How to Stop Your Hips From Hurting During Ab Rollouts

I program the ab roll as often as I can.

It’s a very effective, very challenging ab exercise that achieves incredible results in a very short period of time.

But the other day a client stopped after her 2nd rep, and looked up at me with a cocked smile and told me that it was hurting her hips.

She doesn’t have a history of hip problems, and said her hips were only feeling weird on the back end of the movement- when the roller is coming back towards her body.

This is pretty common. It’s fairly easy for your hip flexors to take over this movement- but there’s an easy way we can prevent that from happening.

When your hamstrings are fully flexed it’s anatomically impossible for your hip flexors to “fire” or “flex”- whichever word you prefer.

So in order to stop hip discomfort during the ab roll, we needed to engage her hamstrings.

The best way to do that is with a medicine ball.

All we did was take a medicine ball, put it between her feet and her butt and had her squeeze the heck out of the ball while she performed the exercise.

Squeezing her feet towards her butt made her hamstrings work as hard as they possibly could, and while that happened she felt no weird pain in her hips.

Voila!

Here’s how you can do it too:

I hope this helped.

You can work with me 1 on 1. Click here.

You can try JaxFit out for only $199. Click here.

Patrick Henigan

Pat Henigan is the owner of Jacksonville Fitness Academy in North Florida. He’s been published in Reader’s Digest, Shape and is a regular guest on News4Jax and writes for Jacksonville Magazine.

He’s been in the trenches coaching since 2010 and has coached MLS players, internationally capped South American Soccer players, SNL Cast Members and multiple Fortune 500 CEOs.

https://www.henigan.io
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