2 Exercises to Strengthen Hip Flexors at Home
in this video I'm going to show you two exercises to strengthen your hip flexors you're not trying to go you can do these two exercises at home and when you first start you don't need any equipment at all by the end of this video you're going to understand how to do these two exercises the relevant Anatomy involved in hip flexion and what the heck hip flexion is and you're gonna have a path to building stronger hip flexors so if you're ready let's get ready to think right move right and feel right first let's quickly cover what hip flexion is it's when you bring your femur up towards the sky or closer to your chest I did not give consent for that I didn't give consent for you to live rent free in my house the term hip flexion should not be confused with when you are just flexing muscles flexing muscles as a way of saying Contracting muscles so if you say you're flexing the hip we're not talking about Contracting hip muscles we're talking very specifically about the femur going in this Direction moving this front back plane called the sagittal plane and going forward like this the opposite motion is hip extension which is when the femur goes back this way meaning it's going behind your body also once you're done learning these exercises I'm going to link to a video at the end of this one that'll show you how to use the right level of effort to strengthen your hip flexors without getting yourself hurt so be sure to watch that video after you're finished with this one the hip flexor muscles are not just one or two muscles there are a bunch of muscles involved in hip flexion first of all there are other classic hip flexors that everybody knows which are the iliopsoas which starts here on the inside of your femur and goes up to your lower back it attaches to the front of your lumbar spine there's also a muscle that starts there that attaches to the inside front of your pelvis called the iliacus and now everyone thinks okay there we go we cover it hip flexor is done but in fact there are many more muscles that help you with hip flexion rectus femoris is one of the quadriceps muscles and it goes from the front of the pelvis down to the knee and it helps you do that also have your adductors which attach to the front and the bottom of your pelvis and down towards the knee and to various points on the thigh and those function to create hip flexion as well depending on the position you're in you also have muscles like the gluteus Minimus gluteus medius the tensor fasciae on the side of the pelvis that can help you create hip flexion again that can vary based on your leg position but the point is that all of these muscles are going to help you with hip flexion so don't just get caught up thinking oh I just need to strengthen my iliopsoas when you're doing hip flexor exercises you might feel different muscles kick in and that's okay in a previous video I talked about doing the can can exercise which is to just lift your knee up towards the ceiling and sky like so you slowly lower it down with control and lift it back up with control if you want more challenge you keep your leg up you put some weight on your leg or ankle weights on the bottom of your leg and you keep going to fatigue keeping it at a reasonable challenge not trying to kill yourself but for some people this is a really big balance Challenge and it's just too distracting there are too many moving pieces holding on to something might be okay but maybe you're so weak that just standing on one leg doesn't really work for you so let me show you the first hip flexor exercise that doesn't involve balance that you can do at home anywhere you're just going to be sitting down you're going to lift your leg up this should look very familiar this is the exact same exercise as the can can except you're sitting down you're nice and stable and you have a reduced range of motion what's nice here is you're actually strengthening the hip flexors in a shortened position meaning the top position where the muscles are all shortened lengthened would be when you're more in hip extension and then those muscles are longer when we're already in the seated position those muscles are in a shortened position and then we're firing them and strengthening them in that shortened range why does this matter when we're strengthening any muscle we want to build strength at every length we want to have control of muscles at every possible length that they can do so we're starting off in this shortened position which is a position that we almost never train our hip flexors in fact many of us don't train our hip flexors at all most of the time we're just sitting like this and our hip flexors are sort of working just a little bit but the atrophy because they're never working against any kind of resistance so when you're doing this exercise lifting and lowering lifting and lowering you're getting resistance from gravity and the mass of your actual leg for some people this is enough challenge to start you're going to feel like my leg is kind of heavy you're going to do this for repetitions it might be 10 it might be 20 repetitions or you can just hold that top position until you start to feel muscles around the front of your hip start to complain when you first start I would recommend keeping the shin vertical and we'll talk about what you can do to mess around with that later because that is going to matter if this feels really easy you can throw on an ankle weight here or you can put the weight up on top of your thigh it doesn't really matter and then you can just do the same exercise making sure the weight stays on your body keep going until you get fatigue again don't [ __ ] yourself with soreness just look for a reasonable challenge somewhere around 70 percent of your max effort if you can't breathe it feels like a vein is going to explode on your forehead or in your neck then you're trying way too hard make sure that you are just fatiguing muscles and getting used to talking to those muscles that's all you're looking for you're not trying to go and when you're ready for more challenge you can get more weight just like a dumbbell and put it on top of your leg and then you can practice lifting that dumbbell using your hip flexor muscles okay how do we strengthen the hip is in a LinkedIn position great question so to strengthen the hip flexors in a lengthened position you're going to want to lie down on a couch or bench somewhere you can let the leg come down into a little bit of hip extension if possible just going into this position might feel like a bit of a stretch for various muscles on the front of your hip and so it'll be good for you to just spend some time like this to lengthen those muscles now to get control of this position we want to again build strength at every length so in this lengthen position we're going to then start lifting the leg up now as you get to I don't know what that is 70-ish degrees you're going to feel like there's not that much resistance anymore because your leg is approaching vertical it's not that heavy it's not that hard to pull it anymore so the hip flexors aren't getting that much challenge so you don't have to go all the way to 90 degrees but you can if you want to or you're going to feel the most work happen is at the bottom position all the way up to around like 65 of 70 degrees you're going to feel hip flexors working through that Arc if you want the extra credit go all the way through the arc but if not then just go through that more difficult area here I do recommend that you have a long enough bench that you can rest your head if you want more ab work then lift your head up like I'm doing here and hold it up your neck muscles are also going to get a nice little challenge but if all of that is too distracting and you get too tired your neck is like ah then please use something to support your head okay you can even use your hand like this so again you're just going to fatigue it might be five it might be ten it might be 20 repetitions you're trying to really strengthen the muscles at this lengthened position you can play around with this by even doing little flutter kicks down here at the bottom position to really focus on the length and position or you could do it higher up find where it just feels weak and a little out of control and just keep strengthening that range so that you have strength at every length if you want more of a challenge just grab a light ankle weight do not use a 10 pound ankle weight to start start off with something light even if you have a five pound ankle weight maybe just start it with one pound and then throw that on there you're gonna lie back do the exercise the exact same way focusing on feeling muscles in the front of the hip also when you're doing this make sure that the foot and the knee are pointing up towards the sky we're not going to deviate so that the leg is twisted or externally rotated unless we're doing that intentionally same goes for internal rotation we want to be very intentional we want to have volition at every position so we're not going to do that and allow the leg to get in weird positions unless we are absolutely choosing to do that which we're going to talk about in a second one final thing to note is when you're doing this exercise it's very helpful to hug the knee towards your chest or at least to have the leg in a bent position with the foot flat on the bench if you have the leg like this you're probably going to arch your back heavily and that's not what we want to do we want to have the low back as flat and rounded even pressing down as we can so that we can focus on getting these muscles to lengthen rather than the back to lift off of the bench for both of these exercises you want to do them on both sides and whichever side is weaker because I know you have a weaker side do an extra set so if you're doing two sets on both legs then do a third set for the weaker leg when you first start do these exercises twice a week to start and give yourself rest days in between so do it like Monday Thursday or Tuesday Saturday so that you can let the soreness kick in and dissipate before you start doing the workout again hey I want to give a big shout out and thanks to the five people who have become five dollar supporters on patreon Chef Jeff Rick Doug Kim and Esme thank you all so much for your five dollar place if you want to support this channel too use the Donate link you'll find in the description box or the join in things buttons on YouTube make sure to go to my website to get them on newsletter and find me on all those other social media channels but don't get caught up in too much social media just follow me even though I don't really post them all right thanks so much for your support now let's get back to it as you get stronger and more familiar with how these exercises feel and how your body responds then you can bump it up as you feel comfortable I also strongly suggest you watch the video I made about using the right level of effort to fix your hip flexors and make them stronger I'm going to link to that at the end of the video and in the description box so be sure to watch that when you're done with this one now I mentioned we can play around with variables like twisting and turning and leg positions so let's talk about that right now when you're doing this seated hip flexor lift and you feel like you want to explore a little bit you can start adding bits of rotation to your femur for example what I'm doing right now is called hip external rotation it's the front of this femur bone rotating the point out to the side and then I can still work on hip flexion this is going to help me use my adductors and my Sartorius muscle which I forgot to mention earlier in the video as being a hip flexor and you may be wondering why would I want to do that and the reason is because you want to have options you want to have volition at every position so let's say you're involved in a support that requires you to do weird stuff like say soccer in soccer you have to do a motion like this where you combine external rotation with flexion so that you can control and juggle the ball likewise you might also want to be able to do hip internal rotation and hip flexion so you can work on that in this position sitting down internal rotation meaning that top of this femur the front of the femur turns the point in and then here you go you can work on hip flexion with internal rotation with external rotation and again if we use this soccer or a hacky sack analogy when you're doing stuff you might want your leg to be able to go out to other positions so you might want to add abduction meaning away from the midline and work on hip flexion here you might want to work on adduction meaning you bring it across the midline and it can be really helpful to just kind of twist to really accentuate it so it's like this leg is sticking out this one is back here so twisted and then work on hip flexion from this position you can even combine these things by going into abduction external rotation and then lifting you want to find the positions and the angles that are just tough for you to control maybe it's out here maybe it's just right here maybe it's with a little rotation in whatever Direction you can work on those variables to help you get more stable in a wide variety of positions and when you're lying down on your back you can do the same thing you could be a little more abducted if you want you can add external rotation just making sure that you feel different muscles working and you feel it safely the goal here is to have control when you're going through that range of motion and not going in anything that hurts or pushing through anything that feels like it's going to pop stay in a controlled range of motion and gradually expand the range of motion so that you have volition at every position you can go external you can go internal abducted adducted whatever you want is fine as long as it feels like it's controlled and safe and of course as you get better at the seated exercise you might feel like you know what I want to start doing the standing version of that exercise that's totally fine too again adding ankle weights is a great idea or you can use a dumbbell and just put it right here like this and then work on lifting so you'll get the most resistance through the higher end of the range of motion and not so much down at this position and that's okay because you're trying to strengthen at the shortened position so now you've got two simple exercises to strengthen your hip flexors at home after you try them let me know how they feel in the comment section down below I promised I would link to the video that'll help you find the right effort to strengthen your hip flexors and you'll find that video right here to support this channel use the Donate link you'll find in the description box or the join and thanks buttons on YouTube like share and subscribe with a bell notification on and as always I hope you remember that pain sucks life every time
