What Are The Best Hip Stretches?
What are the best hip stretches? It depends whom you ask. It also depends even more who is asking me that question. The best anything isn’t a popularity contest, but it should be what is the best for you and your situation. It’s like asking me what is the best thing to eat? What may be the right answer now, may be different in an hour. It all depends.
If you want to know the best hip stretches, we have to know what we’re stretching and why. Just like in my previous blog post when I wrote about the best ab exercises, it has to be a very subjective answer, or else it’s meaningless. You can Google hip stretches and you’ll see a myriad of images display before your eyes of skinny people twisting themselves into human pretzels. That may be beneficial and appropriate for them, but is it for you? The best hip stretches are the ones that will give you relief from whatever is ailing you and will increase your quality of life as a result.
Let’s say, for example, that you have a tight psoas muscle, but your right gluteal is really bothering you. A basic assumption would be that you have a tighter left psoas, and a subsequent rotation through the hips to the right. This often results in a tighter right gluteal complex, tighter hamstring muscles, and a tighter iliopsoas muscle on that right side. In this case scenario, the best hip stretches would certainly include a pigeon pose stretch, a sitting hamstring stretch, a standing, or kneeling psoas stretch, and then follow it all up with placing a lacrosse ball underneath all of the aforementioned muscles. A hot soak or 2 may be in order if it’s an easy case, or if it’s a deeper lying issue, we may spend some time on the massage table. In any case, this is what I have referred to for many years as corrective flexibility training, and it’s all a part of personal training. If I were to simply have a client hit the weight pile without regard for their imbalances, it would not only be irresponsible of me, but likely very injurious to the client as well.
Other times, when life in the health and fitness world is simpler, and there aren’t so many issues with the client, a couple of basic stretches qualify as the best hip stretches. For example, if a client has a nominally small discomfort in his or her back when standing for prolonged periods, it is going to behoove them to stretch the psoas, iliopsoas, as well as their glutes. They likely won’t require as aggressive a treatment plan as someone who is suffering from major postural distortions, or a disease such as Ankylosing Spondylitis or Degenerative Disc disease.
If you want to ascertain what the best hip stretches are for you, simply follow your tightness. If you perform a basic gluteal stretch, and you feel you are tight there, it would benefit you to try stretching your psoas, tfl muscles, and so on. How do you test a certain area, especially a hard to stretch area such as the iliopsoas? Try putting a lacrosse ball under that area and laying your weight down across it. If it’s vastly uncomfortable, stay there until it’s not. There’s no point in me listing every hip stretch known to mankind, as that is already all over the internet. The point of this blog, however, is to teach you what are the best hip stretches for you personally, and how to go about identifying them. Just remember, your hips didn’t get tight overnight, nor will the become fully pliable in that time frame either. A final point to consider is that while you may have identified the best hip stretches for yourself, but unless you actually do them on a regular basis, they may as well not exist.
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Andy
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