 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Boyke and today we're going to do another Limber Up with Lance session on hip mobility. My hip's been bugging me the last day or two, so we're going to go through some stuff. I'm even going to introduce a test for you to try out to see if your hip mobility is getting better. We're just going to try to improve some of our mobility measurements. To start off, we're going to use the active straight leg raise. So the idea with this is we lay on our back, let's say straight arms are down by your sides, this, and we're looking to see the down leg stay straight and we're looking to see the up leg come up at least 80 degrees or so. Okay, so what I want to do is I want to pull my toe towards me and then I want to bend up as high as I can. If my knee starts to come up, this straight knee, this right knee, then I'm going too far. Okay, so don't let that happen. Keep that knee nice and locked down and then we're going to just pull up as far as we can. We say active because nobody's pulling my leg or I'm not using my arms to pull my leg. I'm just using my hip flexors to pull my leg up. Now we switch sides, check the other one. Now for this, I can tell I'm a little bit more limited and I feel it mostly in my calf. You want to take note of it. So there's basically two outcomes for this test. Either I can be limited where I can't bend my leg up or I could be asymmetrical where one leg bends more than the other. If I'm asymmetrical, I'm more likely to twist when I do my squats. I'm more likely to have a hip shift when I do my deadlift, all sorts of stuff like that, and twisting can be associated with some pain problems. So once you've done that, we'll get set up for our first exercise. All right, our first exercise in this hip mobility circuit is going to be the rock bag. So this is my favorite one. If you saw my first limber up video, I'd like to start with this one. It's just easier to be successful. If you've never done it before, don't worry about this pillow right here. But if you're pretty familiar with the exercise, you can try the pillow like I'm going to do here. Just tends to take care of some of your asymmetries. So we start on hands and knees. You're going to pull your belly up slightly. I don't want to round too much. I don't want a hard crunch like this. I just want to pull my belly up slightly. And then from there, I'm going to rock the hips back and then I'm going to bring my elbows down to the ground. Now my pillow is in the way. So I'm going to reorient my pillow and reset. Tuck my hips, rock my hips back, bring my elbows down. I'm just trying to stay long from tail all the way to the top of my head. I don't want to be looking forward like this. And I don't want to let my head fall down like this. Staying nice and long. And then we're just holding this position for five breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth, and a nice long pause and repeat. So I know I'm doing it well when I feel my back expand on my inhales. I will take a quick rest. We're going to do three rounds of this. It tends to get better, at least over three rounds. Sometimes if you really need it, I'll do five. But for your sake, we're going to save some time. We're only going to do three. Let's go again. Tuck, rock back, elbows, and breathe. When I breathe in, I want to try to bring the air into my butt. The lungs are up in the upper chest area. But as I expand the lungs, they push down on the contents of the abdomen, like your guts. And those guts got to go somewhere and they tend to go lower and your pelvic floor catches it. So if you feel stuff moving around there, that's generally a good idea. Good thing. Let's do one last one. I'm not too worried about toes pointed or toes bent under you. Just do whatever is comfortable. Now it's easy to lose tension here. To feel like this is too easy by losing the pressure in the sides of your abs, your oblique area. So if I breathe in and my belly just falls down, I'm not getting anything out of that. I'm not getting that expansion in my upper back. And I'm not going to increase my mobility from that. So you want to maintain some active tension down there. And again, if the back doesn't expand, it's probably not working. If you don't feel the hips moving, it's probably not working. Last one here. And as you go through that, do a couple of rounds, you should feel yourself sit back. I'm going to just retest my straight leg weights real quick because I should see some improvements pretty quickly on this. So that feels really good. And this was my limited one before. That feels much better. Yeah. I still have some tension in the calf. So we'll do some more exercises. And I think that's going to alleviate itself. But that's how I want you to use the active straight leg raise. And that's why I like to start with the rock back because it just works. All right. Our second exercise in this hip mobility circuit is going to be the right sideline left adductor pullback. You might just call it a hip shift while you're laying on your right side. What we're trying to do here is dissociate the hips from the upper body, from the spine specifically. If I shift my hips, I don't want my back to have to move with it. Okay. We're going to try to teach the hips to move on the song. I'm going to use this pillow to support my head. And then all I'm going to do is pull the left knee backward behind the right knee. Okay. I want a little bit of my belly pulled back while I'm doing that. But again, I'm not crunching. I'm not rounding too hard. I just need a little bit of not arching my back. So we're holding that. Now I can see if I look down at my knees, my left knee is about two inches behind my right. I'm going to reorient so you can kind of see it a little bit. If we look down here, knees are stacked. If I shift, left knee is back behind the right knee. If I start to do something like this and my left knee can't stay down, I've shifted too far. Likewise, if I shift and I feel it here on the front of my hips, I've shifted too far. So just a subtle shift. And then I'm going to push this knee down into the right leg. And we're just going to hold again for five breaths. While you're doing this, if you're totally new to this, you might get some cramping in the left inner thigh. I get it pretty much every time I do it actually. So I'm not very new to it. So you might still get it regardless. Same idea as though we're trying to breathe low into the butts, feel some of that pelvic floor moving around. And I can actually feel my left inner thigh tighten up a bit. I'm pretty happy with that. Now, depending on how you're feeling, you might need more rest for this one than we took in the rock back. The rock back is a little bit easier. This one, we're really hammering in on this left inner thigh, but I'm going to get going again. I think you're probably ready. Get a little hip tuck here, belly comes back, and then the left knee comes back. I like to just think every time I exhale, I'm trying to push it down perpendicular to the ground, letting gravity take it down with me. Now I'm starting to feel in the front of my hip here. So I'm going to back off my shift slightly. One more breath. Nice. Okay, we're going to do that one more time now. We're only doing it on this side. Notice I'm not getting up. I'm not switching around. That's just because the body is asymmetrical. You've got a liver that's on the right. You've got a tiny spleen on the left. Your breathing muscle is asymmetrically sized. Like the right side is huge and the left side is moderately sized, right? So what we're trying to do is combat your natural asymmetries. It tends to be where people fall into. Let's do one last one. Again, we're dissociating the hips. Left knee shifts back. Left knee pushes down, and I feel my left inner thigh growing in the area. If you're not feeling it, try to shut your abs off. Sometimes the abs tend to take over, and you don't get that dissociation we were talking about. Notice our breaths are really slow, and they're supposed to be that way. Pretty much everything else should relax. And we're just turning on that left inner thigh. One last one, and rest. Cool, so that one is good for starting to teach the hip shift. I'm dissociating, again, I'm dissociating the hip from the lower back, from the spine. We don't want those to move together. We want them to move independently. That's what mobility is. All right, now for our third exercise, we're going to slip over. You're going to lay on your left side now. We're going to try to activate. We're going to do the shift thing, but we're going to do it from the other side. We're going to try to still shift the left knee back, the right knee forward. But we're going to see if we can do it with some other muscles, not just with the left inner thigh. So, same idea. I'm going to pull my belly back. We'll call this the clam shell. Right knee pushes forward, just slightly. I might even feel that leftover of the left groin. That's good if I get that to turn on. Just hang on to that. We don't want the abs. We want the abs to stay jelly, and then the right knee raises up. I don't want to come up super high, because if I come up super high, I might feel it in the glute, but I'll also turn on the left glute, and turn off the left inner thigh. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm trying to keep the hips shifted, and then just do whatever I can with the top hip. So, same idea. Three sets, five breaths. I know this is long, but this is what it takes to shut some stubborn muscles off. Same idea. Belly stays tucked back. Now, when you exhale, it's easy to let the leg sink down. Don't let that happen. If I really try to keep this knee up when I exhale, I get a lot of right glute max. I love that. Okay, this one can be hard, just like the last one. This can be a muscle that's not used to fatiguing like that, and you could need some rest. We're going to try to push it, though. I don't want you to just lay around for this whole thing. Let's go around two. Tuck hips, shift the right knee forward, shift the right knee up. Now, again, I'm trying to feel the right glute. If I don't feel that, that tends to indicate that some stuff is on that shouldn't be on. So, just try to be as loose and relaxed as possible. Nice. Okay, quick rest. We'll do one more. Specifically, I'm trying to shut off the right inner thigh. That's one of those asymmetry muscles that likes to be short, likes to be tonic, toned up, and likes to prevent our hips from being mobile. So, that's why we're addressing it. Last one, right knee forward, right knee up. Five breaths. I really feel this on the third one here. It's like the inside of my right leg is getting longer, which is good. That's exactly what we want. And if you think it's just a placebo effect, maybe that's good. Maybe you want that too. I'm losing count because I'm shaken. I think that was three. It's actually getting really difficult for me to keep the tension on the glute and not on the inner thigh. If it feels that hard for you as well, you can stop early and I'm shaken. Okay, good. We did it. Cool. So, we're dissociating the hips. Again, it's the same thing. I'm shifting, but I'm not moving the spine as a unit with it. I'm letting the spine kind of twist while the hips drive the movement. That's the key to hip mobility. All right. Exercise number four. We're going to start moving around a little bit. Now, this one is called the leg lowering. It's just like the test we did. If you want, you can pause the video and retest your active straight leg rates. I'm pretty confident mine's going to be better though, so I'm not too worried about it. And it was already better, so that's good. If you need to test, go ahead and do that. If not, we're going to do the leg lowering. I like to put the palms on the ground next to your sides. You're going to bring both legs up. And oh yeah, that's totally better. I feel way less tension in my calf. So, keep an eye on that. Pull the toes towards you throughout. You're going to keep one leg up and let the other leg lower. And then switch sides. We're going to do 10 on each. This doesn't have to take too long. You just got to make sure that the low back stays down in the ground. It's four, six, seven. If you get popping or clicking in your hips, eight. And you're probably not keeping the low back down. Nine. And maybe this is too hard for you. Ten. You could bend your knees and do a heel tap instead. Really try to keep that low back pushed down. And that's a nice little regression to make sure that you're, it's more important that the back stays down than the leg moves. All right, exercise number five in our hip mobility circuit. We're going to do the bare walk. I'm going to kind of invert. I flipped over now. I'm going to go on my hands in like a piped up position here. I'm going to start at the back of my mat. And from here, I'm just going to let my head not fall down, but I want it to be a long consecutive line from my tailbone all the way to the top of my head. Nice and long there. Big deals here are don't shrug to hold yourself up. You want to hold yourself up with your armpits, not with your shoulders. Okay? Arm plinth. Not with your neck. Let's say that. It's okay. Now I'm just going to keep my knees locked out. I'm going to try to sink my heels towards the ground. Just a little bit goes a long way. Don't push that too much. Okay? Just baby step forward. Try to get this heel down. My front heel stays down. Left back heel is going to come up and then I'm going to step with my other side as well. And then I step next foot, step with my hand as well. Step, step, step, step, step. A little bit of shift is okay. Step. Let's go backward too. You don't need a whole lot of room to do this one. Just try to keep those heels down. This will really help my active straight leg raise test because I was having some limitation in my calf that was making it nice and hard. Now I felt my neck starting to kick on there. So I'm either going to take a break or I'm going to cue my armpits to do the work. I feel like I got it as long as I stay focused. Keep it going. And good. All right. For our next exercise, we're going to stand up and we're going to start moving around, seeing how the hips are feeling. I'm going to take a nice wide stance. This one's called the alternating toe touch. I don't need you to stand up on each rep. I like to just go side to side and ten each side. Trying to keep my knees nice and straight. Not rushing anything too much, but big thing that I like to focus on here. Oh man, I have no idea how many that was. Four, five. Big thing I like to focus on here is keeping the feet flat. Six, seven, eight. Feel the inside of the arch drive down into the ground. And there we go. All right. Our next exercise is going to be an alternating reverse lunge. I'm going to step back and I'm just going to drop straight down. Big deals are keep that front foot nice and flat. We're driving through kind of the front of the heel, but the whole foot should stay down. And then the second big deal is I'm trying to introduce some twist in here. Now I want my hips to stay nice and still pointed forward, but I want my shoulders to turn around so that my fingertips can tap the outside back corner of my heel. Okay. I'm going to do ten each side. It's two. Feel this in your back. Try to kick on the hips, kick on the glutes. See if you can shorten them, bring them forward when you stand up. So foot stays flat, but the hips drive forward. If you're having trouble hitting your heel, you can hit like the outside of your ankle as well. That's a good modification. If you're really having trouble, you can just tap the inside of the knee like this. I'm losing count. Let's be real. I'll just count a long time again. We'll call that ten. And then the last exercise in our hip mobility circuit we're trying to take, we spent a lot of time doing some breathing stuff, loosening things up and reducing muscular tension. Now what we want to do is take these movements like the lunge we just did or the toe touch we just did and take that new mobility and figure out how to use it. Last one here, in my opinion, the hardest one. I like the lunge is easy for me, but the single leg Romanian deadlift is a lot harder. So there's two ways you can do this one. I mean, there's pretty much infinite ways you can do this one. If you're struggling, you can keep both feet on the ground and just put your weight on one leg and just kind of bend over almost halfway, not even all the way. Not like you're touching your toes or anything. Try to keep the back nice and long. If you're super advanced, you can float your back leg and do the bend from there and drive the hips forward as you stand up for that. I'm somewhere in the middle. I feel like I get really frustrated when I lose my balance on each rep. So I want to use a light touch on the wall. I'm not putting a bunch of weight on the wall. I'm just putting the light touch on the wall to help me stay balanced. And then I can really focus on my hip doing the work. It's just like the lunge. I'm going to do 10 on each side. You're going to keep the foot nice and flat. That's three. And you're going to drive the hip forward. You want the butt to come forward. So when I get to the top, I should feel a good squeeze in the butt. And I don't want to keep this knee bent when I get to the top. I want to straighten it out with everything. That'll give you a nice, strong contraction. It's really hard to count on you talking. Let's say two more. Nine and ten. That feels good. Let's switch sides. Now, you can do it either way. I'm just going to, for this, I can see easier for me to look at you. I might keep my right hand on the wall, but you can flip too. That'd be fun. And we'll go left leg. Same idea. Try to get a sense for which side is easier, which side is harder. Remember that if you're using your hand on the wall, or you're using your foot on the floor to help you balance. I mean the other foot, right? You're not trying to put weight on that. And you want to keep that nice and loose. Really put the tension here. It reminds me of the clamshell. Remember we said we didn't want to shift too much. We wanted to just keep the tension on the glute on that right leg. And again, counting is hard. I'm going to say this is nine and then ten. So that's our hip mobility circuit. If you're feeling really good, you could put some weight on that one. Or even on the lunge. But this is meant to be more of a warm-up. It's meant to be more of a loosening up of certain things. So I don't want to necessarily turn this into a workout. You should sweat a little bit. And if you're not, either train somewhere that's hotter or I'm kidding about that. Or just try to move faster. Once you get used to it, once you know the exercises, you can move a little faster between them and not take so much rest, right? We started with a lot of laying down exercises and those can be counterproductive. It depends on what you're trying to do. I tried to orchestrate this so that if you just need a mobility circuit and you're not getting ready to work out, this should work for you. But if you're working out, you're getting ready to work out, this should also work for you. Let's say you're doing a deadlift day or heavy squat day. If I do these exercises, I'm going to maximize mobility and then I'm going to teach my joints how to move through that newfound mobility. That's why we structured it this way. That's why we started on the ground and now we're standing up. You just got to be sensible about that. I don't want those breathing exercises in the beginning of the program to put you to sleep. I just want them to open up some opportunities, some movement options for you. Thanks for watching. If you liked it, hit the like button. If you want to see the next one that comes out, hit subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when I release new videos. This is kind of an experimental thing, so if you like it, let me know. Leave a comment maybe or shoot me an email or something. I just, I haven't done a lot of these and I feel like maybe people are liking it, but I don't know for sure, so let me know. If you need something else to watch, you can check out my previous a limber up with Lance session where we run through more of a total body oriented warm up. But you know, there's a lot of overlap with this one. I do like both of them just independently. Or if you want to learn something new, check out my previous long video feature length film on but wink. Hip mobility is a complicated topic, but if you really hammer out the differences in anatomy and how your body responds to the cues that you give it, I think you can figure out a lot of what I know about coaching really, really quickly. And you can make that but wink, hip mobility limitation disappear pretty much instantaneously, though sometimes you just are doing it wrong. You just need to not do that. Check out the video if you want to learn more.