If you want the mother of all hip exercises, well, here you go. Start by grabbing some Theraband or any other type of stretchy band, and you'll find out in a moment why this makes the upcoming exercise so much more effective. Then using either an overhand or underhand grip, pull the band apart and keep it like this for the remainder of the upcoming exercise. Now take your leg that you want to strengthen and keep it on the ground and place the other leg behind you up on a bench or a chair or a si
milar object. From here, be aware that the more you shift your body weight directly over your stance leg, the more intense the upcoming movement will become. So play around with how much you lean forward versus backward to strike An ideal challenge for this exercise. And now bend your stance leg slightly while putting about 60 to 70% of your weight on the outer half of your foot. This small weight shift to the outer edge will help keep your knee from collapsing inwards, and it will also light up
your hip muscles to a much greater extent for the upcoming movement. Again, feel free to play around with how much knee bend you have in your stance leg to find your optimal challenge. Next, while holding this one legged mini squat, rotate your entire body upwards as one solid unit. The easiest visualization here is to think about pointing your belly button to the wall while mimicking the movement of a dog peeing on a fire hydrant. And do not let your knee on your stance leg cave inwards even o
ne millimeter throughout this process. If anything, you want to think about pushing it outwards in the opposite direction. Now here comes the secret sauce. Do this movement incredibly slowly, like ridiculously slow, the slower the better. And once you think you've gone as far as you possibly can fight for one more millimeter of movement, then hold this position at the top for a couple of seconds and then slowly return to the starting position again as one solid unit. And with that, you have just
performed an immensely beneficial movement for loading and strengthening your hips, stabilizers and hip rotator muscles. You've also just made your quadriceps and hamstring muscles perform what's known as an isometric contraction, which is super beneficial for all sorts of physical health and functionality benefits. Typically, I advocate that patients perform enough repetitions until they feel a hefty burn or fatigue build up in their leg, and then from there, fight for two more repetitions. If
you're going at an appropriate tempo, it should take around 45 seconds to a minute to complete around ten repetitions. Anywhere from 1 to 3 sets of these repetitions should suffice. But feel free to individualize this to your needs. So basically you've just performed a highly beneficial exercise for your entire lower body that helps avoid and eliminate very common aches and pains that arise in the majority of the population. If you're wondering why we're pulling a band apart and holding it here
, it's because it forces you to rotate your body as one solid unit so that you get way more out of the exercise by making your hip muscles work way more aggressively. Oftentimes, people will think that they're rotating their entire body when in fact they're mostly rotating their upper body, meaning their hips and their leg aren't being challenged to an optimal extent. Plus, it's a nice little way to engage and strengthen some of the postural muscles in your upper back so there's a little bonus f
or you. This exercise is beneficial for numerous populations. It can be used for general strengthening and injury prevention and it can be used for rehabilitation from various injuries in various areas of the lower body. I often use it for those recovering from ankle and knee injuries, and I often use it with patients who need to recover from hip tendinopathy specifically for their glute medius and glute minimus. Otherwise known as the glute med and min. Speaking of these particular muscles, if
you want to learn the best way to truly and actually isolate them for targeted strengthening, I've got a detailed video where I walk you through what you need to know. Now, I learned the exercise in that video from very literally one of the best hip physical therapists on the entire planet, and tons of my viewers have been having massive success with it. So check it out right here if you want to learn how it's done. So keep making good things happen. Everyone and I will see you over there in the
video.
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