One Hip Mobility Exercise You Aren't Doing But Should Be

Breaking down one of the most overlooked functions of your hips

You may have heard that your Hip Joints provide 6 degrees of freedom, but in reality there are nearly an infinite degree of freedoms for your joint can express.

This may seem strange, but the first idea of 6 degrees sees our joints as linear movement pathways much like robotics. The second idea sees your joint in 3 dimensions and sees every line of potential movement as an option. Essentially, all of the overlapping directions are a blend of tissues that move your body.

In our traditional understanding of how we move, we saw levers and pulleys. We saw specific movements attributed to a muscle and that muscle alone.

Through a new lens, we should see our overlapping muscle tissues as variable contributors. Your muscle and joint tissues when placed at different angles will provide varying amounts of force and load absorption. This is why certain positions provide more mechanical advantage than others.

But for so long we have simply focused on and enhanced the areas where we are most mechanically advantaged, and we neglect the outliers. This feeds an imbalanced relationship between our tissues and predisposes us to potential tissue failure. Tissue failure is often where we experience what we know as injury.

If we think of only 6 degrees though, we only see Flexion, Abduction, Adduction, Internal Rotation, External Rotation and Extension. Extension is quite often the overlooked aspect of our Hips.

There are a variety of ways we can address it specifically, but this setup in the video below is one that I like and find useful.

Check it out.