Stretch and strengthen your lateral leg muscles

One of the best things you can do in the off season (if you haven’t been doing this all year) is to pay attention to your hip flexors and IT bands.   Throughout the year we all tend to neglect the side to side motion as we busy ourselves running, riding, and flutter kicking our way through each training session.  Doing so can easily bring on the dreaded IT band syndrom or unfortunate knee and back pain related to tight/weak lateral legs muscles and stuck muscle fibres and tendons.  A secondary effect of week hip flexors is to have your run form fall apart in the later stages of your race.  You may not notice during the race, but if you look at those race pictures from mile 10 and mile 20 where you seem to be about to fall sideways into a heap on the ground, you can bet your stabilizing muscles – hip flexors being one of them – are not helping you look good.

So, stretch em out and keep em strong.  There are many different types of strengthening excercises: clamshells, lateral leg raises, side stepping on a crossed-over stretch cord…mix em up a bit to keep things interesting.  And guys, suck it up and get on the hip machine or grab the bosu ball like all the ladies.  Rolling out the IT band and hip flexors with a foam roller or firm ball is equally important.  If you’d care to try the toilet plunger approach and leave a comment we’d love to hear about it.  Apparently pulling the IT band outwards with the suction of a plunger is another great method to get things un-stuck. We have yet to try that one.