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There’s one statement my clients hear me say on more than one occasion – “It’s not how you move in the coaching sessions when I’m with you, but how you move in your daily activities”.
What I’m getting at, is that simply by being more aware of how you move in your everyday life, you’ll end up feeling better for moving better.
One of the biggest complaints I hear over and over is sore backs and sore knees causing problematic or painful movements. Well, there’s one particular movement we have all seem to have forgotten how to do right – a movement that greatly helps relieve stress on the spine and knees.
The one movement to keep in mind, whether you’re 15 or 105, love gardening, playing sports, picking up shells at the beach or just having fun with the kids is the simple hip hinge (bending at the hip).
When you bend/hinge from the hip, your spine can stay in a neutral position with the hips taking most of the load, in a positive way, using the biggest muscles in the body, the glutes. This greatly reduces the load through the spine and knees. Whereas when you bend at the waist, as most people tend to do, the spine curves over, putting stress on the discs. Moving from the waist isn’t a problem as a movement in itself, but as a habitual movement it causes premature wear and tear of the spinal structures, as well as ongoing postural and alignment issues. All this then creates pain, and worse still can even mean the need to seek medical or surgical treatments.
So why have we forgotten how to use this king of motion? It’s apparent that in some Westernised cultures our hips are hugely under-utilised. We can avoid so many of these issues that pain us today, but we have to think less about how we exercise and more about how we generally move and what we do when we’re not moving (sitting and standing). Exercise is just a very small part of our motion.
And while the ‘hip hinge’ looks like the most simple movement in the world, if you’ve had years of excessive flexing through the spine as your normal movement for bending then this may take you some time to master
Check out some videos online on how to correctly bend at the hips, and start practicing and trying it out when you find yourself needing to bend – such as when you’re cleaning your teeth.
Once you can hip hinge easily using this technique you’ll be able to lift heavier loads safely, or even sustain a bent position for a longer time – but more importantly, when done correctly, it will become a strengthening movement rather than a stress movement.
An article I read once said “…your boots may be made for walking, but your hips are made for bending…” A catchy phrase to help you remember how to keep bending over!
