Training your Hips for Combat Sports
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Having mobile and healthy hips is essential for many functional movements, such as lunging and squatting. For combat sports hips are also important for many martial art specific movements, such as head kicks and having both an offensive and defense guard. .
How to train your hip:
🅰️Create a workspace: A quote I heard from @jquintnmt “You can’t move where you can’t move”. To make more capacity for movement potential I use passive holds (>2 min hold) followed with isometric loading, ramping up to your safest greatest effort holding for 10-15 seconds.
1️⃣Hip IR: Angle your body so you feel tension wrap around of the front of your hip. Do not stretch into a pinch or pain. Isometrically push your medial ankle into the ground.
2️⃣Hip ER: Keep your back straight and lean forward until you feel a stretch in your glutes. Isometrically push your lateral ankle into the floor.
3️⃣Hip adduction: From the bear sit position use your elbows to feel tension in your groin. Isometrically squeeze your knees into your elbow.
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🅱️Train your work space: Once your hips have room to move you need to train your hips. Stretching without movement will promote passive flexibility when one seeks active mobility.
1️⃣Controlled Articular Rotations (CARs): The goal is to isolate movement to the hip only to minimize compensated movement from other areas. You should move in your pain free circle.
2️⃣Isometric movement pathways: Slowly and purposely move from position to position without just flopping to the new position.
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Training rotational movements will improve global hip movements more than linear movements alone which is why the priority is on internal / external rotation.