What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Today I want to talk to you about a pain that a lot of people will get either running or
jumping or biking or when they're lifting, particularly on a squat at the bottom of a
squat
that runs usually on the outside of your thigh.
It can feel really really tight and can burn and be very painful, or right here on the
outside of your knee.
You may have been told that what you have is IT Band Syndrome, iliotibial band syndrome,
and that's not the right diagnosis.
If you sit here, and I see it all the time, I see people grab a foam roller here, get
on that side of that leg like this, make all kinds of faces because it really does hurt,
and they think they're fixing their problem when all they're doing is actually making
it worse because as you're going to find out today,
the IT band is not something that you can change the tension in by directly attacking
the IT band.
This is just a tendinous structure that actually has the ability to resist up to a thousand
pounds of force so if you think that putting your own body weight on top of a foam roller,
or I don't care if you want to break up a little frost balls, anything to do anything
to change what's going on in that IT band.
However, if you understand where the IT band is in your body and what it actually does,
then you can start to figure out that maybe there's a better way to go after it.
The IT band is actually going to sort of mirror this line on my pants here.
It's that big, thick tendinous band that goes down, again,
the lateral aspect of my thigh and it inserts here onto my tibia past my knee joint.
So, the things that happen here though is that we have muscles that feed into it.
So we have primarily the TFL, the tensor fascia lata that's up here in the hip, and
I'll show you exactly where it is because we're going to need to attack that if we want
to fix IT Band Syndrome once and for all.
And we also have a lateral aspect of our quads, so our vastus lateralis.
We have our glut max that feeds into it from back here.
We even have posterior hamstrings because again, if you look at this white line, it
feeds right into the white line from back behind.
And again, as I said, the quads feed into it from up top.
Well, all those muscles and primarily the ones from the top here, again especially the
TFL,
it uses this IT Band as its own tendinous attachment to the lateral aspect of our knee.
So, you're not going to change the tension in the tendon by going after the tendon.
But you can change the tension in the tendon by going after the muscle that attaches or
feeds that tendon.
And that's what we want to spend all of our time doing.
So if you're getting pain, like I said, when running or biking or jumping or in that bottom
portion of a squat, and you don't know what's causing it,
then you better start looking up here in the hip and especially the TFL if you want to
start making some changes.
So here's the two-step plan for you to really attack that.
Most of the time, I find that the two biggest offenders of this IT Band are going to be
that lateral aspect of the quad,
because a lot of times quads will get very, very tight on most people especially those
that are doing those activities I just mentioned, and also really big, this TFL.
So the TFL actually, this is what it sort of looks like, or where it is.
I'll stand up a little bit here and I'll drop the drawers a little bit, but the idea is
that right here is the iliac crest.
We have the top of our hip bone, and you can actually feel it.
And if you reach around in front, you should be able to feel a bump right here on the side
of my, you know,
I got these muscles kind of in the way, but you can feel this bump on the front side of
your pelvic.
That's called the asis.
If you would just kind of grab ahold of there with your thumb,
and then make a fist, in this general area is where our TFL is, alright, and it's about
that big.
It's not a very, very big muscle.
But it feeds right down as you can see into that white line here which is going to be
our IT band.
So, what we want to do is, we want to get into position and put pressure on that.
We don't need to do a foam roller there necessarily, but if you have a foam roller and that's all
you have, you can do that.
But I like something very low profile.
This happens to be a Fat Gripz.
Now, I"m not using for what they're normally used for, but it just happens to work really
well.
This is very resilient material here.
It doesn't really deform very much at all.
You can use tennis balls put together.
You can put them with cross balls and put them together.
But whatever implement you're using, use it right.
And this is how we want to use this.
You find that area right there in the hip and you sit right on top of it, ok.
And you push your hip right there on it.
Ok, so I feel it now pushing and I feel pressure underneath.
Now what we want to do is, we want to kind of floss the muscle through its range of motion
that it's gong to go through when we run, when we jump, when we squat.
That means we have to flex our hip.
If we can, we try to keep it in contact with the ground.
So, I'll back up just a little bit, you can see this even more, right here.
You want to keep this in contact with the ground, and I'm just basically flexing up
and that hurts because I'm actually flexing the muscle, or contracting the muscle
and taking it through this sort of flossing.
I'm pushing down in this one spot and then dragging it under and through.
I'm dragging the muscle under and through, kind of rolling out the issues without just
rolling back and forth on a roller.
And I'm just sort of flossing through here with that leg up and down.
This is really like an active release technique, an ART technique.
We're just sliding it up and then down.
We're going through our flexion. and we can do this same exact thing here by putting it
down lower now onto our quads.
We just turn it in a longways direction here.
So, now you put it just to the outside so you're actually on the the quad here.
We're not trying to go after the IT band that's down on the side of our pants here because
that's not going to do shit like I just told you.
You've got to come to the front.
Now we're in the front.
Now what we try to do is, take your other foot, lock your leg from moving further any
more, ok, and then try to bend your knee back.
So we stretch the quad that way.
Now, I don't happen to have very, very tight quads, so I'm not going to feel this as much.
And if you don't feel it, move on, guys.
The whole point here of mobility drills is to only do the ones that you need.
Don't spend an hour doing mobility work that you don't need.
If you go through this motion and you don't feel any discomfort at all, then you likely
don't have tight quads.
You likely don't need to address them.
You might have a tight TFL though.
That might need to be addressed or it does need to be addressed if you want to start
changing that overall impact that it's having and feeding down into the IT band.
So again, you work here and you just go through that quad contraction.
The purpose of this leg is a lot times guys when they bend their knee if they have tight
quads,
will find that the knee will shoot forward because you're trying to take some of the
tension off of that quad that's being stretched, but you don't want to let that happen.
You want to keep it back in its stretched position and then flex the knee.
But those are the two moves for me as a PT that I find most often are the ones that you
want to address.
The tight vastus lateralis, the outside of the quads, and the tight TFL,
those will feed tension into the IT band making it really, really tight without having to
go after it and try to compress it with a foam roller
on an already compressed structure that's doing nothing but pushing down on the things
beneath it that makes that pain even worse.
So, guys, if you're going to take a smart approach to mobility, you've got to start
thinking through your mobility a little bit more.
Don't just go and do the cool thing that somebody showed you.
Do the things that you actually really need, and that's the whole point here, guys.
Make sure that no matter what you're doing, even when you're training, when you're exercising,
do the exercises that your body needs.
If you're trying to get from point A to point Z, you take the 26 letters of the alphabet,
and you do those things.
That gets you from point A to point Z the fastest.
That's what we try to do here at ATHLEANX is give you guys a plan to get you from point
A to point Z without any waste of motion,
without any wasted effort so that you can make sure that you're getting the most out
of the time that you spend training.
Guys, if you're looking for a program that does that, head to ATHLEANX.COM and get our
ATHLEANX training system.
In the meantime, if you continue to find these videos helpful, make sure you let me know.
Again, it goes a little bit over the realm of just bro science to the point where we're
actually using real science and helping you understand more what's going on in your body.
Some people may not like it, but if you like it, make sure you let me know and we'll make
sure we cover more of them in the weeks ahead.
Alright guys, we'll be back here again real soon.