Unlock Your Hip Flexors

Pain, anxiety, and belly fat. Turns out we've all been approaching these problems all wrong. The solution is not pills, yoga, meditation or dieting…it's your hip flexors!

What are hip flexors?

If you're like me, you might be asking right now, “but what are hip flexors?”. I've been into fitness almost my whole life and I vaguely know the term myself.

First of all, they are muscles. According to unlockyourhipflexors.com, they're also the “hidden survival muscle”. More on what that means in just a bit.

You have all sorts of “flexors” in your body. Flexors are muscles which act to flex a joint. For example, if you bend your arm to touch your shoulder, you are flexing your elbow joint. There are several flexors involved in every joint flex.

For the hip, you have no less than nine flexors!

The one we're concerned with here is the Psoas major, the most important hip flexor. “Psoas” means “loin region” in Greek. It connects the spine to the pelvis. Basically, it's joining your upper body to your lower body. That's not all, though. Here's everything it does:

— Joins Upper And Lower Body
— Joins Outside To Inside
— Joins Back To Front
— Joins The Axial To The Appendicular Skeleton
— Bends The Trunk Laterally
— Raises The Trunk From Its Supine Position

The point of all hip flexors is to lift the upper leg, or to pull the body towards your leg when the leg is stable (think of sit-ups or knee raises).

As you might imagine, it's a very large muscle!

What can go wrong with the hip flexors?

If your psoas gets too tight, you'll likely develop lower back pain. That's because the lumbar discs are being compressed.

From a body builder's point of view, hip flexors are something to be stretched, and often. Women especially are known to have tight hip flexors.

There are numerous stretches to loosen up the hips and keep them limber.

Unlock Your Hip Flexors Program

Here's what the Unlock Your Hip Flexors program is all about.

The Unlock Your Hip Flexors program was designed by Rick Kaselj, MS. He's a kinesiologist and injury specialist who serves as a resource for fitness and health professionals. He gives live presentations all across the US and Canada and helps people with joint pain, leg pain, back pain, and injuries in general, just to name a few problems he can fix.

His success is rooted in the idea that most of us sit far too long for too much of the week. This causes our hip flexors to tighten up, and when that happens, we suffer a full range of maladies…

— Bulging Belly Syndrome: tight hip flexors cause the lower back to actually curve, which pushes out the stomach. By unlocking the hip flexors, the abdomen will be pulled back.

— Fat: when you're facing danger, your body goes into “fight or flight” mode. This includes your hip flexors. But if you're sitting too much thereby making your flexors tight all the time, your body gets the wrong message. It thinks that since your hip flexor is tight, there must be danger around. Your body therefore works the adrenal glands overtime, causing your immune system to suffer. The body goes into fat-storing mode and voila: your tight hip flexors have made you fat!

— Decreased Sexual Performance: sitting all day causes a reduction in blood flow and circulation in your lower body.

By performing the stretching moves in the proper sequence, says this guy Rick, you will “unlock your hip flexors” and see improvements in all these areas, plus joint pain.

The Verdict

Since I'm an advocate of yoga and stretching in general, and since I know most people don't ever stretch a thing, all this makes perfect sense to me. Besides, there are some scientific articles referenced in the Unlock Your Hip Flexors program website, backing up what they're saying.

The program includes not only stretches but also mobility exercises and stability exercises aimed at unlocking the hip flexor. It's intriguing, believable, and totally not expensive, either. There's a $9 promotion and the regular price is $50. Even at the regular price, it's less than a single session with a personal trainer who may or may not know a thing about hip flexors.