Stop Stretching Your Hip Flexors!!!

Okay okay….I know….the title of this blog is a little extreme. It’s completely fine to stretch your hip flexors for the most part…but not always AND it may not always be the best usage of your time. I can’t tell you how many times clients come in to see us and say they’ve been dealing with hip flexor pain and/or tightness, they’ve tried stretching….stretching….and stretching some more but haven’t seen results. That’s why in this blog, I’m going to teach you about when you may want to avoid stretching your hip flexors and when you may want to consider a different approach.

Hip Flexors: When to consider avoiding stretching them

When you’re dealing with pain on the hip flexor, right on the tendon on the upper portion of the thigh, it may be worthwhile considering stopping stretching your hip flexors for the time being. When tendons are sensitive, oftentimes stretching can make them worse in the short term EVEN if it feels good in the moment. They often respond in a delayed fashion, this is why you might sometimes ‘pay for it later’. So although stretching MAY feel good when you’re dealing with hip flexor tendon pain, you may be sensitizing it and not even realizing it.

Hip Flexors: What to make of ‘tightness’

If I had a dime for every client that has been stretching for months and months because their hip flexors are ‘tight’…I’d be rich! The reason this isn’t working is because there’s a difference between actual tightness and perceptual tightness. An example of actual tightness is a situation such as post surgical rehab, where tissues are actually tight and we need to mobilize the tissue as the scar forms. However, the majority of people are dealing with what we call perceptual tightness. This means that the area FEELS TIGHT but isn’t actually tight. We can tell this because although there’s a subjective report of tightness, when we actually measure the length of the tissue it’s within the normal range. The nervous system is king! Although to be truthful we don’t know EXACTLY why you’re dealing with tightness we DO understand that your nervous system is guarding the area a bit with tightness and this is what you need to address. You need to earn your nervous systems trust.

Hip Flexors: An alternative approach

The question is now what can be done about this! The former two scenarios may have a slightly different approach, and this is where working with a physiotherapist can be beneficial for you as an individual. However, in principle they’re approached similarly. In general, you need to build up load tolerance to be able to tolerate more load or to earn your nervous systems trust.

Tightness and pain often occur when the demands are exceeding your body’s ability to tolerate them.

So until you build enough tolerance, you’re likely to continue going through the cycle of feeling good temporarily but then reverting right back to where you were before. So if you’ve been stretching your hip flexors over and over again, consider trying to strengthen them instead. It seems counter intuitive BUT let’s be honest…has stretching been working?

If not…download this PDF for 3 ways you can STRENGTHEN your hip flexors!