Stubbornly Tight Hip Flexors? Quick Test for Femoral Nerve Tension
Stubbornly Tight Hip Flexors? Quick Test for Femoral Nerve Tension
Do you feel like your hip flexors (or quads) are always pretty stiff, even when doing regular, dedicated stretching? What if I told you the culprit may not be your tight muscles at all and no amount of passive lunges and hip stretches would really make a difference?
Time to learn about the role of our good ol’ femoral nerve and how it behaves differently in out stretches than our hip flexors and quad muscles. Because sometimes when we feel like we’ve got stiff hips, it’s actually due to nerve tension, not just tight muscles.
A Quick Refresher: WTF Is Nerve Tension?
I wrote a whole blog post about how to tell if sensations you feel during certain stretches are likely muscle stretches or nerve tension that I suggest you read if this is a totally new-to-you concept. But the important “Cliff Notes” to know would be:
Nerves - unlike our (relatively) elastic muscles - aren’t meant to stretch. Nerves’ natural movement is to “glide” back and forth through our soft tissue, kind of like a loose piece of string being tugged back and forth through a straw.
When nerves can’t slide like they’re supposed to and get put under a lot of tension, they will try to protect themselves by tightening your muscles - which is the opposite of what you want to happen when you’re trying to stretch!
Nerve tension (when a nerve is being tugged too hard) can sometimes lead to obvious sensations like tingling in the extremities (fingers/toes) or feelings of warmth/coldness. But it can also lead to less obviously-nerve-related sensations like simply feeling like a deep stretch or muscle tightness, which can make it challenging to recognize whether the sensations you’re feeling are a muscle stretch (good!) or nerve tension (less productive).
Internet Archive Book Images, Public domain, via Flickr
Your Femoral Nerve and Hip Stretches
Your femoral nerve is one of the major nerves that passes through the front of our hip. Like all major nerves, it starts at our skull, and then runs down our spinal cord, through the front of our hip to the front and inside of our thigh. Positions that can tug this nerve into more tension are things like:
Extending our leg behind our hip (“hip extension”) - this is a big one because this is a position we need for any hip flexor stretch (like lunges and front splits)
Bending the knee (“leg flexion”)
Rounding the back and/or neck (“spinal flexion”)
So how do you know if the sensation you’re feeling in the front of your hip when doing a lunge or a split is a good ol’ muscle stretch, or a bit of nerve tension?
DIY Femoral Nerve Tension Test
Thankfully you can check pretty quickly and easily if you’ve got a bit of tension in your femoral nerve:
Start in a 90/90 lunge with your front knee over your front ankle, back knee on the ground (or on a pillow or yoga block if it needs some support), both knees bent 90 degrees. Keep your torso lifted and slightly tuck your tailbone so you feel a comfortable/light stretch through the front of your back leg hip (in your hip flexors)
Now it’s time to experiment with giving the nerve a bit of a tug and seeing if that changes any of the sensations in the front of your hip! Keeping the position of your pelvis the same (which will ensure we’re not changing the length of the hip flexors at all), tuck your chin towards your chest, then lift your head back up a couple of times. Do you notice any different sensations in the front of your hip when you lower vs. lift your head?
If you didn’t notice any changes in hip sensations when rounding vs. flattening your neck, we can add a bit bigger tug on the nerve by rounding our back. Keeping your tailbone tucked (same pelvic position as above), bring your hands to the front thigh for balance as you tuck your chin towards your chest and round your upper back. Does this make the hip stretch feel a bit more intense? Or is it about the same? If it feels more intense, does it lessen when you then lift your head (look up)?
Try this on the other leg as well - sometimes you may notice different feelings on one side, but not the other
If you noticed a more intense stretching sensation in the front of your hip or thigh when you rounded your neck and/or back, then you’ve probably got a bit of femoral nerve tension! If your hip stretch felt pretty similar throughout, regardless of whatever funkiness you were doing with your head and upper back, odds are you don’t really have any femoral nerve tension on that side.
Important clarification: if you have some nerve tension, that doesn’t mean you have it instead of tight muscles - often both go hand in hand! But what it does mean is you want to help your nerves get to their glide-iest and unstickiest before you do any deep stretches to ensure that your stretching is actually targeting your muscles, and not just tugging on your stuck nerve.
What to Do If You Have Femoral Nerve Tension
The Short-Term Solution: mobilize your femoral nerve! Doing a 10-15 reps of a gentle nerve glide (here are two easy you can choose from) at the beginning of your flexibility training session can help “unstick” the femoral nerve to ensure it’s sliding and gliding like it’s supposed to while you stretch, and not getting stuck in a high tension position while you’re trying to address your muscles.
The Long-Term Solution: strengthen your muscles to support end range positions that typically involve high nerve tension to better support your nerves. For femoral nerve tension, that means strengthening your muscles hip extension: strengthening your hip flexors (and quads!) while they’re in the lengthened position, and strengthening your glutes (and hamstrings!) while they’re in the shortened position.
