Is Cycling Bad for Tight Hip Flexors? – Dr.Berg

So I recently had a question on my YouTube channel. Someone was a cyclist, they had low back painand very tight hip flexors and they wanted to know my opinion. So I’m going to explain what I toldthem. So one of the challenges doing bike is doing this repetitive motion over and over and over.You’re working certain muscles way more than other muscles. And so the muscles that you’re workingare the hip flexors, which basically bend the top part of your body with the lower portion

because you’re in this position right here, and the knee extensors as you’re pushing down thepedal. Now, if you have the foot clipped into the pedal, that’s a lot better because you canactually pull up as you’re pushing down and you can work both parts of the leg. But if you don’t,it’s a lot more knee extension. So you’re pushing down than pulling up. So you’re going to bebuilding up your quadricep, specifically one part of the quad because there’s four muscles

called the rectus femoris. And the rectus femoris attaches to the hip, and it’s not just a kneeflexor, it’s a hip flexor as well. So the quads mainly extend the knee, but this one will alsoflex the hip. So we have the situation where it becomes overly developed. And anytime you haveone muscle on the body that’s stronger than the opposing muscle, it can create an imbalance.You also have a problem with an overdeveloped iliopsoas muscle. Now, what is that? Well,

you have the psoas muscle, which connects to the inside of the lower back and to the femur. It’s ahip flexor. So if you envision yourself laying on your back and doing a sit-up, you’re going toactually activate the psoas. But there’s another muscle that’s attached to the inside of the pelvisto the femur. It’s a little lower down. And they call the combination of that muscle an iliopsoas.So basically that muscle flexes the upper part of the body with the lower part. So if you over

develop this muscle and this muscle, it will tend to keep you in a flex state. So the big problem iswe lose the symmetry between the muscles on the front of the body and the muscles on the back.So it’s asymmetrical and it’s out of balance. And that’s really what caused the low back pain.So what I recommended is this. Of course, they need to stretch. But usually when I recommendstretches, it doesn’t really correct the problem. Now, what’s interesting is when you test a cyclist

for flexibility, many times they don’t have a flexibility problem. It doesn’t appear thatthey’re that stiff. The real problem is that they have an overdevelopment of certain muscles,and that’s really what’s creating the imbalance. Because when you do muscle testing, you comparethe muscles that flex versus that extend, you see a huge weakness on the opposing muscle.So what does all that mean? It means that you need to strengthen the opposing muscle

and mainly the glutes, okay? The glutamus maximus, your butt muscle. I put some links down below ofhow to do that. So you want to strengthen that muscle. In addition, you want to do stretchingas well. And I put some links down below, but you also want to strengthen your hamstrings,okay? The back part of the body. Because of biking, you’re developing the flexionand also the leg extensors. So we want to strengthen the opposite, knee flexors,

okay, hamstrings, and the hip extenders, which is the glute. In addition to that,I would highly recommend a person also do yoga because that involves all of your muscles andyou’re combining both flexibility and strengthening at the same time. And that goes for any sportthat is unilateral or using a certain motion over and over and over again, like golf, for example.You’d want to golf on the opposite side to balance it out because over time, you tend to create

disbalance and then you start developing pain and inflammation. Anyway, that’s what I recommendedand thanks for watching. Hey, if you’re liking this content, please subscribe nowand I will actually keep you updated on future videos.