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Ask most yoga students what they need to practice during class and chances are high they’ll inform you hip openers. As with anything we feel overly captivated with, the human tendency is to equate greater and more dramatic with higher. (Yes, we’re also talking about Stanley cups.) But that’s not accurate in the case of most of our yoga practice, including hip flexor stretches.
The Anatomy of Hip Flexor Stretches
Once we proceed the “fetishization” of hip openers, as Recent Zealand-based yoga teacher and Yoga Medicine podcast co-host Rachel Land refers to them, we overlook other, more subtle, facets of hip opening. The hip flexors comprise several muscles, including the psoas major and minor, rectus femoris, iliacus, iliocapsularis, and sartorius. Each of those muscles and related tendons cross the front of the hip joint. After they contract, they draw your chest and legs closer to 1 one other. Stretching these muscles means lengthening the muscle, and that’s achieved by taking it in the other way.
Three of several hip flexor muscles, including the psoas minor (left), psoas major (center), and sartorius (right). (Illustrations by Sebastian Kaulitzki/Science Photo Library | Getty)
Each hip flexor stretch you practice goes to land slightly in another way for every of those muscles. The more different poses you practice, the more likely you’ll experience significant change in your flexibility.
Land and others who’ve spent years studying, practicing, and teaching an array of hip flexor stretches consider a few of the less theatric hip flexor stretches to be those they most appreciate. And once we recently inquired which they consider probably the most helpful, many couldn’t contain their hip flexor favoritism to any single pose and shared several less common yet essential poses.
As you are trying to shift your approach to hip opening, consider that no single component of your yoga practice will instantaneously make your life higher. “In case your backbends are getting deeper and your hip opening more dramatic, yet you continue to have the identical arguments together with your partner or just aren’t that nice to the people you encounter, then you must readdress the way in which you engage together with your yoga practice,” explains London-based teacher Adam Husler in a recent Instagram post. “The asana (physical pose) is a vehicle for self inquiry…with the side good thing about getting more bendy and powerful.”
Following are some areas of inquiry so that you can explore.
7 Best Hip Flexor Stretches, In line with Yoga Teachers
A few of the following hip flexor stretches will likely be familiar. Others less so. You’ll quickly notice which of them feel like they’re exactly what you’ve been lacking in your life but didn’t understand it.
(Photo: Andrew Clark)
1. High Lunge or Crescent Lunge
“Most teachers check with shapes that invite external hip rotation “hip openers,” but my go-to hip openers encourage gentle length along the front line of the body,” explains Phoenix-based yoga teacher Kimberlee Morrison. She practices High Lunge or Crescent Lunge as “a superb counter movement for the sitting I do through the day.”
Although teachers used to cue students to bend the front knee until the thigh is parallel to the mat, what’s most significant is that you just simply feel a stretch without allowing it to develop into so intense that you just to carry your breath. Morrison adds “a reach up and over with the arm opposite the bent knee” to bring one other dimension to the stretch. You may feel the difference.
2. Seated Side Twist
One other hip flexor stretch Morrison relies on is what she calls Pinwheel Twist and it’s essentially a moment frozen in time during Windshield Wipers. You’re sitting on the mat, your knees are bent, your feet are on the ground wider than your hips, and your knees go in a single direction as your gaze goes the opposite way.
She appreciates its multitasking ability to stretch not only the hip flexors but additionally the quadriceps, and the outer hip and glutes. “This one can also be slightly gentler on the low spine than most twists that deal with spinal rotation, because the rotation here is usually within the hips, because the pelvis stays relatively level,” explains Morrison.
(Photo: Andrew Clark; Clothing: Calia)
3. Dancer Pose (Natarajasana)
“People may fight me on considering this a hip opener, but I actually have to say Dancer Pose, or Standing Bow Pulling Pose as we call it from my lineage,” says yoga teacher Kate Herrera Jenkins, founding father of Native Strength Revolution and member of the Pueblo of Cochiti in Recent Mexico.
Although many students find the pose to be an intimidating balancing pose, Herrera Jenkins found it to be a chic recovery stretch. “I suffered a brilliant painful, torn labrum from a trail run fall in August. My injury caused pain to easily stand upright,” she explains.
(Photo: Andrew Clark; Clothing: Calia)
Her approach to coming into Dancer works well for anyone unfamiliar with the balancing pose. Her first step was having the ability to simply stand Tadasana (Mountain Pose) and slowly regain the soundness of the hip flexor and hip joint. Her next focus was on having the ability to bend her knee and, not long after, grab her foot behind her within the hip flexor stretch runners commonly practice. From there, she was in a position to press her foot into her hand and convey her upper body forward and down for an exquisite stretch along the hip flexors. You may practice this near a chair or alongside a wall in order that the arm opposite your bent knee can reach out for support.
(Photo: Andrew Clark)
4. Half Saddle Pose (Ardha Supta Virasana)
“We focus a lot on outer and inner hip openers and hamstring stretches that we sometimes forget how influential quad and hip mobility will be on not only our hips but low back, too,” says Land.
She favors Half Saddle Pose (Ardha Supta Virasana). The “half” within the name refers to bending only one leg at a time, relatively than the normal ask to bend each. Unlike within the photo above, you may extend the opposite leg straight in front of you or bend the knee and place the foot flat on the mat. Land also practices it with the support of a bolster beneath her back.
Once you discover the position, there’s a subtle but essential movement on this pose that’s often ignored. Land suggests you “lengthen your spine,” as teachers say. That essentially means reach your sacrum toward your knees, which boosts the stretch within the hip flexors and minimizes compression within the lumbar region. She notes that some persons are more comfortable with padding, like a folded blanket, under the front of their ankle.
5. Lazy Lizard or Half Frog
“I really like love love a yin pose that I personally call the Lazy Lizard,” says Leta LaVigne, yoga teacher and founding father of yogaROCKS studios in Finland. “Perhaps it’s a species of Half Frog?” LaVigne explains that the pose begins with lying in your stomach. Bend one knee and take that leg out to the side at roughly a right angle out of your body, with a bend in your knee creating one other right angle. Feeling for the stretch along the inner thigh. If you happen to don’t feel a stretch, try elevating the knee and shin on a folded blanket, bolster, block, book, you get the thought. You may either rest your upper body on the ground or prop yourself up in your elbows or a bolster.
“There’s just something really calming about lying prone and being invited to release your entirety into contact with the earth,” says LaVigne. “It’s like an enormous sigh to your body.”
(Photo: Patrick Guenette | Dreamstime.com)
6. Deer Pose or 90/90
Multiple teacher mentioned their affinity for the stretch that’s known in yin yoga as Deer Pose and moonlights because the exercise referred to as 90/90. The name “90/90” comes from the undeniable fact that you’re attempting to create two right angles together with your legs and the form is actually a seated cousin to Lazy Lizard Pose.
“I really like this one since it also lengthens the interior rotators on my back leg, that are notoriously tight from long hours of sitting while I write,” says yoga teacher and writer Sarah Ezrin. “I notice an enormous difference in my strides or gait and respiratory once I do that consistently.”
The name is probably the only cue for coming into the pose. You mainly come to a seated position, shift your weight onto one hip, after which bend each knees roughly 90 degrees, while noting what works best to your body and adjusting accordingly. The thigh of 1 leg will likely be roughly parallel to the shin of your other leg. You may remain upright, begin to lean forward, bending on the hips, or lean yourself backward and maybe come onto your forearms, depending on which stretch you favor.
(Photo: Thomas Barwick | Getty )
7. Scorpion Stretch
Several yoga teachers expressed an inclination to linger in a pose that’s not exactly a pose but may as well be for all of the relief it brings. It’s the moments you linger in between Three-Legged Dog through which you extend one straight behind you, bend your knee, and let it fall open behind you in a blissful state of being unconstrained.
There’s a reason you sometimes see students stay within the stretch for several beats even after the teacher cues the subsequent pose. The stretch reminds us of the reality within the quote from French composer Claude Debussy through which he expressed, “Music is the space between the notes.” Let’s not develop into so preoccupied with the particular notes that we overlook our unique beat.