“The Day My Bum Went Psycho” is a book written by Australian children’s author Andy Griffiths. It’s a story about detachable bums that jump off their owners. Zach, the main character, wakes up one night bumless and has to get help from some bum-hunters to recover his rogue bum, which has become the leader of a group of bum scoundrels that have set out to rule the world.
If you actually removed your bum, or what most of us thought of as our bums, you would probably be removing the fat that is stored there along with large muscle that almost everyone knows the name of—the gluteus maximus. Removing this muscle would make some things very difficult or awkward, such as walking and running or getting up from a chair.
Now, we know the gluteus maximus is big and important because if someone had named you Samantha Maximus or Tilak Maximus it was probably not without reason. But if you removed your gluteus maximus (for example if your bum went psycho) you would find some other very important muscles called external rotators. You can see the people who named our body parts are in fact very clever because, as you could probably guess, it is their job to perform a movement called external rotation at your hip joint.
Understanding the basic movements at your hip joint is important for deep hip opening postures and, understanding external rotation in particular, can help prevent injury to the knee joint in some of these poses where you also need to bend your knee (think lotus, pigeon etc).
In this blog I want to talk about the six basic movements of the hip joint and then focus on the idea of external rotation in the context of protecting the knee joint. Hip opening postures are sure to give even the most open-hipped yogi a little pain in the butt. Practicing with awareness and alignment will also help you protect your knee joints.
