 Hey everybody I'm Lance Goyke and today we're going to talk about hip extension range of motion and how do you figure out What kinds of flexibility is normal for you? So I came across this article, which I think is worth kind of diving into it's from 2008 Elson and Espinal it's called measurements of hip range and oh Jesus measurement of hip range of Flexion extension and straight leg raising. Okay. I don't know why that was so hard to say Short version is they're trying to come up with a better way to measure hip extension So generally people are laying prone Facedown on a table like this the tester lifts up the leg They grab right about under the knee and then pull superiorly towards the ceiling better picture There you go Or you could do it actively like that that other picture was just showing where she's just lifting her leg Nobody else is doing it and that is our first difference. That's probably worth talking about There's a difference between passive range of motion and active range of motion And I think it's it's important to talk about that because it's especially important today when we're talking about hip extension hip extension is really susceptible to A difference in active and passive range of motion and part of that is because of the shape of the joint And the other part of that is because of the musculature around it So let's say I have this person laying down I'm the practitioner here. I put my right hand on the sacrum to stabilize the pelvis I pulled a thigh upward to measure my hip extension That is a passive range of motion. The the person that I am measuring does not have to Control the leg at all. The the practitioner is providing all of these external inputs that then stabilize you So this will tell me passive hip extension range of motion. I might test 40 degrees here, but then when I go And I let go as a practitioner the practitioner lets go and then the person being tested Let's the leg come up that measurement might be zero degrees or five degrees or 10 degrees And part of that is just because the shape of the joint isn't allowing all of this But the biggest reason Is just that the glute gets so short that it can't lift up anymore The hip extensors get so short that they can't lift the hip up anymore So as far as active range of motion the numbers that we generally say are somewhere around 10 or 20 degrees Is considered normal the second thing that I want to kind of talk about so what is stopping the range of motion Well part of it is the shape of the joint the shape is this ball Inside of a socket, but it's not always Perfectly spherical and it's dependent upon the position of the pelvic bones and the sacrum So the sacrum can kind of like steer the pelvic bones and orient them differently So sometimes the bone is just in the way you have a bony block I wouldn't say this is quote bone on bone Where you have diminished dissipation of forces and you have more arthritis in a joint or whatever That's not what i'm talking about here though. That probably increases or decreases your mobility increases the likelihood that you have less mobility, right? What i'm talking about here is more just orientation of socket Preventing the hip bone the ball from rolling around you'll notice more differences in hip positioning mobility If you have very taut ligaments now ligaments are well, let's just show you the picture There are three major hip ligaments around the hip joint We might call all of this together the hip capsule There's an anterior hip capsule and there's a posterior hip capsule the posterior hip capsule Which we can start with is comprised of this ischial femoral ligament Which you see here on the right and then the anterior hip capsule has two different Muscles here or not muscles not muscles explicitly not muscles ligaments here iliofemoral and pubofemoral So now these ligaments Check hip motion. So when you stretch a muscle, right? You stretch it and it's like a rubber band and it returns back to shape Ligaments on the other hand if you stretch a really long way, they're not like a rubber band. They're more like a spring So normally they will help you come back But if you go too far if you stretch too far You have this deformation where they no longer check that motion. So somebody with really extensive flexibility training or hip range of motion like somebody who's done gymnastics all their life They spend a lot of time practicing Mobility practicing flexibility and they're not going to have the same checks in their hip motion All right, so back to the article measurement of hip range of flexion extension and straight leg raising We're going to talk more about this flexion extension thing. So what they did That's kind of the picture their point was if you stand up straight There should be a curve in your back That should be the neutral spinal position and it should determine a neutral sacral position as well When you're measuring somebody this picture was so close that I couldn't get what they were doing This on the left is a leg and this on the right is like a cut out in the You saw it up here Cut out in the shirt that's showing her back And then underneath there is a hand that is the practitioner's hand who is measuring and somewhat securing the Lumbo sacral junction. So the end of the spinal vertebra and then the start of the sacrum So we do that to get an indication of Quote true hip extension and flexion We don't want as a if we're trying to understand what is the hip joint itself The acetabular femoral joint. What is that single joint itself able to do without Considering that hey, sometimes I can bend my knee up more because I round my back So if I look at that I use that hand to isolate only hip motion What they were finding Was a pretty broad range actually of measurements 80 to 140 degrees of flexion and five to 40 degrees of extension and they have the Distribution not exactly the distribution, but a little bit some more statistics here the mean of hip flexion was 85 So really close to 80. That's that's actually pretty interesting but the most common measurement they got was 110 and then uh For the extension the numbers were actually a lot more it seems normally distributed So your mean was a lot more in the middle of the range Around 25 degrees as a practitioner what you can do then is you can go to maximum flexion here Using the hand as kind of a guide to block that that sacrum from moving And then once you get to the end of flexion you can push Past you can remove your hand from underneath the practitioner you can push past and flatten the back into the Bench that you're laying on or that they called it a couch, but I just picture a couch is so soft That's not what you want to use you're you're going to push the back down into the thing That's going to posterily tilt the pelvis, which is Hip extension and that's an important concept to get so I'll say it again You're going to remove the hand you're going to posterily tilt the pelvis by flexing that other leg up And then that is going to be your hip extension and you'll watch the leg And it's not going to flex this much, but I mean I suppose if you push hard enough it will but You're going to watch the leg be flat on the bench And you're going to push the other leg her right leg here as far as you can until This thigh starts to raise up And that difference in hip flexion that you then have Is motion of posterior pelvic tilt at the pelvis Is hip extension so that will tell you your hip extension range of motion now That's not a bad way to do it It is a good way to isolate the active hip range of motion The the only caveat that I have or well two caveats that I have that I want to bring up here are first Hip extension changes based on the position of the pelvis So if you're restricting pelvic motion, you're also kind of restricting Available range of motion at that true joint like at the joint that you're measuring Even though we're taking this stuff out of it this these motions don't occur in isolation And so a test like that I don't see as being super useful Unless you're you're like really specifically measuring Is there a block or a limitation inside the hip joint which can be useful Especially in like a surgical consult kind of situation, but as far as a mostly healthy individual Just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me and that leads me to my next point Which is the most important thing for a healthy individual trying to be you know more than healthy above average Is being able to move these joints actively and independently So there's this concept of Dissociation of movement which is which is really just mobility itself So if I can extend my hip without changing my back position, then I'm probably gonna be pretty good at deadlifting But if I can't do that if I can't bend over to reach the bar on the ground for a deadlift Without rounding my back a little bit more and I can't stand all the way up because I don't have Access to my hip extension and I end up arching my back to get there instead I'm probably gonna have a really tight back after I deadlift. So we don't want that So to me this dissociation of movement is more important now granted This is just an article and I think they did a good job of coming up with a new test This is this is pretty uh, I'm curious about it. I haven't used it But it seems like it would be a good measurement now the last point that I want to make here I've brought up an article that I wrote about buttwink. So buttwink short version is It's a it's a mobility limitation in a squat where as I get to the bottom of the the squat I've run out of hip motion and so I bend at the back Instead to get extra motion. You can see in my thumbnail here. Allison's got a really deep squat here With a flat back position She's got a less deep squat more bent over squat here with a hyper extended upper back And a hyper flexed lower back here This is the most common type of buttwink and then a less common but still you know able to do Is as you go down just everything bends and kind of collapse and flexes So both of these on the right are wrong And we're looking for something that's more like the one on the left now way Down in this article this novel of an article. I hope you'll like it. Feel free to check it out I've got some drawings that I had commissioned about various hip socket shapes and bone shapes Hip socket depth is a really important Interperson individuality kind of thing So when you have a deeper hip socket the socket covers more of the ball of the hip joint And you get less pressure in the joint and you can disperse the forces through the hip over a broader area Right, so you tend to have healthier joints over the long term But you tend to have less mobility because you have a bone in the way And it's a normal in the way kind of thing You're not going to stretch yourself out of it too much If if you take somebody instead with a shallow hip socket And you have them do a bunch of stretching stuff Like they're going to move their leg is just going to move around like a noodle like a wet noodle like there's no resistance, right? They're not going to do as well with high force activities But they're going to have a lot of mobility if you took someone with a shallow hip and someone with a deep hip And you stretched them really hard for five years The person with the shallow hip would have crazy mobility or flexibility I should say and the person with the deep hip would have less They would have a lot more than they would have five years ago But they will have a lot less than the person with the shallow hip So this is just something to consider people who tend to like stretching tend to have Shallower joints so don't compare yourself to other people who are super flexible because you might just not have the physiology To support that or the anatomy to support that the other idea is just like if you have a hip impingement It's the same kind of thing. So a hip impingement is an addition of bone So the bones hit each other and the body doesn't like it and it says okay. Well, we need to stabilize this joint Let's put more bone on So you can have a cam or a pincer or a mixed hip impingement And if we look at the mixed one here, I've added bone onto the ball of the hip socket And I've added bone onto this Not the ball of the hip socket but the ball of the hip And then I've added bone onto the hip socket as well and what that does is it it limits your mobility It's just it makes the hip more of a deep hip, right? All right. That's all I have to say it. Let's do a quick recap. So, uh, we'll try to go in reverse order the interpersonal Individuality plays into this a lot. I could have a deep or a shallow hip socket And you don't want to compare one to the other because they're just different You're not gonna a deep hip is never going to be a shallow hip We talked about testing we talked about passive range of motion versus active range of motion And how when I have a practitioner stretch my hip I'm usually going to get or or you know, I didn't say this earlier, but or gravity stretch my hip I'm probably going to have a lot more hip extension than if I try to do it on my own We talked about the integrity of the hip capsule and the ligaments around the hip joint If I have more Flexibility in the anterior hip capsule, then I'll probably have a lot more hip extension as well because those Interior ligaments are not stopping my hip extension. They're not checking my hip extension. So sometimes If I just keep stretching I'm just stretching out these ligaments and and you know, if you need the mobility then you got to do what you got to do But that might be suboptimal for some people, especially if you're trying to be, you know, like the most well-rounded strength athlete kind of person And then we went through this new testing not I guess it's not new. This is from 2008, but We went through this testing of a hip extension where you place your hand underneath someone's back to stabilize the hip You check hip flexion and then you remove the hand and then check hip extension on the opposite side It was just a pretty cool idea Hope that helps If you learned something hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos If you need something else to watch well, I have a whole hip mobility circuit. I will leave that here