Internal hip rotation, increasing ROM

Discussion in 'Health and Fitness' started by likeke34, Nov 20, 2010.

  1. likeke34

    likeke34 Valued Member

    Hello everyone, I'm new here but been lurking for a while... anyways, I have a question/issue with inward hip rotation

    Is internal hip rotation a flexibility thing that stretching helps to improve? Or does it have to do more with the strength/weakness of certain muscles?

    I read that 35 degrees of inward rotation is supposed to be normal, I have almost none lol... like in the picture below showing the degrees, i'm literally at 0 degrees!

    so i was wondering, will it also help by treating it as a flexibility thing like how you work into the splits by holding the position and stretching into it? say like by maybe laying like the picture below, and using gravity or ankle weights to pull my leg down into a deeper internal rotation... Or would that be bad for it lol?
    [​IMG]
     
  2. Southpaw535

    Southpaw535 Well-Known Member Moderator Supporter

    Was a swimming naked underage girl really the best picture you could find of that? But yes from limited knowedge flexibility training does help
     
  3. robertmap

    robertmap Valued Member

    Hello,

    1) Go see your doctor and get a referral to see a physiotherapist.
    2) I wouldn't use weights but using gravity ought to be OK - but see '1' above!!!
     
  4. likeke34

    likeke34 Valued Member

    thanks a lot for the replies! i've been wanting to work on improving inward hip rotation but had trouble finding info online
     
  5. Atre

    Atre Valued Member

    I would not put torque on your knees in the positions shown in the pic. It would mess your knees up really badly.

    Go to a physio. I don't know if this is a muscle issue or if you have an abnormality of the piriformis or if you're perfectly normal or what. See if Van Zandt turns up with any info.

    Why do you need this flexibility?

    PS. I think that girl has a condition I know as X-legs, it's bad for you and messes up your knees by asymmetric wear on cartilage - you don't want that much flexibility!
     
  6. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    Atre

    Likeke is right to want to improve his 0 degrees of internal rotation. When the hips lack sufficient internal/external rotation mobility the knees below and the lumbar spine above this immoble joint have to take up the slack and end up becoming more mobile to achieve necessary range in things like squats, kicks, sprinting, lunges... lots of movements. The knees and lumbar spine aren't meant to be mobile, so when they pick up slack for immobile hips they start wearing down quickly. He needs to get this fixed ASAP.

    For the OP, I've included a link to a great article by Tony Gentilcore. It's not specifically about internal rotation, but if you go down to the "Q" you'll see some tips on how to identify if you have a flexibility issue or an actual capsular restriction in the hip socket, and how to effectively address the problem.

    I hope you find it helpful.
     
  7. Atre

    Atre Valued Member

    Why is hip rotation need for any of those except kicks?

    Squats, sprinting and lunges are all 'linear' - if my feet weren't pointing directly forward when I did these I'd be asking serious questions. Where does internal hip rotation come in?
     
  8. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    If you lack internal rotation you can't even get your feet pointing forward in the first place. A lot of people run with their feet externally rotated, they squat with excessive external rotation, and their knees fall out of alignment while lunging because of excessive external rotation.
     
  9. Atre

    Atre Valued Member

    Huh, interesting - I see a lot of people running like that.

    Scary that people don't have that flexibility to maintain normal posture.

    I'd linked a lot of those kind of problems to asymmetric quads.
     
  10. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    Yeah, it is scary, especially when you train hard and your body is out of alignment. Not a whole lot different than trying to race in a car without your axle being properly aligned - things are going to break down fast.
     
  11. Late for dinner

    Late for dinner Valued Member

    hippy hippy shake ;' )

    Stupid question time. How did you assess your range of motion and in what position were you in? Your rotation will vary quite a bit with the position of your hips (eg flexed/extended) and that may skew what your real range is.

    As a really gross test (gross as in an estimate eh ;' ) you can lie on your back, bend one knee and (with the bent knee foot sitting at the level of the other knee on the bed/floor) see if your knee will move in and out wards roughly 45 degrees each way without your pelvis lifting off the surface. Its not uncommon for men to have only 30-40 degrees internal and 45 degrees external rotation although women often have 45 degrees each way.

    Your mobility can be affected by a number of things , not limited to: muscle tightness, muscle weakness, joint dysfuntion (either hip or pelvis), muscle imbalance (a popular theory at present with many people) as well as a few other things.

    Just for your interest. When a fetus develops the body starts as a tube. When the limbs develop and the trunk becomes more developed there is rotation of the limbs on the torso. This is one reason why the spinal nerve sensory pathways do not go straight up and down the limbs for the most part. As well the relatively larger masses of the muscles in the chest rotate the arms inwards while the hip/gluts etc tend to rotate the legs outwards. Neutral is still neutral but functionally we don't live in neutral which is one reason why people may (if they don't maintain their range as they get older) become stiffer than they need be as the dominant muscles don't get stretched out enough.... oddly enough a loss of hip extension is often the first thing that shows when degenerative arthritis is beginning to have effects..

    Sorry for the ramble. Just a hypothesis/conceptual version that I thought you might find interesting.

    powchoy
     
  12. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    I found it fascinating, thanks for sharing!
     
  13. likeke34

    likeke34 Valued Member

    Thanks a lot!

    What happened was that when I was young, like most kids I was extremely flexible, I could drop down into a side-split cold, all the way up til I was 19yrs old... But I stopped Karate for about 1yr to play basketball and when I came back to karate, I could barely spread my legs apart at all...

    The pain/limited motion only happens when my leg turns inward, for example in a kibadachi (horse stance), like stated earlier, pointing my feet forward was the difficult part because of the inward hip rotation. If I did a shiko dachi (feet pointed outward) I had no problem whatsoever doing it..

    Through google I found ways to test inward hip rotation and realized, I can barely move it inward at all and had someone check for me as I layed in the position of the picture I posted (0 degrees basically)...

    Throwing a roundhouse in a traditional shotokan way (what I practice) is very hard because of the inward rotation required when you chamber the leg... It's weird how I stopped for 1 yr and focused on running during that time and all of a sudden my hip flexibility basically disappeared
     

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