Do This One Stretch Every Morning if You Have Tight Hips

If you spend a lot of time sitting (and if you're like most American adults, you do), adding a single stretch to your morning can open your hips, help you stand and walk taller — and even reduce back pain. You've just got to send a few extra minutes each a.m. with your couch.

No, not sitting on it: By using the sofa to do a simple, beginner-friendly move called the couch stretch.

Greg Pignataro, CSCS, owner of Never Past Your Prime, has had clients reduce their back pain the first time they did this stretch.

"And they weren't doing it at a particularly crazy level, just at the level of intensity they were ready for," he says. "They got noticeable relief from doing just a minute of the couch stretch."

Most American adults spend a lot of time in a chair: By 2016, the average American adult was sitting for 6.4 hours a day, according to an April 2019 analysis published in ‌JAMA‌. And since COVID-19 hit, we've been sitting even more: A December 2020 study from ‌Preventive Medicine Reports‌ found that 40 percent of U.S. adults sat for 8 or more hours per day.

All that sitting is bad for our health and longevity and is correlated with higher levels of early mortality, according to the Mayo Clinic. But while we're still kicking (or, really, still ‌sitting‌), it's also leading to shortened hip flexors.

The hip flexor is a muscle in the front of your thigh that helps extend your leg. When you stand up and press your hips forward (as you would in a deadlift), your hip flexor lengthens and your hip extends so that your thigh is in line with your torso.

But when you sit a lot, the front hip flexor spends a lot of time in a shortened position. The muscle then gets shorter and can't extend as easily. In a February 2021 study from ‌Musculoskeletal Science & Practice‌, scientists found that people who sat for seven hours or more per day had 6 degrees less hip extension than those who sat less.

"With our modern Western lifestyle, we spend so much time with our hips flexed in a 90-degree position. And our hips become very stiff, and become very uncomfortable," Pignataro says. "And that has a lot of negative implications."

When you can't extend your hip, it's harder to stand up straight, which is why tight hip flexors can impact your posture. They can also mess with how you walk: Shortened front hip flexors can result in a stiffened gait, with limited flexion in the knee, as demonstrated in a small 2016 study on people with osteoarthritis from ‌PLOS ONE‌.

Worst of all, they can cause pain. According to a 2021 research review published in the ‌International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health‌, tight hip flexors can lead to lower back pain and compromise your core's ability to brace.

But there's good news: That same study found that stretching the hip flexors can result in reduced pain, a stronger core and even improvements in athletic performance measures like the vertical jump.

The couch stretch is performed in a half-kneeling position in front of a wall, chair or a couch. Your front foot is flat on the floor, with your knee directly over your toes. Your torso can be upright or slightly bent over, depending on the intensity of the stretch. Your back leg's is knee planted on the floor and your back foot is either against the wall or on top of the couch. The hip of this back leg is the one that's being extended and stretched.

Because of the bent knee position, Pignataro says, the couch stretch does double duty. "The couch stretch puts you into a degree of knee flexion that almost no lift or no field sport puts you," he says. In that position, he says, the quadriceps gets a deep stretch that can make you stronger at the bottom of a very deep squat, for example.

But when you're starting out, you don't want the stretch to be too extreme. Here's how Pignataro suggests doing your first couch stretch.

As you continue to practice this stretch, you will begin to become more comfortable with your torso upright at your chosen distance from the chair or couch. To progress the move at this point, move your planted knee (and thus your body) slightly closer to the couch, Pignataro says. You'll continue this way until you're right in front of it.

"That may be enough for most people," he says. But if you're loving this stretch and want to continue to progress it, you can move your back foot from the couch to the wall.

Your goal will be for your back ankle not to be at a 90-degree angle as it is on the couch, but fully extended — the top of your foot flush against the wall, with your toes pointed to the ceiling.

Be warned, Pignataro says: Against the wall, this stretch is a different beast. So even if you're a master on the couch, you'll basically need to start over when moving to this progression: Keep your knee pretty far from the wall and your torso potentially supported by another chair or coffee table.

Rolling out of bed and diving right into the couch stretch can be a little extreme. Pignataro suggests getting blood flowing into the hip flexors before you start with these two simple warm-up moves. They'll take less than two minutes to do.