The Complete Guide to Your Quads: How to Stretch and Work Them

Ballerina stretching

Welcome to a complete breakdown of what sprinters and cyclists need for great power and strength: your Quadriceps. Quadriceps are known for helping sprinters become faster, holding power in your thighs for cyclists, and for dancers to have just great looking legs. Your Quadriceps build and gain muscle easy, thank goodness, and plenty of leg workouts on Youtube include a section dedicated to them ( if they're any good). Today I thought we could go into detail on the anatomy of your quads, how to stretch them properly after you work them, and mistakes people make when stretching or performing anything with your quads.

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1.Anatomy of Your Quads:

Quadricep Muscles

First off Quad means four, so you have four different muscles on the tops of your thighs. I know it looks like one giant one but trust me they are all split up.

The rectus femoris ( the big top muscle you can see on your thigh), is the longest out of the four. It inserts into your pelvis and runs all the way down to your knee cap. The fact that it inserts to the front part of your pelvis will come into play later when we explain how exactly to stretch these muscles.

The other three quadricep muscles insert at your femur, your femur is your thigh bone located on the side of your hip. All four muscles run down and meet at your knee cap.

2.Stretching Your Quads:

So I am sure you have heard that you need to tilt your pelvis in order to get a better quad stretch. Or maybe you haven't, and this is your wake-up call to a better stretching experience. The point of this is because the biggest muscle is located in the front of your hips. 99% of the time if someone has front hip pain, and they have done all of the hip stretches they can find and still have no relief, it is because they never thought of stretching their quads.

Your quads hold so much power, strength, and fast twitch muscle fibers that things can get very tight very fast. Even for those people who just go on long walks every day as their workout, your quads are doing most of the work. Anytime we walk around and run errands, that is all quads. But we never stop to think maybe they need a break or just a stretch to lengthen back out after all we did that day.

So, to get a proper big muscle quad stretch, stand straight, grab the back of your foot with one hand, and PUSH your hip forward. you do NOT need to kick your foot into your hand, that is a myth and makes things worse. Relax and let the push of the hip create all of the length and stretch for you. The other three quad muscles that attach to your femur can easily be stretched with any outer hip or groin stretch.

Mistakes in Stretching:

Now that we know how to stretch your quads, let's get into what mistakes could be happening as you stretch them or as you get into your stretching position.

Positioning Errors: Please do NOT grab your right foot with your LEFT hand, and vice versa. Your quads run straight up and down, if you hold a foot with the opposing hand, you are turning the hip slightly out and won't get the full benefit of the stretch, or even you will feel it in your knee cap and not in your quads. When thinking about the position of the stretch, make sure you don't externally rotate (turn anything out), and keep the stretch just up and down.

Loading other structures: This one is a biggie. It is how we give biofeedback to our brains that we are in fact stretching the right muscle with a certain stretch. When you stretch, you want to ISOLATE as much as possible. Now I know that that is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the fitness community but no one knows what it means. It means we are not trying to stretch a GROUP of muscles at a time but rather a certain section of them, and NOT accidentally contracting a muscle just for us to get a better stretch. That defeats the purpose of the stretch.

When we stretch our quads, it is imperative that we DO NOT hold the FOOT for the stretch, rather we need to hold the ankle or the shin. If we hold the foot over and over for a quad stretch, then over time we micro tear the ligaments in our feet, the tiny muscle stretches that run down the tops of our feet, and over time that creates chronic injury. From all of the micro tears over the years. You weren't intending to stretch your foot like that or cause foot pain later in life and not know where it came from. It was from loading another structure while you were trying to stretch your quads. Be aware of where you are feeling the stretch. Give your brain the proper feedback it needs to feel things properly in the right place.

Your quads are one of the most important muscle you need to train and the muscles we use the most throughout our day everyday of our lives. Let's take care of them as much as possible and give them the proper stretches and break they deserve!