IT Band Pain And Why You Can't Stretch It

It's all a myth. 

The IT Band is not some tight muscle structure that can be stretched whenever you have leg pain that travels down the outside of your thigh to your knee. 

So what is the IT band really made of?

T​his thing is a THICK fibrous band that anchors to the thigh from the hip to the outside of the knee. 

There are other muscles that connect to it that may influence the pull of the bad, however the IT Band itself does not have contract like a muscle. 

It is more of a structural support that has other muscles pulling on it in whatever directions they decide to behave. 

You can think about these muscles acting like a steering wheel on the IT band. Whichever way they are biased to pull, they will steer the IT band it its direction. 

This will cause tension and torsion at the outside of the knee, the outside thigh, or even the hip. It all depends where the tension is coming from. Your IT band is just a victim that gets all the blame. 

Stretching the IT band doesn't help, because like I said before, it's influenced by multiple muscles around it. 

What you really want to do is reduce the biases of the muscles that may put a strain on the IT band. 

One of the best things to do is to learn how to tilt the pelvis backwards, such as doing a glute bridge.

Once you can establish this position, you would want start to integrate this position with squatting and hinging based activities.

Think you need help doing that??

You can always browse our Instagram account for exercises choices

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Schedule a Free Discovery Visit. 

This is where we can guide you through what may be the cause of that cranky IT band issue and give you a realistic solution. Did I mention it's FREE. 

30 min of our undivided attention to get down to the root cause and get you back in action sooner than ever!

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