Modification for Tight Hips

We're going to look now at something that many people complain about, which is tightness in the hips as well as in the hamstrings at the back of the legs. So Christie here is demonstrating what that tightness would look like. Notice how she's not able to fully sit upright on her sit bones, that she has a curve in her back right now and her shoulders aren't directly over her hips either. Now what I'm going to do is have her start to lean back and she's going to experience even more tightness in her hip flexors that were already tight to begin with. Instead, I'm going to have Christie sit on a box. It's a concept that I call bringing the ground up to you.

So you're basically elevating the ground. And by doing this, we decrease that angle in the hip flexors. Now she's also gonna straighten her legs and notice how she can straighten them now, whereas before she couldn't. So now Christie is going to demonstrate what many people do when they start to roll back, which is basically hunching through the upper back and not doing too much other than tightening the lower back. Instead, what I'm going to cue Kristy into is to find a gentle lift through the low belly, good pushing through her feet, and then she releases her lower back as she engages through the front. And now inhale and exhale returning forward as if you're rolling over an imaginary ball. And now you can sit up tall. Now, if that is not enough to get you out of the tightness in your hip flexors, you have an additional option, which is to use a ball. So I'm going to place that ball here between her thighs, the squeezing of the ball engages the inner thighs and connects her more into her core. And now she can try it one last time.

And notice how we now get a release on this side here through the lower back and coming all the way back up. So what we've done is addressed the tightness in the hip flexors as well as in the hamstrings.