2 min read

How To Fix Your Tight Hips

Posted on Feb 6, 2017

How To Fix Your Tight Hips

If your job requires you to sit all day, chances are you’ve complained about having tight hips a few times throughout the week. Here is your 6 step guide to unlocking your hips.

The tight hip sensation you feel is just a manifestation of your body sending signals to your brain to move the body part/joint around. If you continue to ignore those messages, your tight hips will only get worse.

The awareness and sensations become hard to discern, and you may feel confused on whether you are doing the activity right or wrong. Having self-awareness will help you understand when it is time to have a health care professional coach you through the next steps.

Here is when a Myodetox Therapist can provide you with solutions according to your individual needs, to move you along your progressions through the use of our manual therapy and movement education techniques.

So how do you tackle tight hips?

Try out some of these hip drills and exercises to regain the ranges of motion you have lost throughout the years.

1. Warrior Pose – Get into a one line stance by bringing one foot back and bending the front knee until you feel a comfortable stretch in the hip and quad of the back leg.

2. Downward Dog – Bend forward to place your hands firmly on the ground. Walk your hands out until you get into a tolerable pike position.

3. Low Lunge Quad Stretch – Get into a one line stance and place one knee on the ground. Reach back to grab the foot of the leg that is on the ground. Pull that foot towards your buttock until you feel a tolerable stretch in the quad of the same leg.

4. Hip Opener stretch – While in a lunge position extend the back leg keeping your knee of the ground. Bring both hands firmly on the floor inside the front leg. Use your elbow to drive the knee out until you feel a comfortable stretch in the groin/hip of the front leg.

5. Pigeon Stretch – Bring one shin on the floor in front of you with your opposite leg straight back behind you. Place your arms or forearms on the ground in front of you, whichever is more comfortable. Anteriorly tilt your pelvis by sitting up tall and bringing you tailbone towards the sky. Lean forward until you feel a comfortable stretch in the hip of the leg that is in front of you.

6.Cross-legged Arm Reach – Cross your legs in front of you and reach towards the sky. Take one hand and bring it over your head to try to touch the opposite shoulder blade. Take the other hand behind the back and try to touch the opposite shoulder blade.

3 min read

A Weak Butt Causes Hip Pain

Posted on Dec 6, 2016

Education

A Weak Butt Causes Hip Pain

If you’re feeling hip pain, it’s probably because you’re not walking around enough, and you’re not activating your butt enough.

If you’re not texting on your phone, you’re sitting at your desk hunched over, working away on your laptop. Time flies, and next thing you know, you’re getting up for a walk, but only after a couple hours have passed.

Although you’re working hard, you’re not working your butt enough. And even though you may not feel any pain now, the mid-day walk to grab lunch will eventually catch up to your hips.

To get a better idea how your butt is related to your hip pain, allow us to explain.

This important group of muscles do this as their major actions:
Medius: abducts the hip (hip to the side)
Maximus: extends the hip (pulls the thigh behind you)
Minimus:abducts the hip (hip to the side)

These important muscles are often weak and underworked. So many of our jobs require us to sit for prolonged periods of time. The lack of mobility causes our gluten to “turn off” or stop firing as effectively. Once our glutes stop firing, we start developing imbalances within the hip which can lead to aches and eventual hip pain.

When building strong glutes, you can expect to see some of these things happen along the way:

Alleviate back pain: Learning to contract your glutes in a multitude of ranges can alleviate a lot of the mechanical back pain you are currently experiencing. Your glutes work to stabilize the pelvis and keep the hip joint centered. When they’re strong, your lower back doesn’t need to compensate and take excessive mechanical stress.

Increase performance: If you want to maximize your athletic potential, squatting should be a top priority. Stronger glutes will improve your speed, agility, and jumping skills, and quick side-to-side movements. Every time you take a step, your glute max stabilizes your pelvis, making transitions into movements safe on your pelvic joints and ultimately your back.

Abolish knee pain: A strong glute medius keeps the pelvis stable and prevents swaying from side to side. When your pelvis isn’t stable, it puts a lot of excessive pressure on your knees and ankles. When your glutes are strong, it helps to maintain proper alignment of the knee, hip and ankle. This natural alignment keeps your knee from hurting by tracking the knee cap properly.

Try out these 3 movements and see if you can hold the positions for 1 minute each with total control.

This will give you a good indicator of how well your glutes are doing.

Kick backs

Single leg bridges

Side Clamp

2 min read

Your achilles tendon can either make or break you

Posted on Apr 13, 2016

Education

Your achilles tendon can either make or break you

In honour of one of basketball’s greatest competitors, Nike, with the help of social media, has crowned today as #MambaDay.

Towards the latter part of his career he endured multiple injuries, but it’s safe to say Kobe was never the same since he suffered the dreaded and far too common, achilles tendon rupture more than three years ago. Hell bent on carrying his team to the playoffs; he racked up an astounding 320 minutes over seven games, resting for just 16 minutes and 45 seconds.

Shortly after he went down, every league-wide professional said he should’ve stretched more. I’m going to immediately shut that idea down because that wasn’t the cause of his rupture. The achilles tendon is too complicated for such a simple solution.

So what exactly led to this injury?

First, let’s break down the achilles tendon and its unique properties.

Achilles injuries have many causes, usually a combination of numerous issues, with blood supply being a problem. Over time, with repetitive jumping, running or other lower body movement, the lack of blood flow inherent to any tendon results in degeneration or scarring of that tendon, which decreases its ability to lengthen.

Think about it like this, if you bike every day and don’t maintain or grease the bike chain, it will build up grime, dry out and eventually the chain will rust. In this case, without the proper preventative care, your achilles ability to handle the daily demand decreases a lot more. Just like that, a tear occurs when the force is applied faster than the tendon could lengthen.

So what can you do to help prevent an achilles tendon injury?

The health of the achilles lies in the entire back chain from the glutes, hamstrings, and calves.

When looking at the achilles in isolation, a combo of eccentric contractions, ankle mobility and a focus on a focus on a non-inflammatory diet are keys to prehab.

The following are a series of key exercises you can do to avoid an achilles tendon injury.

Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift – This exercise targets the entire posterior chain – glutes, hamstrings and calves.

Calf Raises – We consider this the guardian angel of the achilles. This loads the achilles tendon while lengthening the calves.

Double Leg Bridge – This simple, yet effective exercise shouldn’t be overlooked because of its ability to fire up the glutes.

What next?

An injury to the achilles is a complex one, and a simple stretch isn’t sufficient enough. You have to exhaust all avenues to help prevent this major injury from happening. Although this injury can stem from various factors, if you’re proactive enough, your most primary used tendon will be a lot more sustainable over time.