Hinging! One of the 5(ish) critcal movements that all strength and functional coaches program regularly. When performing hinges, we are looking at developing our posterior side muscles, mainly our hamstringes and glutes while using our erectors and upper back to maintain spinal integrity.
We want to focus on a few things during our hinge type movements. We will start from the feet and work our way up.
- Keep your feet rooted.
- Grip the ground with your toes and keep those heels flat!
- Keep your shins vertical or almost vertical and keep hips back at the bottom of the movement.
- When hinging, we are loading our hamstrings primarily. If we do not shoot our hips back, we end up making our erectors (our back) the primary mover and that is no good! We do this by maintaing almost vertical or vertical shins and by reaching our glutes back behind us.
- Use your glutes to return to standing!
- When returning to a standing position, think about driving your hips forward via your glutes. SQUEEZE them hard at the top!
- Maintain a large chest and a flat back throughout the entire movement.
- We want to keep our back flat – we do this by keeping our chest big to maintain upper back integrity!
- Maintain a neutral spine in the cervical region.
- When standing straight up and down, look forward, when looking down, look down. Keep your neck in line with your spine as it moves through space.
When moving to single side hinges, there are a few more thinks to focus on!
- Focus on keeping your hips flat!
- Do not let the hip that disconnected from the floor open (rotate)! We end up taking stress off the hamstring of the connected leg and lose the purpose of the drill!
- Focus on keeping your shoulders square!
- Do not let the far sided shoulder from the connected foot to the ground rotate as well! We went to think as if we are having both feet on the ground!