10 Best Exercises for Loosening those Hockey Hips
‘Tis the season of early morning hockey practices and several hours of games every weekend. Preventing fatigue and injuries should be every coach and parent’s primary objective so that your kids can maximize ice time, perform their best, and prevent damage to their growing skeletal system (especially feet and hips!) that have yet to fuse. All it takes is a few simple exercises that EVERY hockey player, no matter what age, can use to improve their hip mobility, strength, and ward off groin injuries.
Start at the bottom - Intrinsic Foot Strength
I have yet to meet a hockey player who’s been playing more than 4 years that has a strong arch and excellent ability to control their feet. You would think that more importance would be placed on having a strong base of support when your entire sport is based upon standing on a thin blade. Because of the immense amount of foot control it takes to perform this task, most players collapse their arch by over-pronating (which flat skates all allow) to widen their base of support. Sounds like a great strategy but unfortunately this wreaks havoc on their biomechanics leading to increased stressors through the inside half of the knee, the knee cap, and the shifts the angle of the hip to make it steeper, which allows the bones to abut sooner. If you or your child struggle to get into a deep squat - check your feet first - if your foot rolls in, flattens, and your arch collapses, this could be the main cause. If your child complains their back is tired after practice or a game, this is also the most common cause of that. Do these diligently for at least 2 weeks to start noticing results.
2. Happy Baby (Ananda Balasana) - The Hip Helper
If your player complains of tight hip flexors, tight groin, tight upper hamstrings, or struggles to achieve a proper squat because their low back flexes, this should be a go to exercise. It can be performed passively as a stretch, but better outcomes are achieved when muscular energy is used to make this an active exercise.
Make sure once you’re in position you’re activating your muscles so that your groin muscles in particular are firing as you push your feet towards the ceiling while holding them in place.
**IF YOU CAN’T QUITE GRAB YOUR TOES OR ANKLES…..use a yoga strap or heavy resistance band (even a belt from your closet!) to help assist with this one.
3. Primal Squat
We’ve all seen those toddlers who make squatting look simple as pie - they go straight down to pick up that toy and straight back up without missing a beat. The ability to do this is normal, innate, we are BORN with the ability to move that way. But do to sitting in school as a kid, wearing shoes with heels, somewhere along the way we forget how to move properly and thus begins the breakdown of a fundamental movement pattern. Improving your ability to deep squat will improve pain and stiffness from head to toe and help preserve the joints that commonly lose range of motion over time when we play hockey - ankles, knees, hips, low back.
See if you can do this without curling your spine into a C-shape, if you can’t go to the next video.
For those of you who really can’t get into the Primal Squat - Start Here.
4. Hip Airplanes
For those of you familiar with world-renowned low back pain researcher Stuart McGill’s work, you’ll know this exercise has been proven to get more functional activation out of the gluteus medius and gluteus minimus muscles than any other exercise out there. The beautiful thing about this is that it’s an easy exercise to progress and it targets everything from hip internal and external range-of-motion, hip muscle strength and control, and proprioception and balance. I suggest having someonevideo you doing this exercise so you can watch it and self-critique your form.
5. Active Hamstring Stretch (PNF Stretching)
This style of hamstring stretching is the safest AND most effective way to stretch your hamstrings. If you want to see fast, lasting results, use PNF (Proprioceptive NeuroFacilitative) stretching. The reason this works so well is that when you engage your muscles you help your brain determine where you are in space by activating receptors called proprioceptors. This has a positive feedback signal to the brain which allows the brain to detect you’re safe and stable, with good muscular control, in that given range. This will send messages from your brain to your muscles that say “hey, looks like you know what you’re doing here, I trust you know how to control this area now, so i’ll give you a little more range” and it tells the nerves to relax the muscle. Try it as described in the video!
**Note: If you’re really tight try holding for 20-30 seconds, take a 1 minute rest, and repeat up to 5 times.
6-10. The Bunkie Exercises (Isometric Planks for Training Fascial lines)
The Bunkie exercises are a series of isometric plank variations that can be progressed in intensity as one improves. The key is to create symmetry between your anterior power line and your posterior power line and from side to side in both your medial and lateral fascial lines.
The GOAL is to be able to hold each pose for 60 seconds with minimal to moderate effort. Use a stopwatch to test yourself in a single repetition to see how long you can hold each pose. Fatigue happens quickly so make sure you take at least a 1 minute break in between poses to get an accurate reading of what you’re capable of and where your weaknesses lie.
The Anterior Power Line - Forward Plank with hip extension
The Posterior Power Line - Reverse Plank
The Lateral Power/Stability Line - Star Plank
The Medial Power/Stability Line - Copenhagen Plank
All of these can be modified to become easier to start by:
using a shorter bench or pillows
placing more of the leg (up to the knee) on the bench
lastly would be to ditch the bench all together and do them directly on the ground
Once you’ve achieved the goal described above, hockey players striving for Junior A or higher level of hockey should progress these exercises. Great advanced variations can be found all over YouTube.