Glute Strength & Mobility: 10-Min Fundamental Routine

First thing we're going to look at is hip external rotation and this is really really commonly used in jujitsu hip external rotation is where like our hip rotates out this way and the foot comes inwards towards midline. You can sort of imagine that this happens a lot using Dula Hava guard, K guard, any kind of leg entanglement. You got to be careful if you're not strong in the hips because you'll end up heel hooking yourself and that's really unfortunate. I don't recommend it.

So what we're going to focus on again is this hip external rotation and the most commonly prescribed exercise for that unfortunately is the clam shell. And so what we're going to do is lay on our side with our hips and knees bent and our feet touching. My hand is going to sit on my pelvis to make sure that as I raise my leg up like this that I'm not rotating my pelvis backwards. And people do that when they're quite weak and they end up with this scenario where they think they're getting stronger in the hips and actually all they're doing is strengthening their back.

So not our goal today. So we take a little bit of tubing. I've just got a very small piece of tubing here. I'm just going to put it on initially so you can see what it looks like and I'm going to get rid of it after just so I can show you the different variations of what we need to do.

So we take the tubing. Obviously, if you can, you want to tie it nice and tight. And we're going to hand on our pelvis, feet touching, going to gently squeeze the butt muscle and lift our leg up. Notice I'm not going very high.

This doesn't need to be way up here, especially if you don't have the mobility of the hip to do that. You'll end up just rolling your back backwards like I mentioned. So we're going to tighten and lift and slowly back and down. And again, early on, you want to go nice and slow and controlled.

And then maybe later on we can focus on a little bit more of a snap. Now I'm going to get rid of the band here just so I can show you the different movements. But if I was want to vary this up a bit, I can put myself in a more neutral position, as in my femur is in line with my torso and do the clamshell down there. Now, this wouldn't be used very much in jujitsu, except maybe making sure that our hips are nice and strong for a bridge.

You sort of see how my hips would be in this position. And if you want, I could even do a clamshell in this position while I'm doing a bridge. Now, similarly, going the opposite direction, and this is the one I think is very, very important, is I play a very tight bottom guard game. And so I need to make sure that my hips are nice and strong in this position so they don't just get smashed down and pinned.

And I can also start to invert and get up and over. So I like to do clamshells with my knee very close to my chest and nothing changes. It's just that it's way harder. So we're going to get into this scenario and do like, again, a little butterfly with the band around our knees.

And you should feel that right in the back part of your lateral part of your bum there. OK, so that's number one, the clamshell. Number two is we're going to do a sideline leg raise. Now, when I was in school, I was taught to do leg raises to strengthen the glute mede with my leg being right underneath me.

So parallel with my torso, my foot pulled up and heel turned up or toes turned down. And I even prescribed that for years, but it's actually wrong. You can feel why it's wrong because when I pull up on my foot, you can feel every muscle in your leg tighten. And that means that we're utilizing all these other muscles instead of our glute mede.

And so we don't want to do that. So number one rule is we're always going to have a pointed foot. And then we also want to start to bend the hip because not very much happens in sports with your legs right underneath you, especially not in Jiu Jitsu. So we want to have a bend in our bottom knee and our top hip flexed about 30 degrees.

We then raise and lower our leg a small amount, always maintaining a pointed foot. And if you feel the foot starts to migrate into a dorsiflex position, you're done because you're cheating. OK, so again, 30 degrees raise and lower. You might want to start slow early on and then we can start to again go a little bit faster as you get going.

And as you get more advanced into it, I want you to start to get into a more flexed position. So this is about like a 60 degree bend. And notice my knees even bent. I don't care.

It doesn't matter. Your knees are bent in sport. So we want to just focus on the angle of our femur relative to our torso, making sure we've got a pointed foot and again, raise and lower. And then I can get up into a 90 degree, which I again recommend if you're someone who plays a lot of these deep inverted guards.

Notice that I'm pushing laterally as I go to invert. And that's where you get to. You can do some fun stuff, but you have to have the prerequisite strength to do that. Now, the last piece of the puzzle here is looking at proper hip flexibility.

Everybody thinks that when we're stretching hips, that the number one thing, if I said to you, stretch your hips, most people, I shouldn't say everyone, most people will go into this figure four position and pull up on the hips, much like this. Right. So I'm laying on my back and I'm stretching my hips this way. This actually was designed to help yoga practitioners get into the lotus position.

You know, where we're here and we bring this foot up here and we sit like this. That's what that stretch was made for. It is not made to stretch the butt muscles. It's actually a hip torque.

I am torquing the hip into external rotation. And this is fantastic. If you're trying to get flexible for things like rubber guard or anything like that, that's great. But that's not what we're trying to do in this scenario.

We are not hip torquing, which we can get into later. There's lots of great ways to get external rotation range back to help with, again, things like buggy chokes and all sorts of tense planets, rubber guard stuff. In any case, what we want to focus on here is not having our knee out here. We want our knee in line with our midline or over our belly button.

So what it should look like is here. And then I'm pulling. OK, this is the location and I can play with it a bit once I kind of figure it out. But again, knee over belly button and the intensity comes with pulling the foot like this, much like if you were ready to set up a triangle.

OK, so I'm going to lay on my back here and show you is that it actually is a cross midline. And that's a very good stretch. And you'll feel it right underneath here. The exact same location, shockingly, that you would get when I was doing the clam shells.

OK, so I highly recommend you can play both of them. You know, if I like to get this hip torque and I want to work on getting this hip torque up here, that's fantastic. But if you're trying to stretch out your butt muscles from doing all this work of clam shells and leg grades and just making sure that you've got general flexibility, I want to make my knee over my belly button and then I'm going to pull my ankle towards my opposite shoulder. OK, I'll show you a different angle here like this, not out here across midline.

OK, so that now covers looking at hip strength and mobility. And obviously we're going to make it a little bit more challenging, but these are the fundamental things that have to have. You have to have this checkmarked when you're trying to recover from a back injury. You need spinal flexion and control, spinal extension and control, thoracic rotation and control and hip mobility and control.

I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope you have a fantastic day. I'll see you on the mat soon, preferably without any back pain. Have a good one.