at the hip as it sits in the ball and socket, it’s not being pulled
straight down.
That wouldn’t give us a distraction.
It would be hitting the bottom part of the acetabulum here.
What we want to do is laterally glide it away.
That gives us room and then we can manipulate it, and create some space of the capsule.
So if we get in here on the side the next things we want to do is drop ourselves out,
and back.
So you want to get about 30 degrees out from the midline, and 30 degrees into flexion.
So you come this way first.
So 30 degrees off the midline – this is the middle.
We want to come out a little bit that way.
So my knee is in this direction.
Then we’re going to get 30 degrees of flexion.
We’re going to drop both knees back this way until we’re about 30 degrees of flexion
at the hip.
This would be 0 right here, up into about 30.
Now we step out to the side.
Now, we’ve got a nice distraction going on here, as long as I don’t just allow it
to pull me all the way over, I keep my muscles engaged on the other side, and we have this
nice distraction going on here.
Now, why do we want to do this?
Well, first of all just let it ease you into a little bit more capsular mobility of your
hip.
More importantly, why do we need more hip mobility?
Because when we try to squat we feel a pinching, or when we squat we feel popping.
Any type of sensation, or discomfort in the hip.
Maybe your mobility down into a squat.
You can’t get down deep.
A lot of times, because you have a tightness in the capsule of the hip or, as I said, if
you have an impingement inside the hip, that could be causing a little bit of the pinching,
or pain.
This will help both of those things.
So we get in this position.
Now as we’re in with the glide – remember, we’ve got to get far enough out to actually
get the distraction going on.
From here, now you allow yourself to sit back, sit back, sit back.
Now I’m getting into this deep flexion here, of the hips with the distraction of the band.
That actually feels really good.
I come back up.
If I can go a little bit further out I try to get a little bit further out.
Down in here, off the side a little bit, and I sit back.
And I sit back.
All the way down, and I come back up.
Now what you want to do is, when you get down to the part where you feel the restriction,
after you do about 10 of those reps, when you get down to the point of restriction just
try to ease your way, and bounce into it a little bit.
Just a little bit of a bounce at the very bottom here.
Try to work your way through the bottom, two or three inches.
The part where you feel restricted.
After you’re done with this bring yourself out, come out, and then retest your flexion.
If you’re squatting, you’ll be able to tell that you can get much deeper into your
squat because your hips should be much freer now.
Again, it’s not a long-term fix.
The long-term fix is to try to do this in conjunction with strengthening the muscles
around the hip to reposition the hip, and hold it where it needs to be forever.
But for the short-term, you can do this, and go squat, and you should feel an instantaneous
relief of an impingement, or an instantaneous increase in the range of motion that you have
down at your hip.
I hope you guys found this video helpful.
It is about putting the science back in strength because I don’t see any other way to do
it.
As I said in the beginning, mobility drills are just prescribed with every, single thing,
to do everywhere, in any case, and any instance doesn’t makes sense to me.
There has to be a specific instance.
You have to do it in a specific way if you want to do it without wasting your time.
If you’ve found this helpful, guys, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a program that puts the science back into everything
we do – not just our mobility, not just the way we treat our hip, but every, single
workout, every, single exercise we choose – head to ATHLEANX.com and get our ATHLEANX
training program.
I’ll be back here again in just a few days.
You can leave your requests of what you’d like to see, and I’ll do my best to get
to them.
See you.