Ok, so I maybe went a little crazy today after spending the weekend taking the Functional Range Conditioning Mobility Specialist certification.  All of the sudden, all I want to do is see what I can do with every joint in my body!  I will write more on my experience taking this course tomorrow, but tonight I wanted to share with you something I spent some time on today.

The challenge with any seminar is bringing that material back to my gym and figuring out how I want to incorporate it into my client’s programs and how it fits into with my current knowledge.

A highlight from this weekend for myself was finding out how crappy my internal hip rotation is and how much I lack control of the motion.  So today I worked through some different game plans on how to attack this, first starting with basic range of motion.  Laying supine is always a good option because it allows you the easiest place possible to leverage the rest of your body to produce enough stability to create better motion.

Here is what I did:

There’s nothing earth shattering going on here, I’m simply laying on my back with my knee stacked right over my hip and the leg set at a 90 degree angle.  This is sneaky hard though, the goal is to keep the knee in the same relative position as you rotate from the hip moving the foot away from your body.  You can see in the video that my motion is super shaky at first but begins to clean up as I continue on.  This takes a high level of focus and more importantly, engagement form the rest of your body as well.  While you rotate the hip, you want to drive your fists, free leg, everything into the ground as hard as humanly possibly.  You will be shocked at how much this just fries your body!

But the end result is a higher level of control of the motion and a body that is ready to take on anything.

Give it a try and let me know what you feel and how it goes!

-S

*As a disclaimer, make sure you are cleared to work on this specific motion before trying an exercise like this.  If you are lacking this particular motion, there can be a lot of reasons why and it’s best to know what’s going on first.  Also, it’s easy to compensate to create this motion, so be diligent in your form and keep everything else stable!