Top 3 Exercises for Hip Flexor Strengthening

This week’s video is on hip flexor strengthening, per request. The top 3 exercises we will get into here in a moment. The first thing that I want to discuss though is what are the muscles that fire for your hip to flex? This is hip flexion, this movement right here. Pretty basic, you have 3 main muscles. The first one is called your iliacus. It lays on the inside of your pelvis. The other one is called your psoas. It attaches to your spine and also your femur. So both of those muscles together are called your iliopsoas. The fibers tend to run together. It is really 2 different muscles but it is one name. The other one is one of your quad muscles called your *** femoris. It attaches up here to your pelvis so when that contracts, you also get hip flexion movement. So even to walk for you to bring your leg forward, you need some hip flexor strength. I'm going to show you some basic exercises today that we start with in the clinic. The first one is this. It is pretty basic. It is called a straight leg raise. Just laying on the back flat, one knee bent up to protect your low back. Raise the leg up in the air. At Cincinnati Sports Medicine, a few years ago, I learned what they call a straight leg raise plus which we use in the clinic a lot. Hold your heel up off of the mat 6 inches. Do a 30 second hold and at the end of 30 seconds, do 10 fast pumps. It is called a straight leg raise plus and that is courtesy of Mark Paterno, Frank Noyes, Chris the ATC out at Cincinnati Sports medicine. Excellent exercise. Progressing from the mat, exercise #2 is just a hip flexion in standing or marching in place. So really, really simple. Bring your knee up to waist height and back down. If you are looking for a challenge, you can add an ankle weight. The third exercise if you are looking for something a little more exciting and involving plyometric would be to go into like a lunge position. So if you are exercising the right side, you are going to put the hip flexor on stretch. Keep your body relatively neutral, extend your leg back and then fire up. So this would be something a little more advanced if we are seeing an athlete, if we are seeing somebody who wants to run again. Something a little more advanced would be they could go back into a lunge-like position, extend the hip, stretch the muscle out and then fire it and bring the knee up as high as possible. There are 3 basic exercises. There are a lot of other variables that you can throw in. You can use resistance either via bands or with and ankle weight. There are even some machines that you have the resistance in the front of the thigh pulling up against. But that will give you a basic for hip flexor strengthening.