Chris Beardsley's Garage Gym » corrective

Hip mobility (part two): soft tissue work

Chris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:00:45 +0000

This is the second of 4 posts to flesh out the introducing hip mobility and lumbar stability post that I did last week. In this mini-series, I’m going to cover:

Stretching
Soft tissue work
Activation drills
Strength exercises

Soft tissue work for increased hip mobility

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve allowed my posture to deteriorate recently and I was shocked at how bad it had become when I saw my holiday snaps (check out the lower back arch!). I’m cross with myself and I’m ready to be a bit more aggressive with sorting the problem out. Soft tissue work is going to be one of the tools I use to help.

Having said that, just thinking about being aggressive with soft tissue work is bringing tears to my eyes, but hey, I shouldn’t have let things get so bad in the first place…

And as I mentioned before, I know I need to work on my upper back too but one thing at a time!

Soft tissue work for improving hip mobility and lumbar lordosis

When it comes to improving my hip mobility and reducing lumbar lordosis, I am looking to create an improvement in the tissue quality in order to change my posture and overall movement patterns. I want to remove any knots and scar tissue in the muscles so that the muscles lengthen and relax. I want to allow my hips to move more freely so that the movement that occurs when I flex or extend my legs at the hip happens at the hip and not at the lower back.

So when I bring my knee up (in starting sprinting or stepping up) then my lower back doesn’t round outwards. And when I extend my leg behind me (in jumping or as the tail leg in sprinting) then my lower back doesn’t sway forwards (as in the photo above).

What muscles are we working on?

The hip flexors. And remember there are more than just two! There are quite a few hip flexors, and they include:

The adductors, which contribute to hip flexion:

Bascially, anything on the front of the leg and in the front of the groin acts to flex the hip in some way shape or form. Look down in the bath and you’ll see them (unless you bathe in milk, in which case you won’t be able to).

Soft tissue work for hip mobility

For these soft tissue techniques, you will need a hard ball, like a baseball or a hockey ball, and a foam roller. These are my tools of torture:

Psoas major

I’m using a hockey ball or baseball to roll the psoas major. I have already noticed results with this technique and it doesn’t seem to hurt as much as, say, rolling the tensor fascia lata with the foam roller…

Rectus femoris

I’m using the foam roller to roll my rectus femoris. It doesn’t really seem to hurt so I suspect there aren’t many knots.

Sartorius, pectineus and adductors

I’m using the foam roller for these simply because I can’t seem to get the ball to work properly.

Tensor fascia lata (TFL)

This is my nemesis. It brings tears to my eyes and it is showing no signs of getting any better. Watch this space.

I tend to work into the muscle until I find where the knots are. I put pressure on the knot until it relaxes under the roller or the ball and then move on. It’s a lot harder than it sounds to do.

Hip mobility (part one): stretching

Chris — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:00:35 +0000

This is the first of 4 posts to flesh out the introducing hip mobility and lumbar stability post that I did last week. In this mini-series, I’m going to cover several techniques to improve hip mobilty and lumbar stability, including:

Stretching
Soft tissue work
Activation drills
Strength exercises

Stretching for increased hip mobility

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve allowed my posture to deteriorate recently and I was shocked at how bad it had become when I saw my holiday snaps (check out the lower back arch!). I’m cross with myself and I’m ready to be a bit more aggressive with sorting the problem out. Stretching is going to be one of the tools I use to help.

And for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not in denial about my upper back curving over but I’ll talk about straightening that out another day!

But isn’t stretching bad for you?

Since I can remember, there have been experts debating the pro’s and cons of stretching muscles. Some argue that stretching is always bad for you and you shouldn’t do it. However, most of the time, the argument for not stretching just relates to pre-workout or pre-game stretching. These people argue that stretching should not be done as a warm-up as it has a negative effect on performance but don’t they comment on stretching for changing movement patterns or for postural improvement.

This article published in the New York Times quotes Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who says:

“There is a neuromuscular inhibitory response to static stretching. The straining muscle becomes less responsive and stays weakened for up to 30 minutes after stretching.”

So, for example, stretching your calves or hamstrings before a run would be frowned upon. As would stretching your latissimus before doing pull ups or your triceps before doing dips.

Stretching for improving hip mobility and lumbar lordosis

When it comes to improving my hip mobility and reducing lumbar lordosis, I am looking to create a permament change in muscle length in order to change my posture and overall movement patterns. I want to allow my hips to move more freely so that the movement that occurs when I flex or extend my legs at the hip happens at the hip and not at the lower back.

What muscles are we stretching?

The hip flexors. I wasn’t going to get too geeky here but I was doing a bit of reading around hip mobility to see whether there were any different stretches I could do from the ones I already knew. During my research, I kept reading articles in which authors referred to the hip flexors as the iliacus and the psoas as if there are only two hip flexors. For the record, there are quite a few hip flexors, and they include:

The adductors, which contribute to hip flexion:

Bascially, anything on the front of the leg and in the front of the groin acts to flex the hip in some way shape or form. Look down in the bath and you’ll see them (unless you wear clothes in the bath, for some reason).

Stretches for hip mobility

Lunge

Lunge forwards with one foot and allow the other knee to drop down (gently) onto the ground. Keeping your pelvis in alignment (i.e. don’t allow your lower back to arch – you may need to tense your abs quite hard to achieve this), push your elevated knee forwards. Repeat on each side.

Standing lunge

As above, but in a semi-standing position. Keep the back foot at a slight angle to stretch the groin muscles a bit more. Repeat on each side.

Groin stretch

A stretch I learned to do studying martial arts as a child, I feel this quite acutely in my groin and I’m hoping that is a good thing! Very simply, lunge sideways and drop the body over one foot. Repeat on each side. There are a couple of variants to this stretch and I have shown two of these below. The variants shown are heel on the floor and side of the foot on the floor. I haven’t quite got my toes vertical in the first picture but hopefully, you get the idea.

I tend to hold each stretch for 20-30 seconds or until I feel the muscles relax. In an ideal world, I’d do each one 3 times but I usually stop after 2 from sheer boredom. Unfortunately, there is always something more interesting to do than stretching but at the moment it’s probably the thing I need most.

Introducing hip mobility and lumbar stability

Chris — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:00:24 +0000

Recently, I touched on the dangers of sitting typing at a keyboard all day and how it can cause shoulder problems. I explained how the hunchback you get from typing with bad posture can lead to shoulder impingements because the space in the joint is reduced in size. The hunchback is called “thoracic kyphosis” and this means that the upper back is curved over forwards, towards the face.

In my two-part article on maintaining shoulder health, I covered:

However, I didn’t mention that you can also develop an overly mobile lower back and tight hip muscles from sitting typing all day. While the dangers aren’t as immediately obvious, they do have an impact on our long-term health and ability to lift.

What sort of back problems?

Sitting down all day can cause two connected problems:

lumbar lordosis (where the lower back sags forward too much); and
anterior pelvic tilt (which can lead to tight hip muscles)

Lumbar what?

Lumbar lordosis is where your lower back caves in and your belly sags forward. Imagine an old Italian man at the beach in his speedos and you probably get the idea.

Sitting down regularly with poor posture, slumping in other words, causes your lower back to get more mobile and your hip muscles get shorter and tighter. For more details on this, see Mike Robertson’s article on force couples. Your upper back hunches over and, when you stand up, this causes your lower back to round inwards to compensate.

Anterior pelvic what?

Anterior pelvic tilt is an anatomical extension of lumbar lordosis to include the hips as well as the spine. If you look at the angle of the pelvis of someone with lumbar lordosis, the pelvis is usually angled towards the ground in front of them. So their hip muscles get shorter and tighter.

Typically, if they are wearing a belt, that means that their buckle at the front will be lower than the back of the belt.

OK, but it’s hard to imagine. Give us a picture.

Very well. This is a picture of me at the beach, not concentrating on my posture. You can see how my lower back is arching forwards really badly and my hips are tilted forwards. I am going to start a programme to sort this out. I need more hip mobility and more lumbar stability.

Why are lower back mobility and hip inflexibility bad?

They stop hip drive while weightlifting.

Lumbar lordosis and anterior pelvic tilt don’t allow the body to function in the way it is intended. Most anatomists believe that the majority of the body’s explosive force should come from hip drive. The pivot should be the hips.

The hips should be mobile and the surrounding joints and muscles should be stable. This position allows the major muscles (glutes, quads, hamstrings) to contribute the most amount of force about the fulcrum.

If you have lumbar lordosis and anterior pelvic tilt, the reverse is true. You have a mobile lower back and tight hip muscles. This means that what your body does to mimic hip drive is actually lower back or trunk drive. Your knees probably have to move more too. Lower back drive is a poor second cousin to hip drive in terms of power and it’s also generally believed to be bad for your health. The lower back can only stand so much flexion and extension before it pops.

In particular, a mobile lower back makes it very hard for the glutes to provide any power. It’s like having a baseball bat with a floppy handle. Or something like that.

Further reading

I’m not an expert, so check out these great interviews with Mr Lower Back himself, Dr Stuart McGill:

What can be done about it?

There are four main techniques that I am going to use to get some hip mobility back. They are:

Stretching
Soft tissue work (e.g. foam rolling and rolling with a ball)
Activation of glutes
Strengthening of abdominals

I’ll do posts on each of these topics over the next couple of weeks as I sort my own corrective programme out.

How to keep your shoulders injury free for pull ups (part two)

Chris — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:00:05 +0000

I had some good feedback regarding my article about what to do if your shoulder hurts doing pull ups. I hadn’t realised that there were quite so many people who were experiencing that problem. So I’ve put together a two-part article with a bit more detail about the exact protocol I carry out in order to get rid of my shoulder pain.

What was causing the shoulder pain?

When I last had shoulder pain, it was caused by two things:

Poor soft tissue quality
Lack of thoracic spine mobility

Let’s take each of those issues and address them in turn. I looked at soft tissue quality yesterday so I’m looking at thoracic mobility today.

Thoracic what?

Mobility. The amount of movement that you have in the thoracic (upper back) area of your spine. Anatomists divide the spine into four parts, which are, going from top to bottom:

Cervical (neck)
Thoracic (upper back)
Lumbar (lower back)
Sacral (pelvic)

In short, you need a certain amount of mobility in each part of the spine. For some parts (such as the sacral) this is very little for other parts (such as the thoracic) it’s quite a lot.

Unfortunately, because we spend a lot of time hunched over our keyboards typing away, most of us have quite poor thoracic mobility.

That tends to mean we overcompensate with forward head posture and excessive lumber spine mobility but both of those are beyond the scope of this article.

Why is thoracic mobility important for avoiding shoulder pain?

If you are hunched over, this can reduce the amount of room your arm bone has to move in the shoulder joint. This can cause your shoulder to impinge, which is a bad thing. It may also be the cause of your shoulder pain!

An impingement of the shoulder is basically where one of the structures (tendons or part of a muscle) gets trapped between the humerus (your arm bone) and the acromion of the scapula (the pointy bit that comes off the shoulder-blade). If you want more detail than this, try looking into Eric Cressey’s shoulder savers series.

How can I improve my thoracic mobility?

I’m glad you asked. The two techniques I use for improving my thoracic mobility are:

Extensions off a foam roller
Extensions off two tennis balls taped together

Extensions off a foam roller

Basically, you do a crunch-type movement over a foam roller, moving up and down the various vertebrae of the thoracic part of the spine. Don’t move into the cervical or lumbar areas as you don’t want extra mobility there!

The movement looks like this:

Extensions off two tennis balls taped together

Basically, you do a crunch-type movement over a couple of tennis balls taped together, moving up and down the various vertebrae of the thoracic part of the spine. Don’t move into the cervical or lumbar areas as you don’t want extra mobility there!

The movement looks like this:

Well, that’s what I have found useful in removing shoulder pain when it has troubled me in the past. I often come back to these techniques when I feel that I might be pushing my luck in the gym or if I start to feel tight.

How to keep your shoulders injury free for pull ups (part one)

Chris — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:00:46 +0000

What was causing the shoulder pain?

When I last had shoulder pain, it was caused by two things:

Poor soft tissue quality
Lack of thoracic spine mobility

Let’s take each of those issues and address them in turn. I’ll look at soft tissue quality today and thoracic mobility tomorrow.

Why should I care about soft tissue quality? What is tissue quality anyway?

Well, asking about tissue quality is another way of asking how many knots or lumps there are in your muscles. If you’ve ever been for a massage and the masseur has been kneading away at your back and suddenly they’ve prodded a tender spot that rolls under their fingers – that’s poor tissue quality. They’ve found a knot.

If your tissue quality gets really bad, it can be seen by visual inspection, as the affected area is raised, like a pumped muscle. It sounds impressive but it’s actually quite painful and you have to be wilfully stupid (like me!) to let it get that bad normally…

Anyway, poor tissue quality (knots) just makes your muscles really tight. And tight muscles cause irritation. Tony Gentilcore has described it as being like tying a knot in a resistance band. If your shoulder muscles are tight because they’re full of knots, the amount of room your shoulder joint has got to move is going to be reduced. And that means that your shoulder is probably going to impinge.

The solution is to improve your tissue quality. You need to remove the knots.

How can I improve my soft tissue quality?

The following picture shows a selection of my pain relief tools! The foam roller should be familiar to most people as they’ve become quite common in most gyms. The other items are:

A hockey ball
Two baseballs (commemorative versions not essential)
Two tennis balls taped together

I use the foam roller for general soft tissue management. You can use it for most large muscle groups, such as the front, back and sides of the thighs and calves but it falls down because of its size when you need to work a smaller muscle. I use it to cover a large area quickly and find out whether there’s a problem. If you want to look further into using the roller, then Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson have written well about this subject.

How do you know if there’s a problem? Roll the muscle on the roller. If there’s a problem, it’ll hurt. Also, if you have a lumpy bit in the muscle that gives a bit when you press it, that’s a knot. If you’ve been using the roller for a while and you have some stubborn knots, they might not hurt that much when you roll them. That’s when you need something tougher.

How do I use the balls to help with soft tissue quality?

I roll on top of them. I lie on the hockey ball for getting at knots in my back and shoulder girdle. It’s completely solid and, being smooth, rolls around quite nicely on bare skin without causing welts. I find the baseballs leave me looking like I’ve been to “one of those sorts of parties”.

I tend to use the baseballs together (because I have two of them) and they work better when I have a T-shirt on as the stitching grips the fabric and moves with it.

What muscles do I roll?

Well, that depends on where it hurts! But I find that if my soft tissue quality starts to go, it starts to go all down my back and around my shoulder girdle. When this happens, I hit the following areas:

Latissimus dorsi (the two large snowshoe-shapes just above your lower back but also under your armpit: it’s a big muscle)
Trapezius (the big triangle that has the pointy end towards your lower back and the wide end at your shoulders)
Rhomboids(hard to find on an anatomy chart as the trapezius and the rotator cuff muscles cover them but the ball will find them about half way up your back, just alongside your spinal erectors)
Spinal erectors (the snakes running up either side of your spine)
Rotator cuff(these insinuate themselves under your trapezius and pop out just above your latissimus: they cover over part of the rhomboids)

That’s all a bit technical. What do you actually do?

Practically speaking, I do this:

I lie on my back with the hockey ball under one side of my lower back and gently roll on the ball until it reaches the bottom of my latissimus.
I work the ball upwards until I find a knot.
I work at the knot by rolling the ball around on it until it feels a bit softer
If it’s a really bad knot and doesn’t respond to rolling, I will lean hard on the ball without rolling until I feel the knot start to break up. When this happens, I feel a release of tension and the ball usually sinks a bit deeper into my back.
I repeat with the other muscles in my back.
When I get to the upper trapezius, I often use both the baseballs together to put pressure on both sides at the same time. For some reason, this seems to work better than doing each side individually. I don’t know why.

Sometimes, you may need to move your arm around to get at the knots. Here, I’m putting my arm in the air so I can get at the muscles around my shoulder-blade.

When I’ve finished rolling, I usually finish up with an overhead squat and reach test. This tells me how successful I’ve been at loosening up the knots. If I get a bad result, I know I still have a lot of work to do and maybe need to find some new techniques. If it’s a normal result for me, I know I just need to do the same routine a few more times and I’ll be right as rain.