2 Exercises To Fix IT Band Syndrome & 2 Stretches You Should NEVER Do

Are you looking to treat your IT Band Syndrome at home. In this video today, I’m going to show you two exercises that are key for you to be doing to fix your IT Band Syndrome at home. And I’ll also be showing you two stretches that you should absolutely avoid doing, because it’s going to make your IT Band Syndrome or worse in the long run.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery injections and pain medications.

Now let’s get into the two exercises that you absolutely need to be doing for IT Band Syndrome. The first one is called clams, you’re going to need to lie down on your side to do this, I’m going to show you just like so you can be flat or with your hand under your head like so I’m going to just hold my hand under my head.

But you could put a pillow under your head or just lie like this, what you’ve got to do is target the muscles that are more on the backside of your hip. If you’ve got it Bennett syndrome, you know that your hip is going to be tight here on the front, maybe the outside of your thigh. And usually on the outside of the knee is where people feel it the most.

So you want to avoid using any of those parts that feel painful or tight, you actually want to not feel it there. What you do want to feel is the muscle more in the butt side back here rather than the front of the hip or the outside of the hip. But in the back. And to do that on this climb exercise. You’ve got to keep your legs kind of even with each other well right on top of each other knees softly bend the angle isn’t too important you find out what’s comfortable for you.

Usually a little straighter more than bent is going to be better for specifically for IT Band Syndrome. But then once you’re going to do this is the key part of this clamshell exercises where people do it wrong all the time, you’ve got to roll your hips forward like this, you see how my chest and my hips are kind of coming forward that causes this top knee to stick out past the bottom knee.

What’s usually taught in physical therapy by physical therapists or other people that teach clamshell exercises is to keep your hips even with each other, in other words vertical in this position. And then they’ll teach you to open up your leg like a clamshell exercise is typically done. But what I want you to do is make sure that you feel it back here more in the butt cheek.

So to do that, you’ve got to roll forward just like so you can even put your hand back there kind of like what your back pocket is or would be if you had on pants with pockets, then you’re going to lift up your leg and hold it there you’ve got to hold that’s another important thing, people will typically just come up and down without holding, but you’ve got to come up there and hold it for 10 seconds.

So that you feel it in the back pocket area over here. After about 10 seconds, come on down and repeat that you’ll feel it the first rep or two or a handful of reps, that’s okay, keep going and target the muscle back here where your back pocket would be if you had on passive pockets. And just do it again, take a little rest break every 10 seconds or so.

And I’m looking with my eyes at my kneecaps right here to make sure that my top leg is sticking out more forward than my bottom leg. And it shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t activate this front. If you do feel like this is tightening up on the front, you’re doing something wrong, you got to start over again set up.

You might even need a roll over some people no joke here in the clinic, we’re telling them to bring their chest flat onto the ground and then lift from there just like that. And they can target their butt muscle best from this position. Now how high you lift your knee isn’t as important as that you feel it in the right spot. Actually, what tends to happen is if you go higher, your hips start to roll backwards.

And then you start to use those muscles and I’m telling you not to use the TfL muscle right here that attaches into the IT band, they will feel that pull into their team and into the knee. And that’s going to feed into the problem. So you don’t want to do this exercising correctly, you got to make sure that you fire that bump muscle back here the gluteus medius and Maximus is what we’re trying to fire here.

As far as foot position, you can point your toe up that tends to make it a bit harder you can relax your foot, just make sure that you’re trying to lift that knee keeping it forward here. So the the way to do this, as far as the frequency that the reps and sets, if you got it bent central I would be doing 10 second holds 10 times and then you need to look at doing this multiple times a day.

If it’s severe, I would be doing this every two to three hours while you’re awake and making sure that you get fatigued and even a bit sore if you can back here. At the very least fatigue make sure that you target that butt muscle vacuum. The second exercise that you need to be doing for IT Band Syndrome is butt blasters. And this is another one that’s going to tire out that same spot and you’re but when you were doing that clamshell but it’s a more focused way to do it in a different position.

You’re going to have to stabilize your core a bit better. So I like that because your course to build Your lumbar spine and pelvis stability is really important to make sure that your hip moves well, which translates to good knee motion. And if you’re moving well and you’ve got good strength in those areas, and you should theoretically not have any problems, like IT Band Syndrome, or Runner’s knee is another common name for it.

So let me show you the exercise you’re going to get on all fours. Be on the floor again or your bed, then what you got to do is suck in your abs a bit just stiffen up right here so that you’re more stable, hold that the whole time, then what you’re going to do with one leg is start to straighten it out.

But think about tightening your button, notice my knee is still bent here, I don’t care how straight the knee is, what I care about is the bump muscle right in here is working hard. Once you’ve got your leg tight right here, then what you’ve got to do is begin to turn your knee outwards, while still maintaining your butt tight. So just to show you a slow motion to come up, squeeze up muscle really hard here.

Then turn your knee out and hold it right there for 10 seconds count to 10. And I can tell you it’s already burning right here is blasting that muscle for sure. And it doesn’t matter if your knees straight, it’s actually easier if you bend your knee because it makes your leg longer, which is more effort to control out here.

So if you feel like you need to straighten out your leg to make it more difficult, then do so after about 10 seconds, then bring that leg in and alternate, you should do both sides. Tighten up muscle on the right side. Now then turn your leg out, keep your abs tight and hold it right there for 10 seconds and think about squeezing your butt muscle on the leg that you’re picking up as hard as you possibly can.

After about 10 seconds, come back to the other side and repeat this sorry, let me stabilize my abs here abs tight. Okay, now I feel it. Repeat this 10 times each sides up to 20 reps total. And I would do it along with that clamshell every two to three hours.

If you’re not that severe in your IT Band Syndrome and the pain and irritation that you might be getting on your knee and hip area or on the outside of your thigh, then you probably could get away with doing less of this.

But I would still encourage you to do quite a bit of strengthening here in this area. And realize to this is the first couple of exercises that we give somebody with IT Band Syndrome, we have to progress strength in those glute muscles properly, in order to get them to the point where to get a patient to the point where they’re not thinking about their IT Band Syndrome, it’s not a recurring thing where they truly have cured the problem where they where they have a long term relief, and it’s not coming back every time they go run go Walker just be on their feet for an extended period of time, because that’s when the symptoms will tend to come back.

So you’ve got to increase your strength from these exercises. But these exercises are great starting points that can definitely diminish down the the pain, the discomfort from the IT Band Syndrome. And it can set you up to cure the problem for the long term. Now let me tell you two stretches that you absolutely need to avoid.

Notice, I showed you exercises and now I’m telling you not to do stretches because stretches are rarely ever needed for anything I hardly ever prescribed stretches to anybody. Less than once a year, I can’t even remember the last time I gave somebody a stretch it’s overdone in our culture in our health and fitness world stretches rarely ever need to be done in order to fix a problem. I’m not saying stretching is bad.

It’s okay to stretch from time to time or if you stretch in the morning or you want to stretch here and there. But if you’re stretching with the intensive fixing this it bad problem, I think you’re going to find that it’s not going to fix it, it might give you some temporary relief. There’s more about that in another video that we’ve got, you can check out our channel, subscribe to our channel to make sure you don’t miss out on any of these videos.

There’s two types of stretches and they’re done in different positions. The first one is called an abduction stretch. an abduction stretch is just moving your legs inwards to stretch out the outer side of your head. The opposite would be an abduction where you move your feet outwards and open up your legs.

But typically when stretching out the IT band people look to bring the leg across the body to the other side of the body. There’s standing versions of this there’s sitting versions and lying down versions. Let me show you some of the most commonly done ones.

One that is recommended often by physical therapists is lying down on the edge of a bed or a table. And if you’re trying to stretch out this, IT band on this side and stretching out your leg you’re holding on to the table and just letting your leg dangle this way.

Notice how my leg is coming across my body and you should feel a stretch all the way up in your torso but over through here. This is okay to do. If you’re doing it lightly and they’re standing versions of this, let me just show you that real quick.

People will use the cross their legs so my right legs crossed over my left leg, and I’m standing on my feet like this. And then they’ll stretch out their body this way, or even lean over quite a bit. But call this a ballerina stretch, or a half moon stretch is another way to yoga move as well.

And they’re trying to create a stretch to that TfL muscle in the IT band. These are all different types of abduction stretches, they might provide some short term relief, which is cool, if you’re looking to take to not take pain medications, or to maybe skip out on visiting the doctor for injection, maybe you’ll get some relief.

But if you’re doing this on a regular basis with the intention of fixing your IT band problem, you’re going to not resolve it, it’s going to actually get worse, there’s something called a stretch reflex inside of our muscles that makes you want to contract your muscle when you put it there big stretch and actually makes the muscles stronger over time.

You won’t feel it if you stretch once or twice or you know, a handful of times. But if you’re consistently stretching multiple times a day for days and weeks on end, then you’re probably going to feel the effect of this it better problem staying there longer than it should.

The other common stretch that’s done is a quad stretch. That’s the front of the thighs. Let me show you how it’s done. There’s some where you’re laying down. So just like this on your side, and then you’re grabbing the back of your leg, you’re grabbing your leg and pulling your leg backwards, bringing your heel to your butt just like this.

And this is producing a stretch in this area. And the intent is to stretch the muscles near the IT band. Another one is just standing up. Same idea. Of course, you might be holding on to something for balanced, and then you grab your ankle or your foot and you bring your butt your heel to your butt as far as you can to stretch the front of the thigh.

The IT band is has a muscle in it called the TfL, which I’ve mentioned. And that TfL muscle can act as a hip flexor. So the idea is that if you stretch out your quads, which some of them are hip flexors, they can help to lengthen the muscle.

But again, if you’re getting to that stretch reflex and and you can google this, the muscle spindle is the little cells that are inside of muscles that send a they have nerves that connect to the spine and they create something called the stress reflex. There’s something else called a Golgi tendon organ. And this is all sciency medical terms. For those of you that are interested, you can go look it up.

But it causes the muscle to want to contract to shorten during the stretch, which indirectly strengthens it. And this makes the problem stay longer than it should. The false sense of improvement though is that people like the stretch sensation and especially when you’ve got a physical therapist or a trainer or some medical professional telling you go stretch it out and the harder you stretch out, doesn’t that feel good?

It hurts so good, right? That is a false sense of security, you’re not going to improve for the long term, if you’re just looking to do that to fix your Runner’s knee or your IT Band Syndrome. And one question that I always get about the IT band is rolling it out. So I’m going to give you a bonus tip to treat your IT band problem at home because I think rolling it out is actually not a bad idea.

In the short term. What is good about it is of course it’s not fixing it for the long term. So don’t go rolling it out thinking that that’s going to fix it forever, you’re going to just get some short term relief, but it doesn’t typically tend to set off the stretch reflex and cause you to work out the muscle more indirectly when you’re trying to stretch it.

So I like rolling it out for it man, but it’s really just looking at keeping you from taking more pain medications, or visiting the doctor for injections, but still need some sort of cylindrical, stiff but padded device we’ve got this this roll here. I’ll put a link in the description so that you can look at getting yourself a foam roller works well too.

There isn’t anything magical about these. There’s a huge market for these now. You have all different kinds of textures and pads and shapes and whatever works best for you is really what I’ll tell people we like this one it just has good durability the last a while the foam rollers the white ones or they make black and gray ones, I think they have all kinds of colors.

Those just tend to get a little squashed as you use them more and more. I’ve only really seen them get misshapen in physical therapy clinics, people that buy their own typically don’t use them that much that they get misshapen in physical therapy clinics when they’re being used every day, every hour, multiple times an hour, then we see those get some mileage on them. But anyways, I’m going to show you what to do.

So right where you feel the stiffness on your IT band and your quad, that’s where you want to roll it. So put that under you, you’re going to have to do a little bit of balancing here, right where your front pocket would be is where the TfL muscle is. And you just lean on it like that you can control how much pressure you put with your arms and with your legs.

And then you’ve just got to slide your Up and down over that tenor area, it’s tender. And most people even if you don’t have it then syndrome so if you’ve got IT Band Syndrome, expect it to be quite tender.

When you do this, you might want to even get off your elbow and just be like this, roll it out gently. And then to get onto the front of your thighs and show you how to lay your satellite down, face down on the foam roller or the rolling device and use it like so. You said to lie down face down on the foam roller device and just roll up and down.

Like so you can go all the way down to right above your kneecap. And you can roll your body inwards or outwards to angle different positions on your thought.

Like I said, I can’t stress it enough, this isn’t going to fix you for the long term. But it might give you some structure relief because when you roll like this and kind of massages your thigh muscles, your hip muscles that TfL muscles specifically, and causes it to relax as far as how long to use this and how intense to go.

It’s up to you how intense you want to be how much weight you want to put to your body. I wouldn’t do this for more than a minute per muscle or per area. Some people like to roll on this device for 1520 plus minutes, if you find that you get relief from doing that, by all means do so what I find is a physical therapist is people get diminishing returns after the first minute or so there isn’t that much more improvement for going two minutes or five minutes or 15 minutes.

But if you’ve got the time you’ve got the desire you get you’re getting the results that you’re looking for. Go for it, you can certainly do it. Now one last piece I want to leave you with. If you’re looking for more comprehensive plan, one that takes you through the progressions for resolving your IT band problems so that you can get rid of that hip pain, that stiffness and that knee pain and get back to being active, healthy and mobile again, then check out our 28 Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program.

It’s linked in the description below. And what it is it’s a 100% online on demand program that takes you through series of progressions for improving your knee health. If you’ve got IT Band Syndrome and you’re looking at staying out of the doctor’s office, you can’t make it to the physical therapists office, and you want some guiding and coaching and exercises to do for your it men syndrome so that you can resolve it all the way.

Go check out this program, click on that link, you’ll get taken to a page that has more information about our 28 day program. Hey, if you’re thinking that you want to come into our clinic to get help for your IT band problem, we’d love to take a look at you the best way to get started is to apply for a free discovery visit, all you got to do is scroll down and find the button that says request a free discovery visit and the page will pop up that get the begins the application process for getting a free discovery visit. Just leave us your details.

And what will happen is once you submit that my staff will get it and they’ll call you back as fast as they can so that they can begin asking you the next questions to take you through the application process on getting your free discovery visit during the discovery visit.

For 20 minutes, you’ll sit with a specialist physical therapist and they’ll take a good look at your hip, of course your knee, your back your ankle and foot and see what’s going on so that we can give you a diagnosis for your problem and see if it truly is it man syndrome or something else. And then find out what the root cause of it is so that you can begin to fix it on your own.

Once you ask all the questions that you’d like about your condition, and we’ll tell you about what you should begin doing and what you should avoid doing for your need to get better. Our goal is for you to leave the appointment whether you decide to hire us to help you or not.

I want you to leave the appointment with better knowledge about your hip and knee problems so that you can make the best decision moving forward on it. And of course, we’ll invite you to become our patient if it’s right. And if so, we’ll talk about beginning a treatment plan for you to fix your hip and knee problem for the long term. All you got to do to get started is scroll down and hit that request a free discovery visit button. I hope to be a part of your success story real soon. Have a wonderful day.