Hip joint tightness

I'm posting 2 images. I'm having real problems in the middle split series. The butterfly position demonstrates my compromised mobility. I also tried pancake roll through. The photo here is on the starting position lying prone. When I spread my legs apart I am unable to externally rotate my legs and put heels on the ground. Any advice? @Alessandro Mainente

The tightness I can feel is in the hip joint? The more I try to work these movements deeper it starts to feel like pain. I'm not injured. I just would love to improve on this. Would help to know what might be tight and how to address it.

Jeffrey, this interests me too. I am just like you. Bad Butterfly and really hard to externally rotate when lying flat on my stomach… my regular frog got good, my pancake got good (49 weeks into it now)… but my Diamond Frog is bad as well, because I need that external rotation as well. Is your Diamond Frog hard as well? Curious what @Alessandro Mainente has to say. I have been wanting to ask about this the past few weeks, but here you did it before me… 

Jeffrey, it will come. In the grand scheme of things, your positioning in those movements is not pathological. Merely tight, and normal. There are probably several components to the tightness, mostly from a buildup over the years.

First, the muscles themselves become neurologically used to a certain resting length, and the fascia in those areas will have assumed a certain physical length/orientation/thickness, etc. You will need to stretch to work through all that, both to teach/strengthen your muscles to feel safe enough to lengthen and to also physically stretch the fascia/adhesions. (For you meat eaters, ever wonder why young animals are so much tastier than gristly old animals? Fascia! That is the gristle, and we all accumulate more of it as we age.) But we can control and manipulate that fascia, albeit very slowly.

Second, your joint capsules, the sheath of connective tissue around a joint and ligaments/tendons adjacent to that joint can also thicken and get restricted. Same idea as the fascia, and really just an extension of it.

Stretching can re-educate your muscles for flexibility by making them stronger and feel safer in stretched positions. This is a pretty fast process, and why it's easy for kids to get flexible fast.

However, manipulating connective tissue is another matter. While stretching itself is one way to do it, in my opinion it is not as effective as it could be. Coach Sommer advocates loaded stretching and isometric stretching (stretching while tensioning the muscle) in adults. This is a great strategy. Adults have so much gristle that a stronger stimulus is needed than stretching alone. One caveat is that, while our fascia is thicker than kids' it is also less elastic, so be careful not to stretch ligaments themselves. You can beat the crap out of bad fascia, but good fascia (functional connective tissue) you want to leave intact to grow and strengthen. Hip and shoulder joint capsules and muscular fascia are fair game. It may take to some learning to tell the difference.

However, I think there is one additional piece of the puzzle, and that is myofascial manipulation via different modalities. As adults trying to get more flexible, we are crazy to ignore myofascial work. Specifically with lacrosse balls and bands. If you have tight hips there are some great banded stretches and roll/smash/floss therapies to really accelerate physical change of the fascia. I would say get the above book or watch related videos on YT and start incorporating them into your hip work. It will really help you get more flexible. Start easy just to get the hang of it, but once you figure out what areas you can safely target you can go pretty hard with some of this stuff, and it's quite effective. It still takes time but it will accelerate your progress.

Hope this helps.
Best,

Matt

On 26/7/2017 at 2:29 AM, Matthias Schwartz said:

However, I think there is one additional piece of the puzzle, and that is myofascial manipulation via different modalities (ART, the Supple Leopard book - my favorite, and targeted trigger point work). As adults trying to get more flexible, we are crazy to ignore myofascial work. Specifically with lacrosse balls and bands. If you have tight hips there are some great banded stretches and roll/smash/floss therapies to really accelerate physical change of the fascia. I would say get the above book or watch related videos on YT and start incorporating them into your hip work. It will really help you get more flexible. Start easy just to get the hang of it, but once you figure out what areas you can safely target you can go pretty hard with some of this stuff, and it's quite effective. It still takes time but it will accelerate your progress.

Hi Matt, 

It's interesting that you mentioned Supple Leopard.  I use it a lot as a reference for mobilization techniques and put it into practice from the samples at the end of the book in addition with GB.  Do you have any other suggestions on how to work with myofascial release, I mean some better way with some better tools  (if there's any)?  I do some work at the end of everyday, just to relax and felt great changes since the last month's.  I'm just curious to know from your experience with it.

Thanks!

1 hour ago, Suzanna McGee said:

Jeffrey, this interests me too. I am just like you. Bad Butterfly and really hard to externally rotate when lying flat on my stomach… my regular frog got good, my pancake got good (49 weeks into it now)… but my Diamond Frog is bad as well, because I need that external rotation as well. Is your Diamond Frog hard as well? Curious what @Alessandro Mainente has to say. I have been wanting to ask about this the past few weeks, but here you did it before me… 

Yes my diamond frog is equally terrible. Not that I'm looking for high levels of progress in only 6 weeks or anything. I'm just noticing that almost all of the middle split sessions have been making my hip joints very angry. It's a major issue for me. While I'd be willing to spend the next 200 weeks doing this same video to improve my mobility I'm reaching out now to see if there's anything additional I can do to address my specific problem area. The photos I posted demonstrate tightness that feels impossible to overcome. I also cannot get much APT during butterfly or the seated good mornings, walks, bounces, sweeps...etc.

@Matthias Schwartz thank you for the reply. I've been hearing more and more about the neurology of flexibility I guess you'd call it. Never considered the brain having a connection to flexibility before with that prominent of a role. Definitely something I'll read more about as time permits. I've also been seeing more about myofascial release in the forums. It's not something I've ever done or read about before so I'll look into it as well.

I'm kind of simple minded when it comes to my workouts. I get overwhelmed by too much information. I picked up Coaches book and I've been studying this site as much as possible trying to stick to the program basics. Committing seriously to this training and paying attention to my body is uncovering areas that I didn't know were problematic for me regarding mobility. 

That's the beauty of this program though. We're all starting off unique with our own issues.

@Alessandro Mainente anything to recommend about why I can't do butterfly? 

BUtterfly it is a combination of tight muscles and as a consequence tight capsule. there are no shortcuts here, patience. took to me 3 years to fix my internal rotation of the hips.

Then patience it will be for me as well. Thanks for the feedback.

2 hours ago, Alessandro Mainente said:

BUtterfly it is a combination of tight muscles and as a consequence tight capsule. there are no shortcuts here, patience. took to me 3 years to fix my internal rotation of the hips.

Did your internal rotation issues have an impact on your swivel hips mastery?

I've been doing swivel hips for 12 months and I'm still not there. I've recently started adding in daily work on them to see if I can speed things up. 

19 hours ago, Josh Earl said:

Did your internal rotation issues have an impact on your swivel hips mastery?

I've been doing swivel hips for 12 months and I'm still not there. I've recently started adding in daily work on them to see if I can speed things up. 

Absolutely yes, unfortunately when I stop the internal rotation I tend to lose it very fast. probably holding the swivel hips it is a good idea after the mastery. basically when you reach the bottom position with a knee in the swivel hip simply use the opposite arm to gently push the knee down. by moving the feet of the working leg closer or far from the body you can feel different sensation.

On 8/9/2017 at 7:17 AM, Josh Earl said:

I've been doing swivel hips for 12 months and I'm still not there. I've recently started adding in daily work on them to see if I can speed things up.

I just posted this in another thread. My internal rotation wants to disappear really quickly too, like Alessandro's… A few times a day, instead of sitting in the chair/sofa on my laptop, I sit down into a 90/90 sit… changing the angles randomly, finding the least comfortable position … it really works well. Keeping the body vertical is challenging.