After working with and taking the basketball players of the Albany Legends and the Siena Saints through the Functional Movement Screen, I've become aware of a common theme: basketball players have horrible hips.
This isn't surprising to me, as I had hip issues my entire career and still deal with my hips lacking flexibility and mobility.
It becomes a real problem when half of the players on a team complain of sore, tight or strained hip flexors. So here is the first few steps to opening up the hips, which should result in better movement and mobility in a crucial joint for any athlete.
Foam/PVC/Lax ball roll your hips. This is the best thing you can do for the tissues surrounding the hip. It will likely be very painful at first, but thats a good thing. It means there is restrictions in the muscle that can get better with work. Do this for a few minutes per side before you stretch.
Stretch your hip flexors. After rolling them out, stretch the hips by dropping into a lunge position, keeping an upright torso, and pushing forward on the front foot. Squeeze the glute on the leg that is back and then turn the torso to the side of the leg that is forward. To make this an even better stretch, put the shin and foot of the back leg flat on a wall, or if that is too much put the foot on a chair or bench. What we are looking for here is to get the back leg into actual extension. When you see athletes doing more of a shuffle down the court and not flexing and extending the leg at the hip, its likely that the hip flexors are the cause.
Get comfortable sitting in the squat position. This means finding something to hang on to, whether its a door frame, or anything to stop you from falling backwards while you sit in a full squat position. The key to this is to make sure you are keeping a flat back, upright torso and really trying to push your hips forward. Also, make sure you are sitting in between your knees, not over top of them (thank you Dan John for that great coaching cue).
Next, you will want to use a counterweight to help you sit in this position. Start with a dumbbell or kettlebell of about 20-30 lbs and as you squat, push the weight out in front of you. Work on bringing the weight into your body so that eventually you can sit down with the weight at your chest comfortably.
All of this is to get you to the point where you can sit in a squat position by yourself, no weight, no assistance, with a flat back, without feeling a crazy stretch.
Let me make this one point. Once you get to this range of motion, it doesn't mean you should be squatting with weight to full depth. Mark Rippetoe made a great point that at a certain depth your lower back has to relax to get this low. The last thing we want is for your lower back to relax with a heavy load compressing it. Squat depth is another blog for another time.
Even after a week or so of working on your tissue quality and in this new range of motion, you should feel like you are able to move better in the squat and when running.
The next blog will be about the corrective exercises I have used to get the sequencing of the body back to how it should be (activate the core first, then everything else can contract or relax).
Leave any questions or comments on the fb page. Thanks for reading!
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