Long hours at your desk? 5 ways to avoid tight hip flexors.
If your hips or lower back ache after sitting down at your desk all day. Or, after a Pilates or ab workout, you experience discomfort or pain across the top of the hips or in the upper groin area more than in your abs, it’s very possible you have tight hip flexors.
What are hip flexors?
Our hip flexors are the muscles at the top of our thighs and include the psoas major and iliacus. The job of these muscles is to stabilise our hips and help us to bend at the waist as well as raise our knees.
Tight hip flexors can lead to pain in the lower back, the sacroiliac joints and knees, although it may not always feel that these problems stem from our hips.
Why tight hip flexors?
Long periods of sitting can leave our hip flexors progressively weaker and shorter, and this can be a common cause of hip pain. Many people also have tight hips due to poor postural habits like leaning forward or over to one side, from sleeping all night on the same side, or from sports such as cycling, where the knees are bent and the hips in constant flexion.
Hip flexors can also cause discomfort if they get tired and overused during ab exercises, especially if our deeper core muscles (like the transverse abdominis) aren’t engaged and active. This can occur in exercises such as Pilates or lower body exercises such as squats that emphasise core strengthening and activation.
During lockdown, where home workers were sitting uninterrupted for very long periods of time at their desks, I started to see an increase in complaints of pain at the front of the hips after some of our more challenging sessions. It’s not always clear why someone has this pain and I always advise a visit to a physio or osteopath to get checked out.
However, in some exercises it’s clear to see where the hip flexors over compensate for weak abs, or are especially tight, as the legs often lift off the floor. Now when I plan for a particularly challenging ab focus in class, we stretch the flexors well before and after the ab sequences, helping to get the most out of the workout as well as to minimise injury and discomfort. Whilst it may be difficult to prevent tight hips, here are five ways you can help reduce your risk of hip pain or over working them:
Five ways to beat tight hip flexors
1. Mind-body awareness when exercising. Exercises such as Pilates promote our mind-body connection, ensuring we are aware of what muscles we are working and focusing on optimal execution. Strong mind-body connection helps increase our awareness of overusing some muscles to compensate for weaker ones. For example, if we are unable to keep our feet grounded in a Pilates roll back or roll up it may be a sign that the hip flexors have taken over, perhaps because the abs are not strong or fired up enough, causing the feet to lift off the floor.
2. Modifying exercises to suit our individual needs. With feedback from our mind-body connection, we can assess the suitability of a level of exercise and assess for ourselves whether we need to dial it down. If our hip flexors are tight or the abs a little weaker, for example when we are rolling back to the mat from sitting, we can modify the exercise by holding behind our thighs for support.
3. Hip flexor stretches. In addition to your regular workouts, incorporate stretches into your day and week. This will particularly help of you have been sitting for long periods or have spent a long time in a car. Doing these before and after a class will also help improve your workout. See example stretches in the video 1 below.
4. Hip extension exercises. Our hip extensors, our gluteus max and hamstrings, work in synch with our hip flexors. Together they keep our pelvis neutral and ensure healthy movement of our hips. If our flexors are tight, then it is likely our extensors will be weak. We therefore need to complement hip flexor stretches with hip extension exercises. We focus a lot on this in Pilates with exercises such as the bridge and side-kicks.
5. Breaks from sitting. If you find yourself at your desk for prolonged stretches of your day, try and get up and move around every hour or so. Also consider adjusting your seat height so your hips are higher than your knees. If you are able to take regular breaks to stretch out video 2 below has an easy and short routine you can try from the comfort of your desk!
A regular, low impact exercise like Pilates can be a great way to maintain hip flexibility as well as develop a strong core. To get started or to find out more go to here.
Videos
1. Hip flexor stretches (6 mins)
2. Handy desk-based stretches (10 mins)
