Whats Up With

My Hip Flexors?

by Jonathan FitzGordon
www.CoreWalking.com

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Hi, Im Jonathan FitzGordon. Im the creator

of the CoreWalking Program. Today Im here
to talk to you about hip flexors and hip flexor
issues that hinder a lot of people.
Ive been a yoga teacher for almost fifteen
years and my basic story is I began doing
advanced yoga almost immediately, got injured pretty
quickly, and ended up having a number of knee
surgeries before I stepped back a little bit to ask myself
what am I going to do to keep practicing and stop
getting injured? Fortunately the surgeries did take
care of the problems I was having with my knees.
After finally getting back to my yoga practice one
of my teachers asked me what I was doing to prevent
a fourth surgery. This was the light bulb over the head
moment that unfortunately took three surgeries to
reach.
From that day forward I started to learn about the
body, anatomy and most specifically to learn how to
build my body in a way to avoid these recovering
injuries. One of the things I looked at in terms of my
teaching was how I could help people take yoga off the
mat into their daily life. Thats when I began looking at
and studying walking.
Walking is a fundamental act that we all do but
we also happen to take for granted. Not many people
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think that they dont walk correctly, in fact, not many

people think about the way they walk at all. I started to
develop a technique to teach people how to walk as we
were designed. As it turned out, this technique has had
a huge amount of success with back pain, knee pain,
foot pain, hip pain, all different kinds of issues that are
troubling people in their daily lives.
The CoreWalking program was born and soon
began to help people with problems as far reaching as
migraines and bunions. Sometimes I am even surprised
by the successes we have with the program.
I make no promises. I know that changing the way
we walk can help a lot of people, but one of the things
Im telling everyone who either buys our products
or comes to see me privately is that you have to fix
yourselfno one is out there who can truly fix you
other than yourself.
That doesnt mean you dont want to go to a
chiropractor or get Rolfed or get massaged, you want
to do all these thingswhatever your resources will
allowbut it is essential that you make changes in
order to work with these practitioners to facilitate
the healing that you seek. Thats the crux of the Core
Walking Program. I guide people to change their
patterns, to heal themselves over time.
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Its not so difficult. Its nothing more than

repetition. The essence of the CoreWalking Program
is neuromuscular patterning through repetition. Do
something over and over again and it will start to
change. Create a walking pattern that suits your body
and your patterns will change and you might find that
you can get out of pain.
Lets return to the subject of hip flexors. A lot of
people have issues with their hip flexors. As a yoga
teacher, I come across people with hip flexor issues an
inordinate amount of the time.
A flexor is anything that brings one body part closer
to another. One way we can visualize the body is the
front has the main number of flexors and the back of
the body has a large number of extensor muscles.
There are three main hip flexors in the body:

One is the sartorius, the longest muscle in the

body. It begins from the outer hip, coming forward and
down to attach to the inside of the knee.
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 The second is the psoas major, which I often

refer to as the main hip flexor of the body. Though
there is an esoteric argument to be made that the psoas
is not in fact a flexor. The psoas does lift your leg up
from a standing position so for arguments sake were
going to refer to it as a hip flexor.
The third hip flexor is the rectus femoris, one of
the four quadriceps muscles. The quadriceps connect
the legs to the pelvis, but interestingly, only one of
these four muscles actually connects to the hip. The
other three are connected onto the leg bone.
When I talk about hip flexor issues, I am most often
referring to the tendon of rectus femoris, the
only muscle connecting the quadriceps to
the pelvis. If you are one of the people I am
referring to, problems with this hip flexor
the rectus femoris tendoncan manifest in
many different ways.
For example, lets say you are doing a Pilates mat
class and lying on your back you are asked to lift both
feet up off of the floorthe tendon of rectus femoris
might engage like a taut steel cable at the top of your
thigh.
Or in yoga you are doing boat pose also known as
navasanawhen you lean back and lift the legs up to
create a V shape the action of extending the legs out
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into the V creates that same kind of engagement or

popping of the hip flexor. Very often, once this tendon
engages and turns on, it is very difficult to shut it off.
This can happen to people for a number of different
reasonstight hamstrings, tight gluteal muscles and
weak adductors as well as poor tone in the abdominal
muscles. One or all of these factors in conjunction can
lead to this beguiling issue.
But the main reason that so many people suffer with
hip flexor issues, is the way we walk, stand and sit.
Even if you exercise daily for more than an hour a day
this doesnt compare to the time you spend walking,
standing and sitting.

Pelvic alignment determines much of how our

body works. If the pelvis is well aligned everything
above it and below it can work effectively. When the
pelvis is misaligned it is difficult to get the most out of
the bodys potential. Our patterns tend to be the same
across all spectrums of our life. The way you walk,
stand and sit tend to follow a similar path and from
my perspective that is the path of a tucked pelvis and
forward leaning legs.
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A tucked pelvis and forward leaning legs go hand

in hand. If the pelvis is properly aligned the legs are
usually situated correctly under the hips. But if the
pelvis is tucked or the legs are leaning forward in any
way we will be putting stress on the quadriceps and
specifically the rectus femoris tendon constantly.
My take on walking, standing and sitting is
that almost everyone tucks the pelvis pushing the
thighs forward, stressing out the rectus femoris
tendon for large chunks of the day. Our bones
are supposed to hold us up and the muscles
move us. When the femur bones move forward
against the front rim of the pelvis weight transfer
through the bones is interrupted and the rectus
femoris is unfortunately called upon to hold us
up (along with the iliofemoral ligament).
To reiterate this key point, our bones hold us up,
our muscles move us, and the nerves tell the muscles
to move the bones. And when you stack your bones
correctly, a great deal of the bodys muscles can relax
so that the bones can hold you up. But when we dont
stand correctly we tend to overwork the muscles.
Hyperextension of the knees is
another postural misalignment that
impacts the quadriceps and rectus
femoris. When the shin bones move
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backwards into hyperextension, which tends put too

much pressure on the ligaments at the back of the
knee, the femur bones of the upper leg angle forward
to compensate for the backwards movement of the
lower leg.
This postural misalignment which leads to poor
movement and sitting patterns is what puts so much
pressure on the rectus femoris for the majority of
time that we are walking, sitting and standing. And
then, when you go to do an exercise and it pops up
screaming for mercy, its not the exercise thats making
that happen, its our habitual patterning of the way we
sit, stand and walk.
Change Your Walk, Change Your Life
These hip flexor problems can be helped by
changing the way you walk and changing the way you
stand. A great deal of lower back, hip, groin and other
pain occurs due to the strain put on the lower spine
because the pelvis is tucked under and the thigh bones
are leaning forward.
My favorite muscle is the psoas and the psoas is
one of only three muscles that connect the legs to the
spine (piriformis and gluteus maximus are the others).
When the psoas is well aligned, the legs will be under
your hips and the psoas can engage correctly. When
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this happens the psoas does a lot of work to hold the

spine up naturally and the strain on the quadriceps
and the rectus femoris tendon in particular, is reduced.
This happens because the psoas is
like a pulley system in the body. The
psoas attaches on the back half of the
inner thigh, it comes forward to cross
the rim of the pelvis and then it moves backwards
again to attach on the lumbar spine. The hipbone is the
pulley and the psoas is the rope.
When the psoas is situated correctly there is a
magical thing that happens in your body called
reciprocal inhibition, which means for one muscle
to lengthen, another must shorten. When the psoas
engages as designed, it pulls the lumbar spine forward,
shortening the psoas, allowing the spinal muscles at
the back to lengthen up creating a great deal of support
for the spine on top of the pelvis.
When we tuck the pelvis under and sink
the thighs forward we take the psoas out of its
pulley action. When the pelvis is tucked the
femurs push forward into the rectus femoris
tendon. When that happens, the lower
back shortens, the lumbar spine collapses,
the muscles of the spinethe quadratus
lumborum, the erector spinea, the multifidusdont
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have any tone if the psoas isnt doing its functional

work to keep the thighs back and get the spine to
elevate.
When all of those negatives occurthe psoas not
working, back muscles losing tonewe sink more and
more forward into this rectus femoris tendon, among
other things. Those other things include tightening
of the hamstrings, gluteus maximus, and calves,
kyphosis of the upper back and forward head posture.
It is hard to pick which of these things is the worst but
the rectus femoris tendon bearing so much of the stress
of walking, sitting and standing badly has a profound
impact.
Changing the way you walk can have an immediate
effect on the way you sit and stand. I often describe
the CoreWalking Program as a posture program in
disguise because changing your walk will change your
posture. I think changing the way we stand is one of
the hardest things to try and accomplish. It is much
easier to change walking patterns and that will carry
over into sitting, standing, sleeping and any other
movement you do.
Putting less stress on the quadriceps and the
rectus femoris in particular has far reaching benefits.
Learning to walk differently can immediately begin
this transformation. As the quadriceps release, all of
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the back body muscles that I mentioned before get to

lengthen and soften.
I teach that most people walk and stand in a way
that shortens the back body and lengthens the front
body. Lets return to the front body as the flexors
quadriceps, psoas, rectus abdominis (sit-ups muscle).
And the back body as extensorsgluteus maximus,
hamstrings, erector spinea, multifidus.
Though this might seem strange, if you buy into what
I am saying about how most people stand and walk we
are making our flexors extend and our extensors flex.
We want to reverse this. We want to balance the front
and back instead of leaning backwards habitually.
Leaning backwards with forward leaning thighs puts
way too much pressure on the rectus femoris tendon.
We want to learn to stand upright and walk forward to
relieve a lot of the stress on the hip flexors especially if
they have caused you trouble in the past.
When the legs move back in space, when the leg
bone gets under the hip and the pelvis, taking the inner
thighs back, allowing the psoas to work as a pulley, we
take a lot of the stress off of the rectus femoris tendon.
It is not that hard to do. If you were to start walking
differently today and walk this new way over and over
again for the next ten weekswhich is how long the
CoreWalking program takes (two weeks per lesson)
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when youre done you will be living in your bones,

with your muscles free to move you and your nerves
will be freer to tell your muscles to move your bones.
As a result, a lot of the back pain that you suffer from,
a lot of the knee pain, hip pain, groin pain, neck pain,
and even headaches, can possibly all start to go away
simply from creating more space for this quadriceps
tendon, the rectus femoris tendon.
And that is just one of the many things that can be
changed by learning to walk better, learning to stand
and by checking out the Core Walking Program.

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