If you are into athletic activities, you might be familiar with some common injuries that happen to people like you. Of course, nobody is perfect, but if you exercise properly, you drastically reduce the potential for injury. At the same time, you might find yourself hurt with a hip flexor injury and that can put you out of the game for a period of time. There are certain signs and symptoms of an injury to this area of the body. The hip flexor muscles are the ones that allow you to move your knee up toward your head or to bend at the waist. If you use these muscles on a regular basis or you do not use them much at all, you could be in for an injury of some sort.
Dealing with the Injury
First of all, there are symptoms to a hip flexor tear. You may see bruising on the thigh or the hip if the injury is deep and serious. You will have trouble moving the leg and doing activities such as dancing, walking, running or martial arts. As a matter of fact, if you do any of these things on a regular basis, especially running, sprinting, martial arts, or dancing, you are more prone to such injuries. You will need to consult a muscle and skeleton expert to find the right solutions. There are a number of stretches that you can learn that will help the injury to heal. For the most part, you will need to rest and take it easy on the running and jumping, since those are activities that really strain the hip flexor muscles.
Avoiding the Injury
One thing is for sure and that is, if you injure a hip flexor muscle, you will certainly feel all the motions that involve that muscle group. It will be painful to move and over the counter painkillers may or may not help so much. Ideally, you will need to stretch and strengthen the hip flexor muscles before any type of workout. There are some stretches you can learn that will minimize the risk for injury to this area. One thing you will want to do is stretch all the leg muscles such as the quadriceps and hamstrings since those are supporting muscles for the hip flexor muscles. You will need to be sure that you stretch before any serious physical activity. If you tend to be sedentary, you will want to do these stretches more often and walk more for exercise.
Getting Better
As stated, you will need to get some rest and limit your activities when you have a hip flexor injury. You will need to get some help and that is the main thing. When you find an expert on the muscles of the body, they will have the knowledge and experience that is needed to guide you in the right direction. When you do that, you can experience some real recovery in a relatively short period of time.
