How to get mobile hips

Today on Dad Strength

• How to get more mobile hips

• Get it wrong to help your kids get it right

• Let’s stop pretending

• A book, a quote, a dad joke

No audio edition today, friends. Camp Dad is in full swing.

How to get more mobile hips

If you have knee or low-back pain, the answer may have to do with your hips. To understand why, imagine a taking an elastic band and dunking a small section in concrete and letting it harden.

As you move and stretch the band around, the stress points aren’t going to be in the middle of the concrete, they’ll be next to its edges, in the areas that are forced to move more to compensate for the inelasticity of the concrete. When and if the band snaps, it will be right next to the concrete.

Now, let’s imagine that your hips are too stiff to take you from point A to point B. Something’s gotta give. In this case, this means the low-back or knees.

Is poor hip mobility a guarantee that you’ll have issues? No. Thankfully. But if you have stiff hips, consider working on them to be best practice. Personally, I have plans to keep up with my kid for as long as possible, so a bit of maintenance only makes sense.

Wondering where to begin or how to tailor things? I’ve got you covered. Join me here for a free session on the evening of July 7.

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Get it wrong to help your kids get it right

I was reading a pre-print of a journal article about how acting in an unexpected way toward an object enhances infant learning. It reminded me a method that changed the way I coach. In this one, the coach teaches a deliberately incorrect and inefficient way to do things. Kind of the opposite of what you might expect, right? So, what happens? And why is this actually useful?

The idea is that the error is exaggerated to the point of obvious wrongness. Where does this point live? For advanced exercisers, it’s probably going to be a tiny detail. For new exercisers, it might have to be totally absurd. Either way, once the exerciser feels what’s going on, they will most likely self-correct.

If that doesn’t happen, I show them the correct way to do things and it is such a clear upgrade that it sticks. What can I say? Human brains are fun.

I bring this whole thing up to suggest the following:

The next time you want to step in to show your kid how it’s done, consider showing them (with a straight face) how it isn’t done. If you do an absurd enough job, you’ll enhance their learning — and have more fun doing it.

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Let’s stop pretending

I’m a pretty big cyclist, so visiting Amsterdam was a revelation. It is an incredibly bikeable city. I then went on to find other cities in the Netherlands were even more bike-friendly. So, while the museums were great, I was most impressed with the urban planning. I just kept thinking, “We could have this.” And by this, I mean zero visible congestion, the ability to get anywhere efficiently, lower traffic fatalities, better health, and cleaner air.

Here in Toronto, we fight back and forth about bike lanes, which have become a political wedge issue instead of a pragmatic urban design issue. It’s just one example of the fake arguments we have to have every day.

• Do more bikes create problems or solve them?

• Do we have the ability to affect the climate — and should we act accordingly?

• Should shareholder value shape how we deliver services for the common good?

• Will giving sociopaths access to huge amounts of money and power work out well for everyone who isn’t them?

Gosh. It’s a real mystery. Let’s stop pretending that we need to have these arguments. That they’re in good faith. Or that they’re anything but a distraction tactic. Specifically, let’s stop pretending that the people arguing against them have any kind of clear ethos or internal cohesion whatsoever. It will save us all a lot of time.

What I’m reading/watching:

Psychopolitics:Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han

A quote

A dad joke

What time did Sean Connery get to Wimbledon?

Tennish

Take care of yourself, man!

Geoff Girvitz
Father, founder, physical culturist
dadstrength.com

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