Stuck in front of a pc all day? Spending a lot of time parked in your desk chair can trigger parts of your muscles to relax and deactivate-which doesn’t necessarily sound like a very bad thing, except that with time it can result in tight hips.
Excessively tight hips can have an effect on your workouts as well as your love life (yikes). Weightlifters with tight hips aren’t able to find a pleasant, deep squat, and?runners get a shorter stride along with a slower pace. In the bedroom, tight hips can limit your flexibility while having sex, and also the number of positions you and your spouse can try.
This 10-minute yoga flow made to open your hips may be exactly what people need in our lives. In the video above, yoga instructor Chloe Kernaghan, the co-founder of New York studio Sky Ting, demonstrates a series of moves that will help with your flexibility, movement, and luxury.
Kernaghan starts the yoga flow using the reclined pigeon pose, which warms up the hips and works the outer thighs. She encourages attempting to pull your knee closer to your chest, which will help you receive a deeper stretch within the outer seam from the opposite hip. “If the hips are super tight, you’re welcome to take some small rocking action from to left, but sometimes staying in stillness and just taking some deep breaths is plenty to start to spread out up,” says Kernaghan.
She then moves to a cross-legged seat, and informs us that we eventually want ankles and knees stacked. When the hips feel tight in this position, she recommends utilizing a block or blanket. Kernaghan points out that “hips can be so different between the right and left sides of the body,” and informs us to pay attention to the difference, and what’s going on within our physical space.
Later Kernaghan demos a lizard pose, and explains it’s good to rock back and forth within this position to obtain the thigh bones deeper to their own sockets. She concludes the flow by having us lie on our backs, to allow the heat that we’ve conjured through our hips to produce into the floor.
