To start, if your pain is worse when sitting slouched and pulling up on the underside of a chair, or with bending movements and lifts like picking up objects from the ground, or especially deadlifting, your pain can be categorized as a flexion intolerance, often due to a disc bulge or herniation.

And for a lot of people, especially if you have an irritated disc, you're pulling into a lot of spinal flexion and just irritating something that's already very sensitized.

And that's because external rotation occurs both in the early ranges of hip flexion and deep, as well as terminal hip extension.

We have flexion here.

The movement pattern I use with flexion and extension is again very similar to what I'm doing in the bumps.

Especially the direction of your dorsal flexion, the upward movement of your foot towards your shinbone.

This is your unique bone structure determining the limit of your backbend Now that we've seen how compression works in the spine, let's move on to a different kind of stretch For example, a wall stretch Lie on your back with your legs up against the wall as if you were making a split As you let your legs open out to the side, you'll feel tension in the muscles of the inside of your legs Particularly the adductors But if you feel a hard stop on the outside of your hips where the femur meets the pelvis, that's compression Also pay attention whether you feel any differences between the right and left side It's common for people to have subtle differences in muscle tension or bone shape If you only feel the stretch in your adductors and not compression, that's again perfectly fine It just means you haven't hit your bone limit yet and you have potential for stretching Try this exercise and notice what you feel, especially when comparing the left and right side Lastly, let's try hip flexion with a bent knee Try pulling your knee towards your chest with your leg bent In this position, you'll probably feel more tension in the back of your hip or glutes But as you keep pulling your knee closer, you will eventually reach a point where your movement stops due to compression This is where the head of the femur meets the pelvis Just like with the wall stretch, compare the right and left sides There may be differences in how each side feels One side might reach compression before the other Take some time to play around with the position of your femur and notice where the restriction is coming from If you don't encounter compression, that means you haven't reached your bone limit yet and you have more room to stretch If you do feel compression, don't be discouraged It's your body's way of showing you your limits and understanding this will help you to move more safely and effectively in your practice Remember, whether it's tension or compression, learning to feel the difference will help you to stop fighting against your body and start working with it Before we wrap up for today, I want to give credit where credit is due This knowledge about tension and compression wasn't discovered by me It was pioneered by Paul Grilly, who's a yin yoga teacher and a master of his art If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking out his website He has a lot of images of human bones that will show you exactly what we are talking about today And it will give you an even clearer understanding of these concepts I want to thank you for your time today and I hope you enjoyed this video and you will benefit from it If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments You can support the channel by subscribing or sharing or liking And of course, if you want to, follow me on Instagram or check out my store Until next time, here in the Anatomy Lab Anatomy of the Body

This one is going to be looking at articulating and rolling through the spine, so spinal flexion, also strengthening and lengthening the hamstrings.

and you're going to start to do extension-type exercises as well as, on your back, doing flexion-type exercises.

There's a combination of rotation, then you've got right wrist flexion, left wrist extension, and we can combine the two.