Why Your Hips Are Tight & How Yoga Can Help

WHY YOUR HIPS ARE TIGHT & HOW YOGA CAN HELP

Your Hips & Movement

In the back of your body you’ll find the sacrum, the flat broad bone near the end of your spine, nestled in between the two wing-like bones, and your coccyx, or tailbone. If you’ve ever heard someone complain about their “SI joint,” they’re talking about the junction between their sacrum and their illum. The sacrum is part of the spine connecting to the lumbar vertebrae above it and the coccyx below. You won’t find much movement in the joints between the sacrum, tailbone and hips because your upper body depends on the stability of the pelvic girdle for support.

Where you will find movement, is where your upper leg bone, the femur, connects with your hip via a ball-and-socket joint. The hip has a cup-like depression that fits the ball shaped head of the femur. This joint allows your leg to move forward and backward, out to the side and back to your midline and to rotate.

If you’re wearing yoga pants, you’ll have to imagine slipping your hands into the back pockets of your jeans. With your hands in this position you’ll be making contact with your gluteal muscles, three separate muscles layered on top of each other, the gluteus maximus, medius and minimus. While their positions vary, they all roughly attach on the top area of your hip bone with some additional attachments to your sacrum, coccyx, and low back. They travel down and across your hip to the outside of your upper thigh.


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