Exercise of the Week: Learning to Hip Hinge

One of the more difficult movements to teach a "newbie" to strength training is the hip hinge. We've talked about the importance of these movements in people who may have cranky knees or other issues that prevent squatting or lunging motions.

It's an important movement to understand as it serves as a precursor to an entire category of exercises for most trainees. Any RDL, deadlift, rack pull and even single leg deadlift variations all require proper hip hinging in order to protect the spine and ensure correct timing and sequencing in the pattern to optimize strength development.

I actually remember my first attempt at teaching the pattern to a high school athlete back in 2007. Another young coach and I spent a solid 10 frustrating minutes trying to turn a half squat into a proper RDL. Luckily since then I've gained a little experience and have found a few tricks along the way to help speed along the process. Here's one...

Kneeling Hip Hinge

By getting down on two knees, we prevent the possibility of driving the knees forward at all as you might in a squat. The only way to get down is to push the hips back. The one issue you might run into is keeping the torso vertical and pulling the shoulders back along with the hips when in reality you should see the shoulders come forward (with a neutral spine, of course) as the hips go back.

This might not seem to exciting from a strength building standpoint but it's important to get the patterning down before adding any serious load. In the meantime you can use various bridging variations to fill in the strength gaps while you're learning the new movement.

Happy Deadlifting!