What s Up With My Hip Flexors eBook

What’s Up With What’s My Hip Flexors?

by Jonathan FitzGordon www.CoreWalking.com

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Hi, I’m Jonathan FitzGordon. I’m the creator of the CoreWalking Program. Today I’m here to talk to you about hip exors and hip exor issues that hinder a lot of people. I’ve been a yoga teacher for almost fteen years and my basic story is I began doing advanced yoga almost immediately, got injured pretty quickly, and ended up having a number of knee surgeries before I stepped back a little bit to ask myself what am I going to do to keep practicing and stop getting injured? Fortunately the surgeries did take care of the problems I was having with my knees. After nally getting back to my yoga practice one of my teachers asked me what I was doing to prevent a fourth surgery. This was the light bulb over the head moment that unfortunately took three surgeries to reach. From that day forward I started to learn about the  body, anatomy and most specically to learn how to  build my body in a way to avoid these recovering injuries. One of the things I looked at in terms of my teaching was how I could help people take yoga o the mat into their daily life. That’s when I began looking at and studying— walking. Walking is a fundamental act that we all do but we also happen to take for granted. Not many people www.CoreWalking.com

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think that they don’t walk correctly, in fact, not many people think about the way they walk at all. I started to develop a technique to teach people how to walk as we were designed. As it turned out, this technique has had a huge amount of success with back pain, knee pain, foot pain, hip pain, all dierent kinds of issues that are troubling people in their daily lives. The CoreWalking program was born and soon  began to help people with problems as far reaching as migraines and bunions. Sometimes I am even surprised  by the successes we have with the program. I make no promises. I know that changing the way we walk can help a lot of people, but one of the things I’m telling everyone who either buys our products or comes to see me privately is that you have to x yourself—no one is out there who can truly x you other than yourself. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to go to a chiropractor or get Rolfed or get massaged, you want to do all these things—whatever your resources will allow—but it is essential that you make changes in order to work with these practitioners to facilitate the healing that you seek. That’s the crux of the Core Walking Program. I guide people to change their patterns, to heal themselves over time.

www.CoreWalking.com

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It’s not so dicult. It’s nothing more than repetition. The essence of the CoreWalking Program is neuromuscular patterning through repetition. Do something over and over again and it will start to change. Create a walking pattern that suits your body and your patterns will change and you might nd that you can get out of pain. Let’s return to the subject of hip exors. A lot of people have issues with their hip exors. As a yoga teacher, I come across people with hip exor issues an inordinate amount of the time. A exor is anything that brings one body part closer to another. One way we can visualize the body is the front has the main number of exors and the back of the body has a large number of extensor muscles. There are three main hip exors in the body:

• One is the sartorius, the longest muscle in the  body. It begins from the outer hip, coming forward and down to attach to the inside of the knee. www.CoreWalking.com

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• The second is the psoas major, which I often refer to as the main hip exor of the body. Though there is an esoteric argument to be made that the psoas is not in fact a exor. The psoas does lift your leg up from a standing position so for argument’s sake we’re going to refer to it as a hip exor. • The third hip exor is the rectus femoris, one of the four quadriceps muscles. The quadriceps connect the legs to the pelvis, but interestingly, only one of these four muscles actually connects to the hip. The other three are connected onto the leg bone. When I talk about hip exor issues, I am most often referring to the tendon of rectus femoris, the only muscle connecting the quadriceps to the pelvis. If you are one of the people I am referring to, problems with this hip exor— the rectus femoris tendon—can manifest in many dierent ways. For example, let’s say you are doing a Pilates mat class and lying on your back you are asked to lift both feet up o of the oor—the tendon of rectus femoris might engage like a taut steel cable at the top of your thigh. Or in yoga you are doing boat pose also known as navasana—when you lean back and lift the legs up to create a V shape the action of extending the legs out www.CoreWalking.com

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into the V creates that same kind of engagement or popping of the hip exor. Very often, once this tendon engages and turns on, it is very dicult to shut it o. This can happen to people for a number of dierent reasons—tight hamstrings, tight gluteal muscles and weak adductors as well as poor tone in the abdominal muscles. One or all of these factors in conjunction can lead to this beguiling issue. But the main reason that so many people suer with hip exor issues, is the way we walk, stand and sit. Even if you exercise daily for more than an hour a day this doesn’t compare to the time you spend walking, standing and sitting.

Pelvic alignment determines much of how our  body works. If the pelvis is well aligned everything above it and below it can work eectively. When the pelvis is misaligned it is dicult to get the most out of the body’s potential. Our patterns tend to be the same across all spectrums of our life. The way you walk, stand and sit tend to follow a similar path and from my perspective that is the path of a tucked pelvis and forward leaning legs. www.CoreWalking.com

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A tucked pelvis and forward leaning legs go hand in hand. If the pelvis is properly aligned the legs are usually situated correctly under the hips. But if the pelvis is tucked or the legs are leaning forward in any way we will be putting stress on the quadriceps and specically the rectus femoris tendon constantly. My take on walking, standing and sitting is that almost everyone tucks the pelvis pushing the thighs forward, stressing out the rectus femoris tendon for large chunks of the day. Our bones are supposed to hold us up and the muscles move us. When the femur bones move forward against the front rim of the pelvis weight transfer through the bones is interrupted and the rectus femoris is unfortunately called upon to hold us up (along with the iliofemoral ligament). To reiterate this key point, our bones hold us up, our muscles move us, and the nerves tell the muscles to move the bones. And when you stack your bones correctly, a great deal of the body’s muscles can relax so that the bones can hold you up. But when we don’t stand correctly we tend to overwork the muscles. Hyperextension of the knees is another postural misalignment that impacts the quadriceps and rectus femoris. When the shin bones move www.CoreWalking.com

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 backwards into hyperextension, which tends put too much pressure on the ligaments at the back of the knee, the femur bones of the upper leg angle forward to compensate for the backwards movement of the lower leg. This postural misalignment which leads to poor movement and sitting patterns is what puts so much pressure on the rectus femoris for the majority of time that we are walking, sitting and standing. And then, when you go to do an exercise and it pops up screaming for mercy, it’s not the exercise that’s making that happen, it’s our habitual patterning of the way we sit, stand and walk. Change Your Walk, Change Your Life

These hip exor problems can be helped by changing the way you walk and changing the way you stand. A great deal of lower back, hip, groin and other pain occurs due to the strain put on the lower spine  because the pelvis is tucked under and the thigh bones are leaning forward. My favorite muscle is the psoas and the psoas is one of only three muscles that connect the legs to the spine (piriformis and gluteus maximus are the others). When the psoas is well aligned, the legs will be under your hips and the psoas can engage correctly. When www.CoreWalking.com

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this happens the psoas does a lot of work to hold the spine up naturally and the strain on the quadriceps and the rectus femoris tendon in particular, is reduced. This happens because the psoas is like a pulley system in the body. The psoas attaches on the back half of the inner thigh, it comes forward to cross the rim of the pelvis and then it moves backwards again to attach on the lumbar spine. The hipbone is the pulley and the psoas is the rope. When the psoas is situated correctly there is a magical thing that happens in your body called reciprocal inhibition, which means for one muscle to lengthen, another must shorten. When the psoas engages as designed, it pulls the lumbar spine forward, shortening the psoas, allowing the spinal muscles at the back to lengthen up creating a great deal of support for the spine on top of the pelvis. When we tuck the pelvis under and sink the thighs forward we take the psoas out of its pulley action. When the pelvis is tucked the femurs push forward into the rectus femoris tendon. When that happens, the lower  back shortens, the lumbar spine collapses, the muscles of the spine—the quadratus lumborum, the erector spinea, the multidus—don’t www.CoreWalking.com

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have any tone if the psoas isn’t doing its functional work to keep the thighs back and get the spine to elevate. When all of those negatives occur—the psoas not working, back muscles losing tone—we sink more and more forward into this rectus femoris tendon, among other things. Those other things include tightening of the hamstrings, gluteus maximus, and calves, kyphosis of the upper back and forward head posture. It is hard to pick which of these things is the worst but the rectus femoris tendon bearing so much of the stress of walking, sitting and standing badly has a profound impact. Changing the way you walk can have an immediate eect on the way you sit and stand. I often describe the CoreWalking Program as a posture program in disguise because changing your walk will change your posture. I think changing the way we stand is one of the hardest things to try and accomplish. It is much easier to change walking patterns and that will carry over into sitting, standing, sleeping and any other movement you do. Putting less stress on the quadriceps and the rectus femoris in particular has far reaching benets. Learning to walk dierently can immediately begin this transformation. As the quadriceps release, all of www.CoreWalking.com

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the back body muscles that I mentioned before get to lengthen and soften. I teach that most people walk and stand in a way that shortens the back body and lengthens the front  body. Let’s return to the front body as the exors— quadriceps, psoas, rectus abdominis (sit-ups muscle). And the back body as extensors—gluteus maximus, hamstrings, erector spinea, multidus. Though this might seem strange, if you buy into what I am saying about how most people stand and walk we are making our exors extend and our extensors ex. We want to reverse this. We want to balance the front and back instead of leaning backwards habitually. Leaning backwards with forward leaning thighs puts way too much pressure on the rectus femoris tendon. We want to learn to stand upright and walk forward to relieve a lot of the stress on the hip exors especially if they have caused you trouble in the past. When the legs move back in space, when the leg  bone gets under the hip and the pelvis, taking the inner thighs back, allowing the psoas to work as a pulley, we take a lot of the stress o of the rectus femoris tendon. It is not that hard to do. If you were to start walking dierently today and walk this new way over and over again for the next ten weeks—which is how long the CoreWalking program takes (two weeks per lesson)— www.CoreWalking.com

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when you’re done you will be living in your bones, with your muscles free to move you and your nerves will be freer to tell your muscles to move your bones. As a result, a lot of the back pain that you suer from, a lot of the knee pain, hip pain, groin pain, neck pain, and even headaches, can possibly all start to go away simply from creating more space for this quadriceps tendon, the rectus femoris tendon. And that is just one of the many things that can be changed by learning to walk better, learning to stand and by checking out the Core Walking Program.

www.CoreWalking.com

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