Are the hip flexors the secret muscle to athleticism??
Hello everybody. Today, we're gonna be talking about the muscle that makes your leg go like this. The hip flexor. It's roll and jumping. Does it help you jump higher?
Isaiah:And we can talk about sprinting too, that help you sprint, how to get it healthier because a lot of people have issues in that area. And why are we qualified to talk about this? Well, we have a combined twenty plus years of jump training experience. I have the highest vertical in the world. John is 30 years old with a 40 plus inch vertical off one, and he's getting there off two.
John:I'm getting there off two. Today on my on this low rim, I'm gonna I'm gonna get my head to nine nine.
Isaiah:And we have coached thousands of athletes at this point to jump higher and tens of thousands for free on how to jump higher. And if you wanna be part of that cohort of athletes, just go to thpstrength.com, and we will coach you to jump higher. We have a guarantee. Again, at least three inches of vertical in six months. And you might be thinking, why the hell would we even guarantee?
Isaiah:It's because the average athlete based on pulls gains four inches of vertical in six months. And if you do exactly as we say for those six months and you have not gained those three inches, we'll quote you free until you do. But you can't miss a workout. That's the caveat.
John:I know missing workouts. Can't miss a workout. And if you're gonna miss workouts and you're not gonna do the workouts,
Isaiah:you're not Don't gonna bother signing up.
John:Yeah. Just waste your time.
Isaiah:Yeah. And if you are still weary, use the code THP for 10% off at checkout off your first month. Having said that RIP Austin, man. He's
John:so unfortunate he's not here today. Yeah. It's okay. We'll get into it without you, Austin. Just like we always do.
Isaiah:Alright. Let's talk about the hip flexors.
John:What's your experience in have you ever trained your hip flexor knowingly, I guess? Or have I ever put in exercises for the hip flexor?
Isaiah:Might as well just get into my experiences with know I you think I'm good to Yeah. Talk about Allegedly. Yeah.
John:You did it.
Isaiah:In my opinion. In his opinion.
John:Alright. This is Isaiah Rivera allegedly. He is going to allegedly
Isaiah:discuss Very his popular trainer who rhymes with ease over eyes eye. Wait. No. Ease over pose. Ease over pose guy.
Isaiah:That's what it rhymes with ease ease over pose guy. I if you This is his opinion. You might not know this back in 2020. I no. 2019.
Isaiah:I did Oh, was it 2019? Yeah. 2019. You traitor. I coach you for a whole year and you betray me.
Isaiah:2018.
John:Okay.
Isaiah:Was gonna say I
John:was like, don't think it was 2019. Was longer than that.
Isaiah:2019 is when I stopped doing his training and then I leveled up. No. So I did I did his training, in 2018, and I actually did hip flexor two times because back in the day, I did somebody else's training who was one of the best dunkers in the world.
John:Morton Bill Bannon.
Isaiah:Yeah. Morton Bill Bannon. So I did these two programs. The first one, I did hip flexor training, literally just getting, the pulleys. What are they called?
Isaiah:The pulleys. Cables. The cables. Yeah. The gym, you put around your foot, lie down on the ground, and then train like and then do that exercise.
Isaiah:You did
John:it with both programs?
Isaiah:Yeah. Interesting. It was interesting as Borden built Bannon had it way before.
John:Oh, really?
Isaiah:Knees over pose.
John:It's bees over pose.
Isaiah:Bees over pose.
John:Yeah.
Isaiah:Then I did bees over pose guys training in 2018, and that was the second time that I did hip flexor hip flexor training. I honestly don't know if it helped. Did any? Or not helped. Yeah.
Isaiah:I don't think I did it long enough. Did you run faster? I wasn't running. Oh. I wasn't sprinting, so I know.
Isaiah:Oh, god. The only I don't even know if it helped my East Bay. That my East Bay has felt the same before and after. Is that why
John:Jordan had it in there?
Isaiah:I don't know why he had it in there. I just did. Yeah. Just did. It was in the it was in the program.
Isaiah:Didn't ask questions, and I just and I just did it. That has been the only time I've done hip flexor specific training. I literally yeah. Ever since 2018, I don't think I've done a single
John:What are
Isaiah:some of the
John:claims out there that the hip flexor does I think for performance?
Isaiah:To be fair, I think Jordan has them in for trick dunks specifically for Eastbase. And then the only other claim I've heard about doing that exercise specifically is for speed,
John:for sprinting. Well, yeah, makes you faster, better athlete. What was that? It was that the biggest claims with it?
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Okay. So I would agree that those are the claims I oftentimes see. And I think whenever I was in high school, it was like, Oh yeah, the hip flexor is like so important. And whenever people referred to the hip, was just like, Oh, it's the hip flexor. I never really thought about extension.
John:I didn't even understand what a concentric muscle action was, which is where the muscle shortens. And I, for that reason, I didn't really even train the hip flexor exclusively, maybe until '20 would have been 2011 or 2010, I did it in circuits. I would just do it as a bodybuilding circuit just to address it to some degree and I would do it with a plate. I would just put the plate here and I would just lift up at like a 45 and I would do it for like twice a week, a set of 10. Like that was it.
John:Yeah. And it was just like bodybuilding just to make sure that I addressed all the muscles. And obviously, if you run a lot, every time you pick up your leg, use your hip flexors. So this kind of gets into what it is, does it work, is it relevant, should you train it, and what is your lens on this?
Isaiah:What what does the hip flexor do? The hip flexor. What are my hip flexor muscles?
John:Do you know these answers?
Isaiah:Give me one. Iliassoas.
John:Hey. Good job. Alright. Yeah. So there's a lot of muscles that actually flex the hip the hip flexors.
Isaiah:Rec fem. Rec fem is another one. Good job.
John:Yeah, I'm really proud of you. So ileo psoas goes from your spine into your into your hip, and it was responsible basically for picking up your knee. A lot of people will say like, oh, I'm having ileo psoas issues or psoas issues, I need to stretch it out. It's hard to actually identify if that's the case. Some massage therapists will be like, oh, was able to palpate.
John:I'm like, if you can palpate that, you gotta be like six inches deep in their pelvis. Yo. Yeah. That was on purpose. Pun intended.
John:And you'd have to push super super hard and it's like a big muscle on the back. So you'd literally have to go through their entire intestines. You'd have to push through their entire intestines to reach that muscle. Yeah, bro.
Isaiah:That's crazy. That's really crazy.
John:Oh, another lizard. So yeah, big that that's a muscle a lot oftentimes a lot of people will accuse and say like, this is why I have back pain or this why I issues or my stress this muscle at all, fix all my issues. I have not found that to be the case, I found good posture and Stuart McGill's research to be applying that to be really effective. And then when it comes to the other hip flexor muscles, obviously you have a rec fem, so that is multi joint muscle crosses the knee and the hip, one of your quad muscles. If you go like this and you pick up your leg, you'll usually feel it start to contract.
John:I'm trying to think of other major hip flexors off the top of my head. I'm gonna just Google this off the top because I I those are the major ones. I I have another Put your IT, but the
Isaiah:shit. Damn. Hit hard. Hard. It is not broken.
John:Well, it is broken, but not more broken. What is what is that muscle called?
Isaiah:The Which one?
John:It's a hip flexor. It's a hip flexor muscle. The the connects your IT band. Oh my gosh.
Isaiah:TFL? The
John:TFL, yeah. Flexes
Isaiah:Tensor fascia latin. Yeah.
John:And a lot people be like, this muscle's the key to running faster. Did you ever see Usain Bolt's TFL? And I'm like, I have actually, and I'll say this, research is very concrete about the hip flexors not being the performance indicating, or the key performance indicator, KPI for running faster. It is all about what you do on the ground, and that is extension. So the hip extensors, I.
John:E. Your ass, and your quads, and your plantar flexors, the triple extensors, are what determine your ability to propel forward. Their main action is to extend against the ground. You could have the fastest stride frequency, right, in the world, but if you can't apply force to the ground while you're using it, it doesn't doesn't matter, right? So what actually moves you across space is the push off, and your ability to reposition is a function of not only the flexors, but also the reactive force that your tendons give you when you strike the ground and reposition.
John:So that, you know, your hip, your hamstring, etcetera, that also plays a really, really important role. Now your hip flexors are still somewhat important in that process, but there is no evidence to indicate that it is the driver of success. Like if you couldn't reposition your limb, yeah, then it's an issue, but there are sprinters, and high school sprinters, who have faster joint actions than elite world class sprinters when it comes to flexing their hip. So it's not an indicator of performance at the elite level, even for acceleration. Acceleration's mostly related to just your speed strength, and I guess the first push off the blocks is mostly overcoming inertia, so starting strength.
John:And then once you get moving, it's pretty much purely a plyometric, and it's functioning to, or it's not functioning, but your hip flexors are basically just pulling the leg back in position in front of the body. That's what it does. And then it shuts off, it should be totally off the rest of the time. That's the only time it really should be optimally functioning. So outside of that, it really doesn't do anything.
Isaiah:I also I do wanna talk about flexibility as well because Yeah. This is relevant. That that's something early early on in my jump training journey. This is when I was 14, I believe, 15 maybe. The guy, I think it's Jacob Hiller, the jump manual guy.
Isaiah:Oh, yeah. He had a document that said, you wanna be really flexible with the hip flexors because you get the the top of jump, the top of the jump is triple extension. If they're tight, you can't get full triple extension.
John:Sartorius and iliacus also. So Sartorius crosses that does this. Yeah. Anyways, go ahead.
Isaiah:But he said, yeah. You you you go into triple extension. If you have tight hip flexors, you can't fully extend there. And then I started I I stretched the hell, like, couch stretch specifically, like, from age 15 up until I was, like, 19, 20. Like, I did it for a long time.
Isaiah:And then also in the penultimate step, the couch stretch feels just how my back leg stretches when I do that. So is there specifically for jump technique on the penultimate and triple extension, is there a benefit to stretching them?
John:Yes, I think so, 100%. This is where I would say flexibility, if you're not damaging the joint capsule, which if you go into extreme, extreme ranges and you posteriorly rotate the pelvis, you tuck your pelvis under, that will so demonstrate a hip flexor stretch just so they can see what it looks
Isaiah:like. See, it's like something like
John:Yeah. And Dan Back's a big proponent of this. Then if you were to rotate the hip forward, that's gonna stretch this And right then if he rotates into posterior tilt, that will even stretch it more intensely. Right? So you're splitting everything apart there, you're really pulling it apart.
John:What can happen though is that you can cause the femoral head to jam into the into the joint capsule, right?
Isaiah:How do you know you're doing that?
John:You'll feel a burning I mean, when I've done it, it feels like a burning, splitting, tearing sensation, a ripping sensation very deep in my hip. It doesn't feel like a muscle, it is like borderline painful and burning almost sensation. And then that will persist for like one or two days after that. It gets worse and then it'll usually get better after that. So if you're at that point, in my opinion, you have gone way too far down the continuum of intensity for that.
John:I think that long hold stretches for it, can be productive, and then on top of that, if you're looking at the agonist being the triple extensors, we want the antagonist to be shut off. And what do we know happens when we do static stretching before explosive activity? That muscle's down regulated. So if you were to hypothetically stretch all of your antagonist, and we know the hip flexors pretty much doesn't do anything in jumping, right? It's not really active, it's maybe functioning as a synergist, if the hip can function better in extension, you're gonna get more force on the ground.
John:So if you passively stretch, and I did a in house kind of study in undergrad with like 30 different people, and we did pre and post, we had one day where they came in and they just tested with a normal warm up, then we had one day where they did a long hold static flexibility stretch on the hip flexor, and we saw a significant difference between pre and post op.
Isaiah:I've actually, I think there's been a study done. Used to tell people that back in my young coaching days, I used to tell people if you stretch the hip flexor right before doing like a standing jump, you can jump higher, like instantly. Yeah.
John:That that that was what we tested in 2015.
Isaiah:I used to tell people that all the time. Like, that's one of my, young Young's eight tips.
John:Young's eight tips.
Isaiah:I think it was I have a page.
John:Is that Billy Baguette that that I said
Isaiah:don't remember. It might have been. It might have been. But, I have a page called hyperbolic vert on Instagram. It's actually like a gold mine of dunk tips.
John:That's you?
Isaiah:That was me. I started when I was, like, 17. You and Scottie? No. It was just me.
John:Oh, really?
Isaiah:Yeah. Hyperbolic vert. And I think it has, 12 posts. And it's actually fire. I was looking at it the other day.
Isaiah:I was like, these are really good tips. I show how to, like, windmill and stuff. But I think in there, I I go over a dynamic warm up and like it says, like, oh, stretch the quad and you can jump higher instantly.
John:Stretch the rec femme Yeah. And the hip and the psoas. But if you stretch your quad, you're gonna be helpful. Helpful. But hey, it was young Zay.
John:Yeah. An anatomy degree at the point or extra science degree. Didn't even take anatomy at
Isaiah:that point. So okay. So that that covers flexibility. And then the last thing that I wanna talk about, is there a benefit to training it in terms of injury? Like if you have hip issues?
Isaiah:I
John:think that it makes it worse. Every time I do a lot of flexion, we're talking like lying leg raises, where you're in the chair and you do the leg raises, or if I do hanging ab series and stuff like that, I will almost always piss my pissed off hips off because they're already pathological. And so if you're doing more flexion extension patterns, especially if you're trying to limit it to strictly the sagittal plane, meaning like forward and backwards, and you're not allowing your legs to splay outwards, which by the way, the glute does naturally externally rotate the foot. So if you're doing hip flexion only in this plane, you might actually be going against what your natural tendencies or anthropometry is, you might end up with more issues. So in my experience, anecdotally, it does not help.
John:I think if you're training it in an isometric condition, where it's like postural based, like in a plank or something like that, I think you can be productive for maybe your back. But oftentimes, you know, if you get it too strong or you do too much with it, it actually makes things worse. It can pull your pelvis out of position, you know, because your pelvis is a pulley system. So there's muscles on both sides of the joint, and if one side's too tight and one side's too loose, rotate you into anterior pelvic tilt, or vice versa. If one side's too loose and the other's too strong, could rotate you into posterior tilt, then you have poor posture.
John:So I think that it's not like more is better, it's not a situation where it's like if you do this, you won't have knee pain, there's pretty much nothing that indicates that. It's the only muscle that is multi joint crossing the knee joint is going to be, well actually two, the sartorius crosses your knee and is involved in flexion, and then also the rectus femoris. So In those scenarios, they're functioning to Well, the rect fem is functioning to extend the knee. Sartorius is functioning to more or less bring your leg up like this and flex it. In those scenarios, they're not really significant contributors to what the knee is doing in a jump, right?
John:I mean, anything, in the Rec Fem's case it is, because it's extending, but what you're doing at the hip could potentially make things worse in some cases, like if your rectum's pulling the kneecap upwards and then you're trying, like too intensely. If you were, like in too much posterior tilt, like a one foot jumper in too much posterior tilt, or like you're in a lot of hip extension and then you're trying to extend your knee, that could cause issues at the knee, right? That could cause chondromalacia. Pull that kneecap in. Like the one exercise by bees over pose guy where he's in the super extreme split squat, that can be very provocative.
John:If you bend the back leg in that much extension at the hip, that can be super provocative on the knee. Like if I were to do that, I'd be like, shit, this hurts immediately. Right? And that's just because it's my muscle length is not long enough to handle that. It's gonna it's gonna pull the kneecap upwards out of the groove, the trochlear groove, and then it's gonna go ahead and just press super aggressively with high pressure, and grind up that cartilage underneath the kneecap.
John:So I think that it's like if you have the mobility to do that, and your kneecap's in position, maybe it's of use, but there's definitely scenarios where that, especially like myself, that would make it really bad, and I avoid flexion in that much hip extension, because it just causes a lot of issues. I'm sorry, knee flexion in that much hip extension, on the back leg specifically. So yeah, I don't think you know, the way to train it, I guess you would do anything it is not trained in anything where you're doing triple extension. You would have to be like doing ab exercises to train it, leg raises or something like that, the cable leg raises. In a split squat, the rec fem is probably doing something, and it depends on how much you're angulating at the hip, right?
John:There's some scenarios where if your leg is totally straight, your rec fem might be flexing into the ground, but if you're angulating at the hip, then it's probably not doing anything. Like, you're gonna be using your hip extensors, which is the goal of an exercise like a lunge. But yeah, that's pretty much all I have. I don't I don't really have too much to add. It's kind of a weird muscle.
John:It's gotten this like reputation that it's important or secret that is a bunch of bullshit. Like, if you're a sprinter, you should be spending like a little bit of time on it, and you're probably getting it in your sprints, and you're probably getting in your sprint drills. Like I said, I did like two sets of 10 total a week.
Isaiah:Yeah. And I think there could be an argument like if you're specifically doing trick dunks for it.
John:Yeah. I think in that.
Isaiah:Yeah. That makes
John:sense. Like East Bay specifically But
Isaiah:I never did them. To most. And I have some of the best Yeah. Tech base in the world. But could they be better?
Isaiah:Maybe.
John:But I don't think it's a limit. I don't think that's a limiter. Like, how fast you get your legs up? I don't think it's a limiter for you. Mhmm.
John:Because you have all the time in the world. Yeah. For you, it's like
Isaiah:Just jump higher.
John:Just jump higher, give yourself more time in the air, and that's probably gonna make your dunking still a
Isaiah:lot better.
John:If you're at the point where you can you jump high enough to East Bay, the limiting factor is not how fast you get your knees up. Yeah. Like you have a And and out of position.
Isaiah:Dunk technique isn't a huge focus for like, my main focus is jumping higher.
John:Exactly.
Isaiah:I hit new dunks for fun, but it's not I'm not trying to, like, break the record
John:for were trying yeah. Like, fastest East Bay,
Isaiah:like, who the fuck There could be an argument. I you could make an argument if I was going for double East Bay.
John:Oh, yeah. In that scenario
Isaiah:Like, it Really? It'll it'll probably be worth.
John:And your hip flexors do get wrecked from that in your abs. Yeah.
Isaiah:Yeah. I do remember. Is
John:a scenario where
Isaiah:So if I did a if I if I wanted to, like, buckle in and only focus on hitting that dunk, probably be worth doing that.
John:Try to think of, like, a scenario where the hip flexors are, like, a KPI, like, important. In that scenario That that one, yes. Yeah.
Isaiah:Yeah. That one. Can't really think of a Yeah.
John:But it's not even that. Yeah. Actually, I I don't
Isaiah:because it's it's essentially a
John:Yeah.
Isaiah:Double east bay motion.
John:Yep. I I feel that in my my left leg when I do them a lot. Like, for that, was like, shit. I'm not trained for this. Like, did not prepare
Isaiah:because you're if you think about it on a tomlol, your left leg goes from Full extension
John:extension. Flexion. Really Yep. I've I've noticed that myself. But off two foot, I've never noticed that to be like No.
John:Oh, you know what? The other thing, it is involved in the knee drive on one foot. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe a little bit of relevance there, but oftentimes you're looking at like, again, triple extension.
John:If you flex harder, you might get a reaction force into the ground that's a little bit more intense. But in terms of the leg that's pushing, no, not doing anything. Should be off completely actually, it should be relaxed, so your hip can do its hip extensors can do its thing, your ass can work optimally. But, yeah, that's all I got. Anything else you wanna add?
Isaiah:I think that covered it pretty well. Cool. Alright, well, if you
John:guys are looking for coaching, make sure you go to teachbstrength.com and make sure that you like, comment, and subscribe to this YouTube channel. Go to my YouTube channel if you wanna see behind the scenes content. It's always hilarious. We post the stuff that we would never post on Isaiah's channel, on my channel. Workouts.
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