ROLL WITH THE PROS: HIP PAIN
Dr. Marc Legere
Published February 10, 2021 at 6:00pm AST.
Hey, it's doctor Mark and I'm here again with Vertiball and today I wanna talk to you runners or walkers out there who maybe struggling with hip pain or pain going down the side of the leg.
Some of the people who might have researched it, you know that I'm probably talking about issues with your IT band or a muscle called the TFL. Now these muscles, or this fascia, can be problematic if there's any type of change or differences with your gates and specifically what people often have problems with is if it opens up when you're running, the TFL or the IT band can become painful and it can become quite painful for some of you longer distance runners
Some of the things people have used in the past to help these are foam rollers or even those running sticks. Those are the sticks that have like a little plastic tubes that go in it that you can roll down your leg. Those are great, but there's problems, or shortcomings, with them in my opinion. The foam rollers are really hard to control and are often too painful and the sticks are
often not enough. So the Vertiball is gonna solve a lot of those problems and allows you to put as little pressure as you want or as much pressure as you want to. Because it's so easy to use, I'd say make this part of your daily routine when you are a runner or a walker.
So, to use the Vertiball you simply wanna slip off to the ball from the unit by pressing down. Then you wanna open it up if you wanna attach it. So I'm gonna attach it to my dry wall here and I'm gonna put it right about where my hip is going to be. Maybe if I find my front hip bone or my side thigh bone here. You wanna feel your side thigh bone and just move a little bit to the front and that's the approximate area where I want the ball to be. So I'm just gonna put it against the wall and I'm gonna drop the ball back into it and now that it's nice and stable and firm on here what I wanna do is I wanna try to get my hip lean against here so kind of the magic area when we're talking about where the TFL or tensor fasciae latae sits is kind of behind your front, hip bone and kind of a little bit in front and above your side thigh bone and that's where we wanna start so we can kind of lean against the wall and we're gonna take our leg and we wanna kind of bring it across and then we wanna lean into the vertiball and we can kind of bring up our hips up and down if we wanna make it more intense, we simply kind of step a little bit further away from the wall and now support ourselves less with our arms so we can really just lean in and we wanna come up and down. That's where the fibers of that of that muscle, that TFL, sits.
We wanna work with the IT band. It's a really long muscle that's gonna go just down below the knee and for that we wanna kind of work up and down so we wanna roll the ball up and down now if you need to make it lower we're simply gonna unattach the unit, get it to drop down, reattach it, drop the ball back in and now we can go a little bit down further against the leg. Again, If I wanna make more pressure, I'm just gonna get a little bit away from it and just put more weight against it and then again because that ball rolls in there, It's just gonna be a nice roll all-around in those areas and you can make this part of your cool down routine. when you're done your run or your walk. It can be a little intense so if it is, just back off a little bit or if you're one of those people who likes a little bit more of a firm, contact just lean a little bit more in.
So with the Vertiball, and for those people who are suffering, or struggling with IT band or TFL issues, I'd say, give it a try. It works for the runners that I recommend it for and hopefully it can help with your needs.