I apologize that I did not get this up this past weekend as I have been fighting some weird bug (hopefully not that swine flue, I mean H1N1) and I’ve been pulling a Rip Van Winkle and sleeping like crazy.  My body shut down on Sat again at about 7pm and I was in bed by 8:40pm and slept 11.5 hours.  This was the 4th time this past week I slept more than 10 hours at night since I could not get anything else done.  Probably a combo of PhD work, a full meet, TSC, planning a wedding, work, training, etc in the past 2.5 weeks, but such is life.  The great part was I felt human again on Sunday and got in a pretty good squat session in the 42 degree garage (it is snowing like crazy now too as I type this).  Go Vikings!!

This is the promised follow up to the Tight Hips, Stop Static Stretching post below.

Tight Hips?  Stop Static Stretching

So welcome back from the link.   You did read it, right?

As you know I am a fan of active mobility work over static stretching as I feel you can get a better result (at least the same range of motion) in a shorter time and you are increasing strength at the end range of motion.   Static stretching makes a muscle weaker.

I have the video below and 2 snap shots of the before and after change in ROM (range of motion).

ROM After Static Stretching of the Hip Flexors

ROM After Joint Mobility Work (Opposite Joint) for the Hip Flexors

Notes:

This athlete did not have particularly tight hips to start with per say, but still got some increased range of motion, even after doing a bit of static stretching.

In the interest of full disclosure I did the same thing one another athlete this past week and saw a very minimal change.   This is expected since we are dealing with physiology here and everyone is going to be a bit different; so the exact same thing will not work 100% of the time for everyone, all the time.  If I could find that one single factor, I would be making a lot more money! hehehe.

You must re-evaluated every exercise with every athlete to know if you are making them better for worse!  You can use gait, range of motion, muscle testing as a few (all of those are taught in the Z-Health R Phase course).

Why Bother?

I can tell you first hand that if you have hips so tight you can bounce quarter off them, you better get them figured out ASAP.  Not only is it decreasing your performance, you are running the risk of injury.  I’ve pulled both of my hip flexors (left and right sides) and a few of my adductors all at the same time.  WOW, that was incredibly painful.   I’ve done all sort of fun stuff to my body over the years from busting up my right ankle (snowboarding), completely dislocated my right shoulder (broomball) and many more but none of them were as remotely painful as my hip flexor pull/strain. I walked like a friggin penguin and that was painful.

I may be cute, but I walk funny (photo credit John)

I could not get in and out of my car without lifting up my legs and bitting my lip to prevent me from yelling in pain which tends to draw lots of attention in the work parking lot and may even wake up the security guard.   I could not roll over at night without waking up in pain–that was a blast. ha!  I would cringe, grab on to the covers and try to slide them under myself while at the same time grabbing my opposite leg, counting to 3 and puling my leg over at the same time trying to slide the other sheet under me.   Trust me, you don’t want to injury your hip flexors!   I will leave the story about riding my pedal bike 150 miles 2 days later on the MS 150 fund raiser for another day.  I figured if I could endure that, it was peanuts to those that had MS.

What did we learn today?

If you can see an increase in range of motion with a joint mobility drill, why would you static stretch?  I think most static stretch since they don’t have another option!  Now you have another option (I like the Z-Health R Phase for precise joint mobility work).

If you are interested in how working the opposite joint helps range of motion, see this post below

Opposite Joints: My elbow hurst and you want me to check my knee?

Let me know what questions you have by posting a comment below!

Rock on

Mike T Nelson