Riders: tight hip flexors? Instead of stretching, try THIS!

Описание: Do you ever stretch your hip flexors and while it feels like it's really 'getting in there' at the time, before you know it they've pinged straight back to where they were before? Or even, they've got sore?

Often when our hip flexors feel like they're tight, they don't actually benefit from stretching in the traditional sense. Often, it's not so much that they're physically shortened and need pulling longer, like we imagine. It's more that they're constantly slightly "switched on", they're overworking, they're holding themselves engaged. And if you try to stretch a muscle that's doing that, you can trigger its inbuilt protection mechanism which is designed to protect the joints: it's an automatic reaction where if you pull too much at a muscle that is switched on, the body fears that the joint is going to get compromised or damaged by those forces, and so it sends a signal to the muscle to hold on even tighter to prevent the 'pull' pulling on the joint.

So instead of stretching, try this. It's a really gentle movement and probably won't feel like it's doing much at the time. But if you follow the instructions and ensure you're using the muscles around the seatbone in the glutes to create the effort, you will be using that same internal automatic system to get the body to tell the over-keen hip flexor to let go...

If you get tight in this area (hands up most people!) then the more often you can do this one, the better!