Off Ice Hip Mobility Exercises!

Hey skaters, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. I am Coach Julia, and today we are gonna be doing some exercises to help mobilize your hip area. So some of my favorite skating moves need really mobile hips, really flexible hips. You guys know I absolutely love the spread eagle. It's probably one of my favorite moves. I think I do it in every single program. Maybe not, maybe that's an exaggeration. But I love the spread eagle, and it requires really open, mobile hips. I also love those enabowers. I love doing a big corner-to-corner enabower or an outside-edge enabower. So there's a lot of my favorite moves that need a lot of hip mobility. There's also some other really cool spins, like the pancake spin requires mobility in your hips. Not just flexibility for those big, grand maneuvers like I like, but just for everyday little things. C-steps, chalk toss. I mean, there's so many different skating skills that need mobility. So today I'm gonna show you a few maneuvers that you can incorporate into your pre-workout or your stretching at home, or even at the gym, and this will help you get more mobility in your hips. All right, so I'm doing this in my living room. I have the most space here and some soft carpeting. You wanna find something that's soft, not like on a hardwood surface or something. So we can do this a little bit more comfortable. Grab a yoga mat, if nothing else. So get yourself some space, and then we're gonna do most of this pretty much on the ground. So what we're gonna do for our first exercise is I'm gonna bend my front knee. So this is my left knee. I have it kind of tucked in, kind of like if you've ever done a butterfly stretch. It's kind of the same thing, but we're just doing it with one knee. And the better you get at it, the more you can drop your knee all the way down to the ground. You can see I have some space in here because honestly, I don't do this as much as I used to when I was really training all of the time, but that's okay. So you wanna have this knee. Right now, my left knee is bent and my left foot is kind of tucked in towards my body. I'm gonna have my right leg, where you can see my knee is facing the ceiling, and then I'm just going to close that knee to the ground and then open it back up, okay? Close it to the ground, open it back up. All right, so you're really opening that hip joint in there and you want to do the best you can to keep your butt on the ground, okay? You don't wanna be having to lift up every single time. Now, if you have to lift up, it just means you're not getting that internal rotation here that you're gonna want. So right now, we're working on rotating our hip inside. So if you're starting out with your hip lifting, you're not getting that internal rotation, your hip is still aligned, like basically straight. So work to keep your tush down on the ground and rotate in and out. I would rather have you rotate a little less, but keep those hips down if that's where your mobility is to start with. If you can't drop it all the way down to the ground yet, that's fine, okay? Just try to keep those hips on the ground during this rotation exercise, okay? And then I wanna show it to you on the other side as well. So now I'm bending my right knee and tucking my right foot into my body, all right? It's the same, it's that butterfly position, just leaving the right side down on the ground. I almost said down on the ice. I'm so used to teaching on the ice. Okay, so now my left knee is pointed towards the ceiling. All right, I'm gonna try to keep my left, both my hips on the ground. I'm gonna rotate my left hip in and lift, in and lift. Okay, so now we're working on that internal rotation with the left hip. Okay, so you're up and down and up and down. Again, trying to keep both of your hip bones on the ground. So there is our hip mobility exercise number one. Okay, so for our next mobility exercise, we are gonna take the same kind of thing we just did and upgrade it a little bit. So I am going to start with my right knee up. So it's kind of like the beginning position we had. And then my left knee is gonna go in, okay? So it's kind of the position we started with, all right? Where we were just doing our butterfly motion. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna drop the right knee, sorry, the left knee in. And then we're gonna bring it up and drop the right knee in. So we're alternating back and forth, okay? So we're not giving our body any reprieve now. We're just pushing those internal rotations. And do your best to keep those hips on the ground, okay? If you are swinging fully from side to side with those hips coming off the ground every time, then you're maybe burning some calories, but you're not really working on your hip mobility, okay? So we really wanna make sure your hips, your tush is staying on the ground, okay? And that way, you're gonna rock from side to side. And you're actually, you're getting a little bit of a stretch through the outside of your hip as well. And you're working on the internal rotation, okay? So we're gonna go drop and drop and drop. Okay, so we're just taking what we did a moment ago and kind of upgrading it a little bit. All right, for our third hip mobility exercise, we're gonna do one of my favorite things to do when I'm kind of stretching. And this is something that those of you who have the splits are gonna have a much easier time doing. I don't currently have my splits. I feel like, I don't know, there's this idea that we should always, as athletes, have them, but I don't. So, but that's okay. This isn't about splits, this is about hip mobility. Okay, so I'm gonna put my right knee in front of me. And you can see I'm immediately, hold on, this camera is really weird. Let me lift it. There we go, I think that's better. You can see me better. Okay, so I'm gonna push down into my right knee. And you can see my, I'm definitely pushed in front, my knee is in front of my foot, okay? There's no trying to not keep your knee in front of your toes or anything like that. And I'm stretching out the front of my left hip area now. Okay? All right, and then what we're gonna do is rock back. So now, oh, I feel so good. I'm now stretching the back of my hamstring, okay? So I'm rocking back and forth the front of my left hip. I'm releasing that pressure and stretching my hamstring on my right side, okay? I love this stretch. I've always felt like it just really opens up my hips. It feels amazing. All right, so this one, I'm stretching the hip, the front of the hip area on the left, and then the hamstring area on the right. If you can get your knee all the way straight back there, really straight knee, you get that good hamstring stretch. And then we're gonna do it on the other side as well. Okay, so now I'm gonna put my left knee in front and I'm pushing into that left hip. And that is stretching out my right hip. That's the one that you can't see, the hidden hip. Okay, so I'm stretching out that right hip. It feels so good. Sink in. You wanna sink down and forwards, really opening up the front of your hip area. Oh, it feels so nice. And then we're gonna rock back and stretch out our hamstring, okay? So now I've got my left hamstring is getting a nice stretch there. All right, and so we're just gonna rock back and forth the front of the right hip and then the left hamstring, okay? Okay, so this one, I'm gonna balance on my left knee, all right, and my right leg is out to the side. I'm just gonna place my hands down in front of me, okay? So just on the ground, I know they disappeared from camera view, but we're gonna push our hips back and then pull forward. Push our hips back and pull forward. Let me see if I can change my angle if you can see it a little bit better. There we go, okay. So I'm pushing my hips back towards my left foot and then rocking forward and releasing, okay? Push back towards your balancing foot, that's the left, and releasing, okay? So this is going to open up a lot of my right hip because that's the one that's extended out to the side. So this leg is extended out to the side and I'm really opening up that right hip while creating mobility in my left as well. Most of my weight is over on this left side, but I am slightly open. You can see that I'm not fully up on it, like I'm not fully balanced on it right here. I am leaned so my weight is slightly split. That way, both of my hips are getting a little bit of that opening. It's a different feeling in each hip. Since this one is stretched and this one is not, the way that they're being opened up is different, but you can see that my knee is out to the side a little bit. And let's try it on the other leg. Okay, so I am gonna put my weight now on my right knee. My left leg is going out to the side, okay? I'm gonna put my hands down in front of me. I'm gonna have you push back into your hips. Oh my goodness, I can already tell that doing it on the other side has opened it up a little bit more. Okay, and then I'm gonna release, press back, release, press back. Oh, that feels really good. Release, press back, release, all right. Really help open up the inner hip, inner thigh area. If you're working on side splits, this is a great movement to help you move towards those side splits as well, all right? Because you're stretching each side individually. And then once you get each side really opened up, you can move into your side split exercise. This one is a little bit more challenging, but I fully believe that you guys will be able to do it. Okay, if you can't do it today, work towards it. Okay, so we're gonna go into an all fours kind of position, hands and knees on the ground. I'm gonna start by doing this with my left knee. I'm gonna have you try to keep a 90 degree angle the entire time, okay? So the left knee is gonna lift up and you can see it's still 90 degrees. My toe is now pointed directly towards the ceiling. I'm gonna have you rotate it to the side and it is still 90 degrees, you can see there, okay? I'm gonna have you bring it down, all right? Then we can relax and then we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna bring it to the side, we're gonna bring it back, down, back, side, down, side, back, down, okay? So we're going all the way up, squeezing your tush, open to the side, bring it in, open to the side, bring it back, squeeze your tush, bring it down, okay? So we're still in all fours, we're gonna go up, all right? Keeping that 90 degrees, open, down, up, back, down, open, down, open, back, down, all right? So we're going up behind us, squeezing our tush, open to the side, bring your knees together, then we're going open to the side, bringing our knee back together. All right, our sixth exercise, I know a lot of you have probably done this before, it's more of a stretch than an exercise, but we can incorporate a little bit of both here, who's making the rules, okay? We're going to open our knees up into a butterfly position, okay? So my feet are together, okay? And my weight is on my hands, I'm gonna push forward, okay? So the more flexible you are, the better, you could potentially get your hips all the way down on the ground. Right now, this is as far as I can go, and that is fine, and we can actually rock a little bit. So if you wanna rock forward, get a little bit of that stretch, release, rock forward, get a stretch, release, rock forward, nice and slow, we don't want a fast movement here, we just want a nice slow movement where we're releasing the tension, and then increasing the tension. Okay, I have one more hip opening exercise for you guys this morning. I love doing this one, but I do realize it might be a bit more of a challenge for some of you, so if you're not there, then that's fine. I'll show you a way to modify it as well. So this one, I'm gonna actually tuck my foot behind me, okay? And for some of you, this might be enough, but what I like to do is then tuck the other foot behind me so that I'm kind of in a, my feet, hold on, you can see my feet are turned out away from my hips. This is already a little bit of a stretch, just sitting here in this position. So my hips are really rotated in right now, both are rotated very much in, okay? And then my feet are out to the side. And if you need to sit here like this for a while, and that's what you've got, that's great. The closer you can get your tush to the ground, the more stretch and mobility you're gonna get out of this. I go a little bit farther, and I like to actually lay back in this position, which I know is crazy, but it really stretches out the front of my hips, and I love the way that feels. So I just like to lay here like this. When I was younger, I could get more of my back down on the ground. Right now, there's a little bit of an arch, but this is one of my favorite ones to do. But if you wanna just sit here with those feet out to the side and kind of push back a little bit, that's great as well, okay? So if you can even, I mean, anywhere in there, if your hips are up, but as I said, the closer you can get your hips down to the ground, the more of a stretch you're gonna get out of this position. So this is our final hip opening exercise for this morning. All right, skaters, I hope you enjoyed those hip mobility exercises. Make sure you implement them so that your time out on the ice is more effective, and you can get some of those skills that you may have been struggling with. Now this is just a little taste of what I have going on in the Coach Julia Club. In the club, I have organized lessons. They're starting from your first steps out on the ice, and we're building the club out so that by the time I have all 10 courses up, you will be able to learn your axle through my club. I also have off-ice instruction, and I have so many plans for more courses. I was initially thinking it was gonna be just 10, but as I'm working on it, I'm thinking I wanna do a full off-ice series, a full USFS skating skills series, stretching, I mean, my mind is a whirl with all of the ideas for different courses that I could add once my initial 10 are all complete. I'm about halfway through. I have four courses up. We just launched course four today. Course five will be going up in a week or two. So you wanna head over to coachjulia.club if you wanna join me there. We have a community where I give you feedback on your skating, so you can upload your skating videos to a feedback section, and I will watch them and give you feedback on your skating skills through that club, all right? So again, you can join me at coachjulia.club. But if you enjoyed this video here on YouTube, please do give us that thumbs up. And as always, I look forward to reading all your comments in that section down below. If you haven't done so yet, then hit that subscribe button and the little notification bell so you can see all my videos when they come out. Happy skating, and I'll see you next time.