With all of the movement required in your hips, your body needs to create stability in order to find balance within the movement. You cannot for example, just be a floppy sack of potatoes. If you do not have sufficient strength in the major muscles crossing your hips and responsible for hip movement, your body will create stability through rigidity, rather than the relaxed responsiveness discussed in previous articles.
As I mentioned, if you are over 30, you are naturally tending toward diminished hip mobility anyway as your muscles slowly atrophy and your body tightens up ligament and fascial tissue in the area to create stability, and as your body's range of motion decreases. Simply, we have a more sedentary lifestyle and tend to move less as we age. So the range of motion in hips is reduced. The older we get, the more deliberate we have to be about stretching because we are losing flexibility on a daily basis without purposeful acts to counter this trend.
If you also happen to have lower core tone, your body will tend to try even more to create stability in your torso through tightening in the hips.
Getting more flexible hips that are still able to balance in motion requires both strength and flexibility through all the muscles that cross the pelvis. Major ones include Psoas (hip flexors), all the big leg muscles on all four sides, and your waist area core muscles. If you have tight sides, those muscles are not only preventing your ribs from bending: they are also holding your hips.
Hips and seat are such an important foundational building block for riders in any discipline that I will have to continue the discussion in future articles.
This month, I'd like to build on the stretch suggestion from last month's piece (the 'fold and roll') with some more stretches to open up your hips and reduce tension.
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- Side to Side Lunge
Side-to-Side Lunge
Start with legs fairly wide and simply shift your weight slowly and rhythmically from side to side. Using a dynamic motion before you ride will help warm up your muscles. At the end of your ride or day, you can hold stretches (static stretching) and take your time to get a little deeper into the muscle and ligament tissues through longer stretching. This stretch opens up your hips by lengthening inner thigh and groin area muscles.
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- Rotational Variation
Rotational Variation
I like to move from a side lunge stretch by rotating around and forward to continue to gently loosen up muscles around the hip socket itself. If you are schooling over Level 1, it gets more important to have mobility in your hip socket because you begin to do lateral and other movements in more planes of motion and with more control than a Training or Level 1 ride requires.
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- Outer Thigh Stretch
Outer Thigh (Iliotibial Band) Stretch
It can be very difficult to stretch your outer thigh. Your gluteals & IT band (iliotibial band of ligament like tissue down the side of your leg) can become tight in the seated position. As a rule of thumb, it's important to stretch muscles on both sides of a joint, so if you do the inner thigh stretch, a stretch for the opposite area is also needed. My weight in this photo is mostly in my arms and the bent leg in the front.
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- Pigeon
Pigeon
In this photo, yoga for riders' specialist Louise Sattler (www.gallopingyoga.com) shows a pigeon pose. You do not need to drop your body as low as she is doing. You can use props to hold yourself in whatever position brings you to a stretch. This stretch is particularly good for both the hip flexors (rear leg) and gluteals and piriformis (front leg). Riders with sciatic issues would benefit from this stretch. This stretch is normally done as a static stretch, whereas the above stretches can also be performed in flowing or dynamic gentle motion.
All stretching should be comfortable. Otherwise it will stimulate contraction, rather than invite your muscle fibers to lengthen. A pull or slight burning sensation in muscles and ligaments is fine, but pain in joints signals that you need to back off and stretch more conservatively.
