Your hip flexors are a muscle in your body that control a lot of movements. These are a group of muscles that flex the hip. They are involved in a lot of stabilising movements, but also some larger and stronger movements such as kicking. The hip flexors consist of two muscles, the psoas and the illiacus. They both attach to the femur, but the psoas attaches to the lower back, whereas the illiacus attaches to the hip bone.
How Your Hips Get Tight
A lot of us do desk jobs. The fact is that we all need to work, and no matter how often we get up and move around, the majority of the day is still spent sitting down. If you are in a sitting position for most of the day, then your psoas and illiacus are also in a bent position for most of the day. As they attach to the top of your leg, and your lower back, they will be in this shortened position for as long as you are sitting down. They can become very tight when they stay like this for a long time, as they are not very pliable muscles. Once they get tight, even if you stand up, you need to do extra stretches and exercises to make sure that they get lose again.
How It Affects Your Body
If you have tight hip flexors then it is likely that you will have back problem. You just need to think of the anatomy to see how that works. As mentioned before the psoas attaches to your lower back. If your hips are tight then your psoas may pull your back forward and put you into lordosis. This puts a lot of strain onto the back, and will push the discs in between the vertebrae out. This can turn into a serious injury, and is often a cause of back pain.
Simple Hip Flexor Stretch
There are quite a few things to do to ensure that your hip flexors to not get tight and stay tight. First of all don’t sit down too much. However for a lot of people this is not an option as they work. There is a simple stretch that you can do to help keep them loose. Get on one knee, and bring the other leg up to ninety degrees. Then push forward through your hips and you will feel a bit stretch in your hip flexor muscles. You should also add lunges into your program at the gym, as this is just like a hip stretch. An overhead squat is another great idea to help stretch these stubborn muscles out. Try not to sit down on the bike because you are only going to make them tighter and have them in the bad position longer.