At-Home Workouts

Exercises for High Hamstring, IT Band, and Hip Pain

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A lot of runners, hikers, cyclists, and walkers will experience high hamstring, IT Band, or other hip pain in their lives. With 60% of runners experiencing high hamstring pain, and 50% of cyclists and 20% of runners experiencing IT Band pain, hip pain is one of the most common injuries/complaints among this active group. The good news is that with a little bit of prevention/intervention work, a lot of those aches and pains can be avoided.

The hip is a ball and socket joint which gives it its ability to move in a large variety of ways. The six motions of the hip are: external rotation, internal rotation, abduction (leg moving away from center), adduction (leg moving towards center), flexion, and extension. Tension and limited range of motion in the hip (and the whole body) can only be caused by 2 things – mechanical tension (structure limitation) or neural tension. Most of our day-to-day mobility restrictions are cause by the latter.

When expanding space in the hip capsule, rotation should be addressed over any linear limitations. Without the establishment of good rotation, both internal and external, other ranges such as flexion and extension will never improve. Good range AND control of both of these rotations should be the primary goal of anyone experience hip tension.

Below are a few exercises to help. When doing these exercises, there should be no pain. You should feel stretch in the long tissue (the part your are lengthening), but you should never feel restriction or pinching in the closed angle (where the body is shortening or folding). There should also not be pain in other joints like the spine and/or knees.

While both rotations should be explored, if you are primarily experiencing hamstring pain, you would want to focus on your hip internal rotation and control. If you are experiencing more IT Band symptoms, you should focus more on the external rotation movements.

First, explore your hip range with this exercise:

Next, let’s work on hip external rotation and hip extension first.

Now let’s work on hip internal rotation.

And then put it all together with hip CARs. This exercise can be done daily on its own as a warm up for a run.

Have questions? Reach out at Brenna@KoaFitUSA.com.

Exercises for Plantar Fasciitis and Achilles Pain

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While not the same, Achilles Pain and Plantar Fasciitis can come from the same mechanism – insufficient dorsiflexion. Dorsiflexion is the ability of your ankle to flex in a way that gets the top of your foot closer to your shin. How much you need depends on the movements you want to do. For example, at least 10 degrees is needed for walking on a flat surface and at least 15 degrees is needed to run on a flat surface. If you want to add hills or uneven surfaces to the game, you are going to need more.

Getting more dorsiflexion isn’t as easy as stretching your calves. In fact, stretching past your range of dorsiflexion is what probably caused the pain in your heel or achilles in the first place. When you dorsiflex, a bone called the talus rolls anteriorly, but then needs to glide posteriorly. Sometimes, we feel this lack of glide when we flex our ankles and feel a resistance or “hard stop” at the front crease of the ankle. This lack of glide overstretches the tissue on the backside of the ankle, and over time, can create inflammation at the heel or the achilles depending on where we are weaker, what’s happening with the rest of our gait, and other factors.

To gain back dorsiflexion, we need to establish heel rock. This is our ability to invert and evert at the calcaneus (heel bone). Watch the video below to practice this move.

After we understand inversion and eversion (and probably discover we lack eversion), we combine this motion with the entire movement range of the ankle.

After we establish this range of motion, we move on to working directly on our dorsiflexion. This next exercise can be hard the knees if done on the floor (as shown). You can modify it by placing the foot that you are working on up on a chair or table.

Once we increase the range of our dorsiflexion, we will want to gain control of it with this next exercise.

Finally, we want to work the eccentric (loaded and lengthening) of dorsiflexion to ensure we have the strength we need when we are out on our runs, hikes, and walks.

It is important to remember that if you currently have pain, you may need to include an anti-inflammatory method in your recovery. You can talk to your doctor about what is best for you. These things need to work in combination to reduce the inflammation and prevent the injury from coming back. Anti-inflammatory options alone (such as ibuprofen and cortisol shots) will not fix the mechanics of the problem that got you in pain in the first place. Meaning, as the anti-inflammatories wear off, you could be back at square one if you have not done the work to fix the issue (not to mention you are leaving a lot of strength and power on the table by not expressing your full range of motion).

Your best option? Prevention. Start these exercises now so you don’t have to experience pain in the future.

Want more? Koa Fit’s Online Library has 35+ routines not just for ankles, but for hips, shoulders, low back, and more. Try it out today boy clicking here.

2 Exercises for your Low Back

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To keep our low backs happy and safe, it is important for us to learn how to stabilize them when we lift, push, and load them. Just as important though, is to learn how to move the lumbar spine in bending and extending, twisting and side-bending. Our lives are not lived in neutral spine, and in order to keep our spines prepared for our active lives, we need to train outside neutral as well.

These 2 exercises will help you discover how much you move (or don’t move) in your lumber spine, which motions are easier and which are harder, all while strengthening those deep core muscles that we need to keep the spine safe.

3 Exercises for Your Ankles

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Do you keep rolling your ankles? Maybe you feel like they are stiff and don’t move well? Is there a little tweak in them after a big hike? Do you always feel the need to stretch your calves? Try these 3 moves (daily if possible) to help bring some mobility and control to your ankles and tension relief to your calves and feet.

Morning CARs Routine

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Your daily routine to maintain joint strength and mobility to keep your body moving well. CARs stands for Controlled Articular Rotations. When doing this routine, you want to be pain-free – especially no pinching on the closed-angle side fo the rotation (short side). To get the most out of your CARs, make any part of your body that is not doing the motion rigid and stiff.

Neck CARs

Spinal CARs

Scapular CARs

Shoulder CARs

Elbow CARs

Wrist CARs

Hip CARs

Knee CARs

Ankle CARs

Toe Work

Feet and Ankles

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Feet, our connection to the world around us. These 29 muscles, 33 joints, and 26 bones propel us through our lives. How they work and connect affects how everything up the chain works, from our ankles and hips, to our low backs and shoulders. Over the next few weeks, I am going to focus on our feet and how to keep them happy. Check back each week for new videos.

The best place to start, is to see if you have control of your feet. Try this video below. If you can’t get it at first, keep trying. It will come quicker than you think.

Now that we can move our toes, let’s try to gain some more range of motion. Try this big toe extension stretch with both a straight and bent knee. Hang out in both positions, but spend a little more time in the one that feels the most useful.

Moving up to the ankles with this next video. Limited range in our ankles usually means we have limited “rock”. Meaning our heel has a hard time rocking side-to-side. Try this next exercise to check on this side-to-side movement while also working on gaining more control of the movement.

Now that we have some side-to-side movement, we can work on increasing the range of our dorsiflexion (shin bone towards the top of the foot). This PAILs/RAILs exercise allows us to gain more range of motion while actively engaging that new range. This means, we are strengthening while we are gaining more flexibility.

To round out all our work, we will finish with ankle CARs. This helps upload all our new range and maintain it beyond our session.

Elbows Can Be a Pain

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Who has a tweaky elbow? One of those twinges or aches that seem to almost go away, and then with one wrong pick-up or swing, the pain is back. For a lot of people, the position of their shoulders is the root cause of their elbow discomfort. Below is a set of 5 exercises, to be done in order and together, to help relieve minor aches or tweaks in the shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Done daily, noticeable changes will happen within 1-2 weeks. Try these out and share with your friends!

Also, check out my Online Platform for the Shoulder Strength Series that can help you incrementally build stronger shoulders fo injury mitigation.

Hip Mobility Exercises – Week 1

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This week we are working on our hip abduction. Hip abduction is when one leg moves towards the side, or away from the center line. The most obvious and common ways we use this movement in our daily lives is when getting in and out of bed, in and out of the car, or side-stepping out of the way.

Weakness in this area can cause the hip to “cave” to the outside which causes the knee to dip inward when walking or going up steps. These 2 motions can lead to hip and knee pain.