Hey runner, I'm Marie, @drwhittfit. Never feel like all your hard work was all for nothing ever again. I coach strength training for runners, helping YOU identify your weaknesses and fix them with strength exercises designed for runners to help you build the exact strength you need to run your best, strongest, fastest, most injury-resilient race yet. Subscribe and come join the Running Fit Fam!
Hip Mobility MEGA CIRCUIT: long runs shouldn’t start with stiff hips
Ironically, I'm writing this email after my own long run and I just stood up to get more water and uh...the hips are tight lol. So don't you worry; the physical therapist will be using her own movement-medicine after we chat haha. But tight hips can be a real drag,...especially when you've tried "every stretch out there", nothing works, and near-crippling tightness is becoming an unfortunate repeat event by mile 8. The first thing you need to know is you're not crazy. It's ok if the stretch felt good at first, your body gave you the green light to go ahead and run, just to ambush you later. Here's the problem with passive stretches and why I always try to follow them up with something more dynamic, even if it's just incorporating a deliberate inhale and exhale:(by the way...these goodies aren't in the blog post. You're getting the running fit fam deep-dive.) Passive stretches can help lengthen a muscle. And we experience this feel-good moment in our muscles and our nervous system thanks to muscle spindles which detect the change in muscle length. The cool part: these muscles spindles (the length-detecting sensors) relay this information to our central nervous system (your brain and spine). Your brain and spine respond with a sigh of relief. We then take all this amazing information, and these temporary changes in our muscles, and shove them into mason jar and shake it around like a maraca in a tornado. Ok, not really. But we go for a run.Where there's a LOT of muscle contractions...that actively lengthen, shorten, lengthen, and shorten that muscle you just temporarily reminded to stay long and loose. By the way, the mason jar in the tornado is long gone. And the hip tightness is back. That's why for my runners and patients, I tell them to stretch GENTLY if they like, but to incorporate exercises like the ones I have in this week's blog post so increase their mobility and then help them KEEP IT FOR GOOD. What makes these exercises special? This hip mobility MEGA circuit I've put together for you focuses on restoring hip range of motion in every direction, but specifically focusing on hip extension and internal rotation, two very important directions that are often tightest, and contribute the greatest to that unrelenting, tightness feeling. But I also deep dive back into your nervous system, because sometimes nerves that are "stuck" can also contribute to that achey hip sensation, especially in the front of your hips. So how about we fix our tight hips together (because I know I need it) and head over to the blog post together?
And if you have any other questions, or running-problems you'd like to see exercises for, email me back! (yes, really, it's me on the other side) Until next time running fit fam, Dare to Train Differently, Marie Whitt, PT, DPT //@dr.whitt.fit P.S. TL; DR: if you've got wildly tight hips, I have a MEGA hip mobility circuit full of exercises you HAVEN'T TRIED YET. (ok, at least like 2). But go check it out! Looking for MORE ways to work together?
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Dr. Marie Whitt / Strength Coach and Physical Therapist for Runners
Hey runner, I'm Marie, @drwhittfit. Never feel like all your hard work was all for nothing ever again. I coach strength training for runners, helping YOU identify your weaknesses and fix them with strength exercises designed for runners to help you build the exact strength you need to run your best, strongest, fastest, most injury-resilient race yet. Subscribe and come join the Running Fit Fam!
This is basically the equivalent of running-research-gossip Read: NERD ALERT. (I'm just gonna own it at this point because you are my people.) I've waited a hot minute to deep-dive into this particular research article. And the whole time I've been reading and re-reading it, the IG algorithm has still not put it into my feed. So if you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the title: "How much running is too much? Identifying high-risk running sessions in a 5200-person cohort study."...
If you've ever struggled with incessant soreness and deep dull ache in the front of your hip that won't go away, you've probably scrolled to the end of the internet trying to find some kind of relief. *cue the evil hip hook* If you don't know what that is, you literally lie down on your belly and impale yourself and your hip flexor over a metal hook. I wish I was kidding. If you're needing THAT kind of "release", it's REALLY time to take a deeper look into WHY your hip flexor is clamping down...
If I said I didn't need these exercises too... I'd be lying. Somewhere, somehow I've recently picked up a funky ankle ache. Yes, even PT's get "how did I do this?" niggles. And I know a lot of runners are feeling the same thing as you ramp up for fall races, entering peak mileage, or are in the thick of peak marathon mileage. And you might be saying things like: "My right ankle has this nagging tenderness/soreness my past couple runs. What do I do about it?" The most common not-so-great...