What’s up folks! This is Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I’m here to help you live an easier, pain-free life, help active people live and stay active, do the things they love, and do it well – more efficiently with power, speed and grace! Today what we’re going to talk about is increasing the speed within your legs and the hip itself. In short, we will be talking about speed, strength, and power within the legs. What you want to first ask yourself is whether you are functional? When it comes to building speed, your body needs to be in a balanced state. What does that mean? Are the muscle tissues moving properly? Does the fascial system have enough glide? Do your muscle tissues contract and communicate with the whole body? All three of these questions must be addressed to decide if your body is in a balanced state. So one muscle must communicate with the next muscle, and so on and so forth. In the case of speed, everyone has front muscles, the hip flexors, which are contracted. Everyone understands that these muscles are tight but this is actually slowing the legs down. You need to really focus on getting that hip to open. So let’s actually start showing you what’s happening.

What you need to know is that the body is designed to have something in the back turned off if something in the front is on. We are an anterior driven society so the front of our body is working overtime, at all times. Consequently, this will get tightened and turned on, eventually getting harder and preventing the hip joint from opening completely. As a result, the posterior part of your body, your butt, is going to turn off. I’m going to show you how to make that backside functional, but first, let’s find out what it looks like.

In order to push your leg backwards, your glute and hamstrings need to work. So you need to focus on foam rolling, trigger point work, and stretches for your glute and hamstrings. First, you must get them to learn how to move, then get them to contract with trigger point work or squats. It is also important to get them to communicate, by using fluid motion in your stretches. Once you do that, you must then understand the hip flexor area. This area will be the next tricky part. This gives the glute and hamstrings a reason to stay working. There are many muscles in this group and so much happening in this area. However, what you want to focus on is getting the hip to open in the backwards direction. Once we get the muscles to stop working so hard, your body will take over and start doing it on its own. This is where people make their mistake. They think they need to get faster and stronger yet what they don’t realize is that the body naturally wants to become more efficient. You don’t have to try so hard if you focus on the basics of getting the muscle tissue to start moving, contracting, and communicating. Watch how it moves then feed that movement. Afterwards, it’s just a matter of practicing that speed and efficiency in a non-focused way. Usually, if you are doing this right, you won’t even see the positive effects coming. You will notice that you are running faster without even trying.

So when we are talking about increasing speed, we are talking about increasing the functionality of your body. Getting it to move, contract, and communicate through foam rolling, trigger point work, and stretching is the key point here. You just need to do these things and focus on the balance between the hip flexors and extensors. Then it’s just a matter of practicing and you will realize how much easier you can move and how you can move. If you liked this tip, share it and comment on this. I love the feedback I’m getting. I’m getting a lot of emails asking to provide different tips on various topics. If you haven’t yet, please join the newsletter and you’ll get these tips right in your mailbox. Until next time! Bye.