if you have tight hip flexor muscles especially your soas and you're tired of doing the same old traditional stretching and rolling exercises that only give temporary relief try this the reason why most common fixes for the soas and tight hip flexors don't get long-term results or even meaningful results in the short term is because they're not addressing the root cause of why that soaz muscle is tight in the first place they're only addressing the fact that the soaz muscle is tight first let's understand what the soaz does in order to understand how it gets tight
heght so the so is attaches at our low back vertebrae represented by this band right here and it runs down to the inner portion of our thigh bone right here so typically when this muscle contracts it can do two things primarily it can pull the hip into what we call flexion and it can bend the hip like this the other way this muscle can create hip flexion is these fibers up here contract and they pull the low back forward into what we call extension this is going to move the hips in flexion but it's in
a different way and you can see that this pelvis is moving closer to the femur or the leg bone in a similar way it's just being initiated through the low back rather than this action right here both are ways we can move into hip flexion so people that have tight soas muscles often times have a pelvis and hips that are stuck in a position of hip flexion which is being represented by that big back arch right there so this is shortening the muscle and keeping it in a shortened position now the other thing that this
is doing is this is flaring up our rib cage like this and when the rib cage is flared up like this this is the second part of the equation it's keeping the diaphragm in a compromised position if I stay flared up like this this is a position of inhalation so what I struggle to do overall both out of my hips and my rib cage is get in a position of a stack where think about an exhalation do you see how the pelvis comes underneath myself and also these ribs are stacked on top of the pelvis
better this is the position we want to get in and one really cool thing about this guys is that your soas does have a direct attachment to your diaphragm via a fasal line now this fascial line means that tightness in one area can affect different muscles down or up the chain of this fascial line so by getting the diaphragm in a better position it can take stress off of the soas so the goals are to bring the hips into more of an extended position underneath us but also to bring the rib cage down so muscles
that will help do this are the hamstring muscles that attach on the back of the pelvis which can help pull the pelvis underneath us but also we want to facilitate a nice long exhale because that's going to bring the rib cage down and the muscles that are really helpful for that are our oblique muscles specifically our internal obliques that attach here and here because when those contract they can pull the pelvis underneath us and stack the rib cage on top of it so these are the two goal muscular groups we're going to focus and Target
in this exercise guys I have a huge announcement I love giving people the tools to be able to understand and fix their own bodies to have empowerment to really understand what's at the root cause of their issues and so I'm releasing a brand new product and a brand new course unlike anything that's on the market right now and it's called the own your body course it's going to be a live or you can even do it self-paced course that starts in September and it's going to give you the tools to understand and take ownership of
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ends at the end of this week and it's a super affordable price because again I want to reach a ton of people with this course and I want to help a lot of people for this what you're going to do is lay on your back with your feet up on something about this high like a bench or a chair and you want around a 60° Bend at your hips right here somewhere around there now you're going to take a foam roller or maybe a pel folded in half you're going to put deep deep in your
groin basically as close to your junk as you can get it and then you're going to lay back should be totally flat chin should be pointing up at the ceiling now what you're going to do is keeping your feet pointing at the ceiling you're going to drag down into that object gently you're just keeping this as a placeholder you're not squeezing it but dragging down should engage your hamstring muscles just a little bit so you're going to feel like your low back is flat but your tailbone is slightly off of the ground it's like you're
in a little posterior pelvic tilt you should not feel any glutes engaging really it should just be hamstrings now what you're going to do is you're going to take your palms up and reach them very gently low at less than about a 60 degree angle relative to your trunp so right about here now you should feel a little bit of your shoulder blades moving away from your spine we call that protraction okay now what you're going to do is maintain all this little bit of hamstring engagement a little bit of a low reach and as
you exhale through your mouth you want to sigh the air out for about that long at the end of that exhale you should feel your side AB not your six-pack muscles as much but your side ab muscles engage you're going to pause and you're going to hold the tension in your side ab muscles you're we very gently inhale through your nose not engaging your neck so when you inhale you're going to feel your chest open up a little bit and your back open up a little bit so it looks like this and then you would
exhale again the two biggest mistakes here is that people reach too hard and their chin lifts off of the ground and their Sturm depresses don't do that it's a very gentle two three out of 10 reach the other thing is that when people exhale they don't exhale long enough so remember we got to get the rib cage down so if you exhale like this it's not going to be good enough you have to have a nice soft open mouth exhale and then when you inhale don't engage your neck now what if you only had soas
tightness on one side well generally what that represents assuming that muscle is tight because it's in a shorten position what's going on is that this muscle Contracting is actually going to pull the spine to the opposite side so notice how these fibers contract and these fibers come closer together it's going to turn the spine to the right if it's a tight left soas that's also likely going to pull the pelvis if I get rid of this band really quick that's going to pull the pelvis more forward on that left side so we now have an
issue where we have a rightward facing spine and we need to pull the pelvis back on the left and better turn the spine to the left to take stress off of that tight left seaz so for this instead of being in 60 degrees of hip Bend you want to be more 90 degree Bend up both your knees and your hips foam roller is still going down in between your thighs sort of like the mid portion of your thighs Here and Now what you're going to do is you're going to keep that chin pointing at the
ceiling drag very gently down low back stays flat tailbone lifts off you should feel just hamstrings not your glutes really working here now once you're here you want to initiate a shift towards the side of tighter soaz you should be very gentle just like a two out of 10 you don't want to feel any pinching in your hips if you do you could back away a little bit but here should be fine for most people you can think about this shift in a couple different ways you can think about this via initiating the shift via
pushing the opposite side knee up or pulling that knee down your feet shouldn't really move it should be a hip movement it's very subtle and gentle as you do that you're going to feel a tiny bit of groin engage on the side you're shifting to without losing the hamstring on that side now just sit here and breathe in through your nose out through your mouth you're going to feel more left low back heavy on the floor and that's good at the end of that exhale feel those side ABS engage on that side you're shifting towards
more pause very gentle inhalation if you want to get more side ABS you could take this arm and reach it straight up towards the SE ceiling very gently and do that same breathing just make sure that it's just hamstring inner thigh no hip flexor and your side ABS on that side that's the only muscle group you should feel working in this exercise I recommend doing these exercises twice daily for maximum results both in the morning and at night two sets of about 5 to eight slow breath Cycles if you guys like this please like the
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