How to Fix Tight Hips (WITHOUT STRETCHING!)

If your hips feel tight when you squat, and you’ve tried every stretch to try and loosen them up and it isn’t working, then you need to watch this video. Here I’m going to show you the real reason why your hips feel tight and what you can do to make your squat better. I will take you through a ste

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I’ve got Jesse with me – oh, wait. I’ve got Jesse with me and we’re going to show you what to do about tight hips.

A lot of times, guys will say, “Oh, my hips are so tight”, or they’ll even say, “My hip flexors are so tight, and I can’t squat”. Guys, it doesn’t make sense because at no point – yes, your hip flexors should be activated in the descent of the squat, actively pulling you down, but it’s not a hip tightness. They’re not being stretched at the bottom of the squat. As a matter of fact, they’re getting more lax. So, what we want to do is fix somebody like Jesse who has some tightness on a squat.

Go ahead and squat down. He gets up and he feels tightness in through here. What’s causing that? I’m going to help you, guys. We’re going to go through three stages.

Number one: we’re going to take a look at the non-Jesse, Raymond over here, to look at skeletal factors and things that you can do right away to fix the tightness that you’re having. The next thing we have to do is look inside the joint a little bit. Right around something we call the ‘hip capsule’. A lot of times we don’t really address this. This is going to have some mobility actions that we could do to try and get to the root of it.

And then if that doesn’t work, there are some other things we tend to always overlook at the muscle level. It’s not just about stretching the muscles. It’s about what the activity of those muscles are and what the stability of those muscles are because if it’s not there, you’re going to get some compensation in other places that will be causing these tight hips. So, when stretching is not working you’ve got to look in other places. This video is going to help you finally get to the root of it.

Obviously, there are a lot of things that could be causing that tightness and that restriction, but we’ve got to start somewhere to figure it out. The easiest place to do that is staying right here on the ground. No, you don’t have me to do this for you, but the good news is, you don’t need me to do this for you. You just take your hip through three different ranges of motion. The first is: how much flexion do you have?

You could do this yourself, again, by grabbing onto your knee and pulling up. For Jesse, he’s got good flexion. He can get well past waistline and it doesn’t feel hard at the end. You want to make sure it’s not feeling like it’s running into a wall, but it has some bounciness to it. The next thing is, you want to check internal rotation.

Even though the foot is moving that way, outward, the hip is actually going into internal rotation. You want to look and see how much rotation you can get here. 30 to 45 degrees would be great. Jesse’s got good rotation. Again, you don’t need me to do that.

Although it’s easier. You can do that yourself, just to test that. Then we have to go into external rotation. With external rotation here, we’re going this direction. What I’m looking for is if this lower leg can cross your waistline, parallel to your waistline.

Run east and west. A lot of your are probably going to find that you’re going to have some restrictions here, but if you find that you have this restriction really hard and feel restriction on internal rotation significantly, combined with some of this flexion limitation here; that would indicate to me that you’ve got some bony, arthritic changes going on there. Or you’ve got some type of impingement or labral tear. Or maybe even a bursitis, if you’ve got some pain. Those are all instances where you’ll want to get checked out for something that needs a little more qualified medical attention.

That’s not something you’re going to fix here in a single video. But when we see the restrictions coming more from what we’re going to find in this video – more of the capsular restrictions, things that you can do something about – you’re likely going to find that the restrictions come in external rotation. That’s exactly what we find here with Jesse. You can see his external rotation on this side is nowhere near getting to waistline. He’s nowhere near parallel to his waist.

He’s not running east to west. He’s got all this lack of external rotation. So, we need to try and figure out what’s happening here. We’re going to look at the skeleton in the easiest of changes because we know we can do some things, just with his own posture and how he sets up for a squat to help alleviate that and create more room. But if that persists, you’ve got to start looking deeper.

You’ve got to start looking into the hip itself and the capsule, which we’re going to do. Then, interestingly, looking at the muscles. But not just from stretching them out, but how we can use the activation of those muscles – or the inactivation – that’s happening here, causing the tightness in the hip. So, I’m going to explain all of it step by step, and we’re going to start right here with the skeleton. All right, guys.

Let’s start off anatomically here. It’s the easiest thing. The thing you can do just like this, just by changing position. But it helps to understand what’s happening inside your hips when you go to squat. We should know that the one of the requirements is to get into hip flexion.

That’s what a squat is. You’re getting into a deep hip flexion. You want to be at proper depth. The first thing you can do to help yourself is realize, in order to get into flexion you want to make sure you have external rotation because it’s going to be easier to get deeper into flexion if you have external rotation of the hip. You can see that right here.

If I were to take my hips and internally rotate them like this, and then try to go into flexion, you can see I get limited in how high I can go. We get bony stops here inside the acetabulum here, the ball and socket of the hip. That gets cleared substantially more when I externally rotate the hip and I can keep going all the way up here. That’s when you see kids get way down into a deep squat. You have to externally rotate the hip to get there.

So, you’re doing yourself a favor if you realize that and you set yourself up to do that. So, the easiest way to set yourself up is twofold. Number one: you take a little bit of a wider stance. If you go into a narrow stance squat, you’re already starting to cause some impingement in the hip here and the inability to get past this bony block. You can see it getting stuck.

It’s getting stuck right here on the pelvis. But if I take my leg out wider and now, I go down in there, I’ve cleared that. There’s a clearance here. Anatomically I’ve created a better opportunity to get down. But then I could also just turn my legs out a little bit.

It’s a necessary part of squatting. We talk about it all the time, guys. If you want to squat effectively and properly you need to turn your legs out. Not just your feet. Your feet – it doesn’t mean anything because you can turn down here and some rotation of the tibia that won’t have any impact on the hip.

It’s about getting the entire leg turned out, keeping those knees over the toes, and that’s when you hear that because you want to keep the whole leg out. So now when I go into that squat, I’ve got external rotation. So, if you’re already having problems, let’s say you do this, but you still feel you’ve got this tightness inside; we’ve got to go to the next part here. That is examining what is going on right here in the hip capsule at the head of the femur in the acetabulum. So if you’ve tried to make those skeletal modifications where you’ve opened up your hips, and you squat, and you’re still finding that you’ve got the ti