Are Things You’re Doing Every Day, Making Your Muscles Worse?

Bottom Line

Everything we do in our daily life is making certain muscles work more and others work less. Just because you have the ability to do something, doesn’t mean you should. Same concept applies to our muscles. Just because our hip flexor has the ability to flex and bring our knee up, doesn’t mean we should be allowing it to do it all the time.

Why it Matters

When you allow a muscle to constantly do what it was programmed to do, it makes the muscle ‘fat.’ Meaning the muscle is constantly allowed to do what it wants, thus ‘overfeeding’ it. This results in things that make life harder for us on a day to day basis. For example if you sit at a desk all day for work, sit in your car to drive home, then sit on the couch at the end of your day; your hip flexor is being overloaded. This causes it to get super tight and results in it being painful for you to get up from a seated position. Add in some low back pain and your life is a living nightmare. Standing for too long hurts, sitting too long hurts, there is no way for you to find relief.

Next steps

When muscles get to do what they want too much, it is time to work the antagonist muscle. Think of antagonistic muscle as the yin to the yang. There has to be a good balance. Think of the triad, get the muscle released, disengage the problematic muscle, reengage the right muscles. Continuing with the hip flexor analogy, once your hip flexor releases you will notice significant decrease in pain. But that does not mean the issue is resolved, our body has the tendency to fall right back into old habits. After being released it is important to continue to stretch the hip flexor with the Triplanar and to strengthen the glutes. Glute bridges, clamshells, and side lying raises are a great way to start, focus on 3 sets of 15 repetitions.