What’s up folks, its Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I’m here to help the super athlete eliminate pain for the long term all through self-care. Your body can heal anything, you just have to start working with it.

Today we are going to be talking about the post season. I’m on the east coast, so now it’s starting to get cold as we move into winter. Many of the tri athletes that I work with are now going into post season. What I want you to focus on in this post season is learning and gaining proper new movement patterns. Everyone knows about how the hips are supposed to move and the hip flexors that can be tight. Yet I want you to start focusing on the soft tissue work. Start working with the foam rolling in a sequence of events that is always going to get an area to open. Look at how your hips move and work with the hip flexors. I want you to start gaining more access to it.

One of the exercises I want you to look at is the squat. With the squat, once one thing goes wrong, many things can go wrong. So I want to show you a couple of the things that happen to go wrong while doing the squat. In this post season, I want you to correct that and find someone that can help you open your hips and teach you proper movement patterns within the hip. Whether it be a chiropractor, a massage therapist, or a PT, anyone that is going to help you progress how that hip moves, will change your whole next season. If that hip moves, everything will follow through and also move.

So let’s talk about the exercise in detail. In a squat, everything needs to be aligned. As you start to go down, everything goes down, including your butt, your legs, and your hips. If your hip starts shrugging on one side, you should take notice of that side which can be a problem. I want you to focus on both sides of your hip structure and get them to move evenly downward.

Another thing I want you to notice is whether your knees will buckle inward. We want them to stay neutral and go down evenly. Many people that do cross-fit or use weight loads, do need their knees to flare out slightly so they have more access to muscle tissue firing. However, it is not a natural movement for the body. I want to make sure this is very clear. The body works in very clean movements based off of what muscles need to work. If you think your knees must flare out to give you more power, you are wrong.

So what you want to focus on in this post season is new movement patterns. For this tip, I showed you two main points within the hip itself. You want to get your glutes, TFL, hip rotators and flexors, quads, and low back to start working better. Therefore, you want to foam roll from the torso to the knees. All these things play a crucial role on how your hips will move. If you work on this for the next three months, I guarantee you are going to have an even more powerful season next time. If you know someone who needs a hip range-of-motion or hip flexor work, please share it with them. If you aren’t part of the family, I would love to answer any questions you may have, so shoot me an email. Until next time! Bye.