You can only view 3 videos without an account. Become a Member to access all videos on the website.
Kneeling Hip Flexor Static Stretch
The Kneeling Hip Flexor Static Stretch is a stretching exercise that lengthens the hip flexors, a group of muscles at the top of the upper leg. This stretch is done by getting down on one knee and stepping the other leg forward or angled slightly outwards. The front knee should be bent at a 90 degree angle and the back knee should be on the ground. The person should then lower their upper body straight down until a stretch is felt and hold that position for 20-
Transcript
00:00:0400:00:07
This is Brent of the Brookbush Institute
00:00:0400:00:07
and in this video we're going over our
00:00:0700:00:10
static hip flexor stretch. I'm going to have my friend Adam come out he's going to help
00:00:1000:00:15
me demonstrate both the wrong way and the right way to do this stretch. Now me
00:00:1500:00:18
and you have been personal trainers a long time, let's show everybody how we
00:00:1800:00:23
see this done poorly quite often. Alright and you can see he gets
00:00:2300:00:28
this nice arch to his back, if he threw his arms back he looks like he should be
00:00:2800:00:32
on the front of the Titanic. Although this might be pretty like it's
00:00:3200:00:36
definitely not the greatest way to do this stretch. If we think about how much
00:00:3600:00:42
hip extension you have, which is just 10 to 15 degrees, we know that this is not
00:00:4200:00:46
15 degrees, that's more than 45. He has to be getting that mobility from somewhere
00:00:4600:00:51
else and that should worry you a little bit. We want our stretches to be specific.
00:00:5100:00:54
You can get out of that position, it even irks me a little bit to see
00:00:5400:00:59
you in that position right. It's not a great thing to not know what you're
00:00:5900:01:02
stretching, we want to make sure that we're stretching stuff that's short.
00:01:0200:01:07
Remember hypermobility is just as dangerous as hypomobility, so if
00:01:0700:01:11
we're stretching things that aren't short we could be setting somebody up
00:01:1100:01:16
for some dysfunction, or possibly pain in the future. So how can we make this
00:01:1600:01:23
specific to just the hip flexors, and the truth is that it's actually easier. The
00:01:2300:01:26
the stretch I'm going to show you is way easier than the ones you just saw.
00:01:2600:01:31
So Adam is going to set himself up with these nice 90-degree angles, so
00:01:3100:01:35
he's going to be 90 degrees with knee right underneath his hip and then leg straight
00:01:3500:01:40
back, and then he can go ankle right under this knee, and then this knee is
00:01:4000:01:44
level with this hip, so we get these nice right angles and we get easy lines
00:01:4400:01:49
to monitor. He's got good straight posture this way, remember your psoas
00:01:4900:01:53
connects into your lumbar spine so it is important to even watch how much
00:01:5300:01:58
lordosis you're getting here. Now once he's in this position all you have to do
00:01:5800:02:04
is go posterior pelvic tilt. Now I don't tell my clients to posterior pelvic tilt
00:02:0400:02:08
but that's what we're going teach them. What I usually tell my clients to do is
00:02:0800:02:14
can you tuck your tail, alright it's scared dog,
00:02:1500:02:20
and if I have to I'll give them a little manual pressure on their PSIS
00:02:2000:02:25
usually that'll get people to tuck under, good. Squeeze their glutes is
00:02:2500:02:28
another good way to get them to posterior pelvic tilt, and usually if
00:02:2800:02:35
you can teach that simple little turn of their pelvis under, can you feel that in
00:02:3500:02:40
the front of your hip, it's like immediate. It just makes it so easy, you're just going
00:02:4000:02:46
oh hip flexor stretch got it, got it. It's just that easy, and now we can be pretty
00:02:4600:02:50
certain because all we've done there with a posterior pelvic tilt is lengthen
00:02:5000:02:58
out our hip flexors via some hip extension. Now what I can do from here is
00:02:5800:03:02
add a few little modifications if I wanted to go after specific muscles.
00:03:0200:03:07
Let's say I've taken my assessment one step further, I went from just doing the
00:03:0700:03:10
overhead squat assessment and seeing things like anterior pelvic tilt or
00:03:1000:03:14
excessive forward lean that make me think that my hip flexors are tight, to
00:03:1400:03:19
now I'm starting to think about well if knees bow in that's femoral internal
00:03:1900:03:28
rotation; of my hip flexors, my gluteus minimus and my TFL are internal
00:03:2800:03:34
rotators you following me, how can I make a hip flexor stretch specific to
00:03:3400:03:38
the TFL and gluteus minimus? It's actually not that hard, I'm going to have
00:03:3800:03:46
Adam take this leg and turn it, face the camera real quick for me Adam, he's going to
00:03:4600:03:51
take this this foot, hopefully you can see what I'm seeing, and he's
00:03:5100:03:57
going to put it behind this ankle. So we don't need a lot of external rotation,
00:03:5700:04:01
but just a little bit of external rotation because my TFL and glute minimus
00:04:0100:04:05
are internal rotators, so I'm going to externally rotate to lengthen them. He's
00:04:0500:04:11
then going to hip hike a little bit, or lean in this way, that's going to adduct his
00:04:1100:04:16
hip relative to his pelvis, and you don't even have to do that much because we
00:04:1600:04:22
still want just enough room to do a posterior pelvic tilt. Alright so now
00:04:2200:04:28
tuck under, and you should feel that more on the lateral side of your hip. How's
00:04:2800:04:33
that feeling? Good. So now I'm getting real specific, like I felt like
00:04:3300:04:38
okay he had knees bow in, that functional valgus, I know the internal rotators are
00:04:3800:04:42
overactive contributing to that knees bow in functional vagus. Maybe I even
00:04:4200:04:46
did some goniometry and he had a reduction in either internal rotation or
00:04:4600:04:50
external rotation, that gets a little complicated, but I'm getting specific. Now
00:04:5000:04:56
what else could I do? Well, let me have you turn around one more time. Alright
00:04:5600:05:04
I could go rectus femoris, let's say I have Adam as a patient and I noticed
00:05:0400:05:10
that a lot of his issues seemed more geared around the knee. Now if you
00:05:1000:05:13
are physical therapists, athletic trainers or chiropractors you could even
00:05:1300:05:16
goniometric assessment to see if they had enough knee flexion. Maybe
00:05:1600:05:20
there's somebody who's post-surgical, right we know that the rectus femoris has
00:05:2000:05:26
just geared way up, lots of overactivity, lots of active trigger points, lots of
00:05:2600:05:30
shortening and we want to figure out a way to lengthen it. Well, Adam he's
00:05:3000:05:33
already in the habit of doing this, but if we take the hip flexor
00:05:3300:05:39
stretch and we go from this plantar flat foot out position to
00:05:3900:05:44
dorsiflexed, notice that increases the amount of flexion at the knee which is
00:05:4400:05:48
now going to lengthen the rectus femoris a little bit; and what Adam should have
00:05:4800:05:53
noticed is when he goes from, so flop your foot all the way out, when he goes
00:05:5300:05:58
from their, posterior pelvic tilt, good and then tucks his toe in, then all of a
00:05:5800:06:03
sudden he feels a lot more down the center of his thigh, cool. Alright
00:06:0300:06:07
so that's great, so that's a little bit more rectus femoris.
00:06:0700:06:14
So we have got TFL which was the turn the foot in and lean over a little bit, and
00:06:1400:06:21
then we have rectus femoris which is throw the the toes in there and get a
00:06:2100:06:25
little bit more knee flexion, and then you of course have the first
00:06:2500:06:28
variation we showed you which is probably just more of a good general hip
00:06:2800:06:33
flexor stretch, maybe would incorporate a little bit more psoas and iliacus
00:06:3300:06:37
because the TFL and the rectus femoris have a little bit more slack in
00:06:3700:06:42
them than these other two positions I've showed you. Now let me harp on
00:06:4200:06:47
a couple of things that I don't like to see. The couch stretch has become incredibly
00:06:4700:06:54
popular, I want you to keep in mind that if I take this foot throw it up on
00:06:5400:06:59
something this way, and then jam my body back against my foot, that number one it
00:06:5900:07:05
is incredibly aggressive, and we have to get out of the habit of if it didn't
00:07:0500:07:12
work I need more. If it didn't work it might not be the right technique. I've
00:07:1200:07:16
never seen anybody get additional benefit from the couch stretch that I
00:07:1600:07:21
couldn't get from a kneeling hip flexor stretch, especially with toes in,
00:07:2100:07:27
it's just too much. Not to mention the couch stretch is just rectus femoris. You're
00:07:2700:07:32
shortening the rectus femoris so much at the knee, or lengthening it so much at
00:07:3200:07:35
the knee, that when you go into a posterior pelvic tilt the limiting
00:07:3500:07:38
structure is always going to be your rectus femoris, and you are going to miss
00:07:3800:07:43
TFL glute minimus, psoas and iliacus every time. So if your goal was to fix
00:07:4300:07:46
something like knees bow in or an anterior pelvic tilt, you're losing.
00:07:4600:07:51
You're losing because you're leaving a lot behind. Now the other thing that I
00:07:5100:07:59
don't like to see, is I don't like to see the very fancy hip flexor stretch which
00:07:5900:08:06
is Adam if you raise your right arm, and then Adam side bends towards
00:08:0600:08:16
me, good and then he rotates back this way. Now the problem with this stretch is
00:08:1600:08:23
not that it's not theoretically sound, it is a very theoretically sound stretch.
00:08:2300:08:28
What we're doing here is we're trying to lengthen the psoas as far as possible,
00:08:2800:08:35
remembering that our psoas attaches to the vertebral bodies of L1 through L5, so
00:08:3500:08:42
if I side bend a little bit, I pull my psoas a little longer on that side,
00:08:4200:08:49
and then if I rotate back it lengthens even further. The problem with
00:08:4900:08:53
this stretch is as soon as people do this stuff they tend to lose their
00:08:5300:08:55
posterior pelvic tilt, they tend to arch their
00:08:5500:09:00
back and then they tend to go into hip hiking, and now what we have is a
00:09:0000:09:07
theoretically great stretch with bad form; and I have to be honest I've never
00:09:0700:09:13
seen good form on that stretch ever, especially once left alone. It's one of
00:09:1300:09:16
those stretches where maybe you can get it set up right in clinic, maybe you can
00:09:1600:09:19
get it set up right with coaching, but as soon as you give it for a home exercise
00:09:1900:09:22
program, as soon as you walk away from your patient, as soon as you turn your
00:09:2200:09:28
back it becomes like this mess of they just look like Al'Dente noodles,
00:09:2800:09:32
like hey look I'm stretching my hip flexors, and it kind of goes back into
00:09:3200:09:40
our what we call the Titanic stretch, right, good. Alright last
00:09:4000:09:43
point I'm going to make harping on the static hip flexor stretch here is
00:09:4300:09:57
this is not a stability exercise, so feel free to give somebody something to hold
00:09:5700:10:01
on to. Let them hold on to a wall, like I like to do these stretches right next to
00:10:0100:10:04
a wall or like a weight rack so I can hold on to, there's nothing wrong with
00:10:0400:10:11
that, we're trying to stretch, we'll do stability exercises later, and first
00:10:1100:10:19
steps first, let's go all the way back to can we just do a good static hip flexor
00:10:1900:10:23
stretch. I know I'm giving you a lot to think about with modifications and maybe
00:10:2300:10:29
things you shouldn't do, but where we should start is stable position, 90, 90, 90,
00:10:2900:10:35
90. Can you posteriorly pelvic tilt, hold for
00:10:3500:10:41
30 to 120 seconds calmly, and get a good release. That's it,
00:10:4100:10:45
that's where we're going to start. If you have any questions leave them in the
Related Videos
Kneeling Hip Flexor Static Stretch
Dynamic Hip Flexor Stretch (Upright Lunge Series)
Anterior Thigh SA Active Release
Rectus Femoris SA Static Release
Active Hip Flexor Stretch
What to do with the Psoas
Psoas Integration (Reverse Lunge to Resisted Triple Flexion)
Modified Thomas Test
Sacroiliac Joint Chicago Technique
Thoracic Pistol Manipulation
Shotgun (Pubic Symphysis) Manipulation
Lumbar Spine Joint Manipulation (High Velocity Thrust)
Quadruped Crawl Sled Pull
Rectus Femoris Self-administered Active Release (Pin and Stretch)
Ely's Test (Rectus Femoris Flexibility Assessment)