If you want to run faster, run for longer and avoid injury then stop what you’re doing and watch this video.
When you’re done you can find out more about why standard methods don’t work and what you can do instead with my FREE “3 Secrets the Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know About Fixing Your Own Knee Pain” here
If you haven’t got time to watch the video – here’s the transcription:
00:00 How Toxic IT Bands Can Poison Your Running. Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with a video for everybody who wants to run faster, run for longer and avoid injury. So, first of all, I want to help you understand why your IT Bands feel tight, how that’s going to impact your running, and then, how the next common steps happen. So first of all, let’s explain to you how IT Bands get tight. All right? So I’m just gonna stand up here. The IT Band, for those of you who don’t use terminology like that is literally just the outside of your thigh down here. We’re not going to get into technicalities. It’s just confusing and stops people moving forwards and we don’t want that. So, the IT Band is just the outside of your thigh and it gets tight when the inside of your thigh gets too short.
00:52 That gets too tight, so it turns your leg bone inwards like this, or it just pulls your pelvis across to one side and the insides of you thighs get really tight. They rotate your leg bones inwards, and that stretches your IT Bands down the outside here. And that’s why it feels tight. Now the impact that has on your running is that your hips can’t move sideways. And you might wonder why moving sideways is important for running, but it’s absolutely paramount. And the reason for that is because when you’re running, your centre of gravity needs to be over your base of support. Now what do I mean by that? I mean your hips need to move sideways when you pick one foot up off the ground so that your body, your centre of gravity is over your foot. If it isn’t over your foot, if it’s on the inside of your foot, then all of this down the inside of your leg has to work super hard to hold you in a position for long enough so that you can lift your leg and put it in front of you and move to the next foot.
02:02 So if your body is having to work super hard on the inside of your thigh, it’s gonna push your arch flat to the floor. That’s going to make you feel like you’ve got overpronation, if you’ve heard that term before, or fallen arches. It’s going to increase the amount of tightness through your adductors and that’s gonna reduce your stride length. If your adductors won’t lengthen, they lengthen in this direction as well as this direction. So if they won’t lengthen in this direction, it’s going to shorten your stride length it’s going to limit the amount of trunk rotation you have. So that means your elbows will go sideways and all of these things will contribute to you being slowed down. So when your hips can travel sideways, it makes it much, much easier and much less effort for your body to balance you, and the communication between your foot and your brain is very fast.
03:01 And what we have is elastic recoil because this is lengthening as your body is shifting sideways. So your body is lengthening here, is relaxing in here. And that means that when you pick your foot up and move forward, you get the opposite happening here, which gives you free energy and will help you to run faster. So we want less effort through your adductors. The insides of your thighs down here are we want lengthening through here, which it can’t do if your leg is rotated inwards. So the most common next step for dealing with tight it bands is to deal with them directly. But if we continue to do this and deal with the symptom rather than the cause, then we will increase the tightness over a period of time, which gradually will lead to injury. So if you have IT Band Syndrome is literally describing where the pain is just on the outside of the knee.
04:02 Down here, you could have pain on the inside of the knee. Here, you could have pain anywhere. But if you want to find out how to really deal with that new pain and prevent that knee pain really quickly, really simply then go ahead and grab my 3 Secrets the Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know About Fixing Your Own Knee Pain, FREE video. Just go and grab it. There’s the link in the description there. It will help you to prevent pain. It will help you to run faster. It will help you to get rid of any pain you might have already, all sorts of stuff. Go and grab that free video. Now, don’t forget to let me know how you get on in the comments below. So thanks for watching. And if you like this video, make sure you comment below, up, down, sideways, wherever you need to comment. Share this video with your friends, tag your friends who’ve got tight IT Bands in the comments. Thanks very much for watching and I’ll see you again next time.