When I stretch my hip flexor muscles I feel it in the front of my thighs. Is this right?

The short answer is yes! In my first post I talked about the movement of hip flexion and listed the hip flexors. We have already covered the iliopsoas the main flexor of the hip. Today I am going to talk about the rectus femoris muscle which also assist with hip flexion.

The rectus femoris is the large muscles at the front of your upper thigh. If you sit down with a tray on your lap, the tray would be resting on your rectus femoris. It is part of the quadriceps, four muscles on the front of the leg between the pelvis and the knee. Rectus femoris is the only quadricep that reaches over the hip joint as it originates on the front of the pelvis.

In class I often reference your ASIS (Anterior Superior Illiac Spine), you have two and they are the nobly bones you can feel through your skin at the front of your pelvis. Well you also have two AIIS (Anterior Inferior Illiac Spine) this is another nobly part of the pelvic bone at the front of the body just below the ASIS and this is where the rectus femoris originates. Why not feel this part of your body now, trace a line from below the ASIS along the thigh to the top of the knee bone. Finally the rectus femoris ends (inserts) as part of the quadriceps tendon onto the Patella (knee bone).

So if you feel a stretching through your quadriceps when you are stretching your hip flexors, that is just as it should be. Your hip flexors are a group of muscles that includes one of your quadriceps.

Comments

My feet are amazing! But how should I stand and why does this matter?

Each of your feet are amazing, I know that I did not appreciate my feet until I had a accident and one of my feet stopped working as well as it used to. My extreme sport of choice was piggy in the middle with my children on the beach, when I kick a stone. This has continued to impact my foot health for over 18 months (well I'm still recovering). Each of your feet are made up of 26 bones, 30 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments. Your feet are the most amazing mobile weight bearing structures around. When anatomists write about the foot, they often refer to the "bony architecture" of the foot. Now start to think about the structure of your foot as "bony architecture" and you can start understanding how you foot is similar to a vaulted church ceiling. Lots of individual bones precisely placed to fit together in an amazing arched structure. What is incredible about the foot is that there are three arches at work. You have the arch that yo

Pilates key principles: Control

In Pilates we aim to maintain a high level of control over the movements that we make. As you will have completed some Pilates with me, you will be aware that a small angle change in leg positioning or increased stability through the pelvis can suddenly increase the intensity of an exercise. When thinking about control it is very closely related to precision and you could say that these key principles come hand in hand. You will find that control is improved once you have made multiple attempts at an exercise. Muscles will increase in strength and your muscles will remember the movement of an exercise. Therefore when taking part in a class, stay at a level where you can maintain control. If you work at too high a level you will find it harder to master the control of position and movement and then perfect the exercise. When we have control over a movement we are also able to make the movement using only the muscles connected with that motion. An example of where things can go

Osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a condition that lots of us recognise, but do we really know what it is? It is a condition where your bones lose strength, this would not be noticed until you had a slip or a fall, you may not even know you have it. However because the bones have lost some of their strength a simple accident could end up causing a bone fracture (break). This condition impacts both females and males. How do the bones lose strength? Your bone are just as alive and changing as your skin. It is normal for us to shed some old skin as we grow new skin. In our bones, old bone is absorbed by cells called osteoclasts and then new bone is built by cells called osteoblasts. This process is know as bone remodeling and keeps our skeleton healthy. As we travel through phases of our life the hormones that balance this cycle change. As we get older some aspects of our bodies don't keep working as efficiently as they used to. Take the osteoclasts for example, who have worked at top spe

Katie Leaver Pilates

Search This Blog