The flexibility of our body muscles and joints is often overlooked when we exercise for fitness. The main aim when we exercise is mostly to get the perfect abs and bigger biceps, but the mobility of the hips is one of the most severely overlooked aspects of being fit.
Hip Flexibility is not paid much attention to if you do a lot of work sitting down in front of a desk, or in the car then you may have reduced the flexibility of your hips without even knowing about it.
Reducing this mobility is the main cause for having lower back pain in younger and elderly people, and some may not even be able to bend down to pick up a bag of groceries without getting cramps or being advised to bed rest.
We need to keep this in mind that the muscles present around the hips are one of the most important muscles for the movement of our body. If our hip agility becomes weak, then we tend to lose our grip on our daily movement patterns and lose our balance. Accordingly, our body leans on to our knees or lower back which ends up doing all of our work.
Due to the increasing workload nowadays, we tend to overlook how less functional our hips have become, which is why I will now introduce some exercises that will increase our hip mobility so that we can avoid lower back pain in future.
- Lying H
- We need to first lie on our back, preferably a very flat surface like an exercising mat or a carpeted floor.
- Slowly bend your knees and then cross one ankle over the opposite knee.
- Now pull the knee of this leg closer to your chest, while keeping the top leg fixed in its place.
- You will feel a stretch in the hips.
This exercise is used as a warm-up exercise for the hips. We should hold the first leg in place for a prescribed time and then do the same time for the other leg. This will be counted as one set.
- Butterfly Stretch
- First sit up extremely straight, with your legs spread, and the soles of your feet pressed together.
- Drop your knees to the side as far as they can go with you being comfortable.
- Pull in your stomach muscles gently and lean a little forward towards your feet from your hips.
- Grasp your feet with both your hands and pull yourself forward more.
This exercise is very important for the groin muscles and as well as for the rotation of the hips. Most Importantly, keep your back very straight during this exercise.
To make this exercise easy you can work on one side at first and then the other one.
- Frog Stretch
- Sit on all fours; Join the palms of your hand together, bringing the knees as apart as you can.
- Now move back and forth in this position.
- Place your feet on the ground, and your toes should point outwards.
This is a comprehensive exercise and adds more weight and stretch to your inner thighs and hips. Go slow with this exercise, doing one side first and then the other.
- Kneeling Lunge
- Bend one knee, getting into a lunge position keeping your knee and foot apart from each other which must be the same as the wideness of your hips
- Keep the chest straight and the shin upright.
- Pull the back knee up off the ground to apply more pressure.
Don’t forget to keep your upper body tall and extremely straight, and you might have to spend some time in finding the best front foot position.
