5 Tips for Your Hip Hinge

Every mom needs to learn how to hip hinge.

Why?

Even if you do not have goals of lifting huge weight in a gym setting, a hinge is a fundamental movement pattern we perform all the time in daily life.

Think of a hip hinge as bending over to pick up something off the floor. How often do your kiddos drop toys on the floor? A LOT! But, even if you don’t have children, we all perform this task frequently throughout the day. Mastering it now will also help you move better for years to come.

Hip hinge = hinge at the hips.

Hip hinge = butt back.

In a hip hinge, you’ll hinge at your hips, sending your butt straight behind you. Ideally we’re able to maintain a stacked body position (ribs over pelvis), eccentrically lengthening / loading the glutes and hamstrings.

A few tips:

• Knees remain soft and weight stays in the mid-foot. Shins stay vertical.

• Torso leans forward more. Rather than folding forward and bringing chest towards thighs, think about hinging back and bringing thighs towards the chest (more down below).

• You should feel the work more so in the glutes, hamstrings, and even your abdominals versus feeling all quadriceps.

5 Tips for Your Hip Hinge

1. Move Horizontal: a Hip Hinge is more of a “booty” back movement

Where a hip hinge really differs from a squat. As you initiate into your hip hinge, we are focused on the movement coming from the hips. We’re not moving up and down (more of a squat), but rather moving “back.”

• One way to sense this “back” movement is to set up near a wall. Keep your knees soft and weight over the mid-foot. Simple focus on tapping the wall behind you as you hinge back, focusing on finding length on the backside of the pelvis.

2. Keep hip flexors relaxed

This will ensure you’re not “pulling” yourself down with the front side of your hips, but actually using controlled lengthening through the back side of the hips to lower you down.

Check the front side of your hip bones. Just below we can feel for our hip flexor muscles. As we go into a hip hinge, sometimes we may find we “pull” ourselves forward and bring our chest down. Essentially, flexing the hip. Instead of bringing the thigh towards the chest and sitting back, we bring the chest to the thighs and sort of “fold forward.” This tends to lead to overactive hip flexors. Our goal is to keep the hip flexors nice and relaxed :)

Place your hands on the front of your hips. Sit back into the hips and pause and when you feel the muscles kick in or pop up into the thumbs. See if you can guide them to “let go.” Even thinking about the thumbs encouraging the femurs to sit back into the socket to help open up the backside of the hip.

3. Butt blooming / allowing the glutes to fully lengthen

Yes, butt blooming. A client mentioned this one and it stuck with me :)

One of the biggest things to check for optimizing glute function and getting into a good hinge is making sure you’re actually eccentrically lengthening / loading the muscle on the back of the hips and not compensating somewhere else. Sometimes we may see this as rounding through the low back in a hinge. If you struggle with glute clenching or back side pelvic floor tightness, practicing some eccentrically lengthening glute-focused hip hinging can be a great strategy to do a few times a day to help rewire the habit and pattern of clenching. Why does clenching matter? Check out this video?

In the video below I talk about this consideration, and allowing the the glutes to almost “grow” into your hand in a hinge. It can be really helpful to actually place your hands on your glutes and feel them “grow” and lengthen into your hands. You can also check out this video where I bring in the “butt blooming” in something like a hinge row.

Does everything still feel really stuck? Working on some release and breathwork for the posterior pelvic floor can be really helpful!

Check out some of my favorites below :)

4. Check your ribcage

In a hip hinge we’re looking for a stacked body position and the ability to connect the lower ribs with the pelvis. During pregnancy and postpartum our body takes on a more extended position (ribs flared, booty out). In this position the abdominals are a bit checked out and the low back muscles are working overtime.

In this extended position we’ve lost the ability to create tension in the obliques and have the lower ribs internally rotate. We want this to help us stay in a nice stacked position in a hinge pattern. When we start lifting heavier, I don’t expect our position will always be a perfect stacked position. But, when we are first learning a hinge, addressing back pain, sensing the glutes/hamstrings, and learning how to generate power and produce force, this can be really helpful.

What can we do?

I love starting with something like a kettlebell deadlift, even elevating the weight on a block.

• Reach towards the kettlebell on the ground and get into your hinge position. You should think about being “over” the kettlebell so the kettlebell lines up with about mid-foot.

• Get into your hinge position.

• If you find yourself in that more extended position, think about exhaling the lower ribs back in space. If my hand was on your sports bra area, I want you to think about exhaling into that space. Note: we need enough posterior expansion to be able to do this!

This exhalation is utilizing the obliques to help pull down on the lower ribs. You may notice you need to place a focus on one side more than the other. I, for example, have a left rib flare and really have to focus on exhaling the left ribs back when I perform a deadlift.

5. Push/Pull for a better hinge

Push/Pull is one cue I’ve been using with clients to help facilitate that booty length your body craves in a hinge. Think of a push/pull with the knees and the hips.

• Weight in the mid-foot and knees slightly bend. Yes we want that hinge at the hips, but we want the knees forward over the mid-foot too.

• Think about a “pull” back with the hips and a “push” forward slightly with the knees. Initiate with the hip hinge. If I was there coaching you I’d physically move you in both directions to get you there. Note the push forward with the knees is just slight and meant to get you more into the mid-foot. Otherwise it turns into a squat.

• Knees forward, booty back, knees forward, booty back. These are small movements, but this will really help open up the back side!

In my Postpartum programs + work with 1:1 clients we work a lot on finding a stacked body position, strengthening the hamstrings and deep abdominals, building a dynamic ribcage and getting 360 degree expansion, releasing the posterior pelvic floor, and freeing up space so we can hinge well.

Looking for more tips to master your deadlift or return to exercise postpartum? I got you ;)

xoxo,

Erica