The Best Kicking Muscle You DON’T Know About

What is the most important kicking muscle that you’re probably neglecting? It’s called the psoas muscle. The psoas muscle is the only muscle that connects your spine to your hips, and that is the muscle in between your belly button and your hip muscles. If you point to your belly button, come to the side and down just a little bit, that area is your psoas muscle.

What you can do to stretch that out is very simple, but is probably one of the most painful stretches that you could do in your entire life.

Stretching your psoas kicking muscle

Grab a lacrosse ball, baseball, or foam ball. You just put the ball right on your psoas muscle, lay on the ground, and do some rotations. This is gonna open up that muscle really nicely, and it’s gonna make sure that you’re a lot looser.

Often, when you’re running and kicking, you’re using that muscle all the time. It’s extending, flexing, retracting, and it’s just going through some beatings. It’s really important that you make sure to take care of that muscle.

For the first few times that you stretch it out, it’s gonna feel like you’re exploding on the inside. That’s totally fine; that’s just your body getting used to it.

What you gotta do for 5 or 10 minutes a day is get a ball, put it up against the psoas, roll it out. Get one of those massage guns, if you have one; those are really handy. Just put it up there for 5 minutes, it’s really gonna help you out.

If you’ve noticed, if you have a tight psoas, you’re most likely doing one of those postures where your butt is back. But you want to engage your hips so that you’re taking pressure off of your psoas muscle.

Posture on field goals

I did this on an earlier video, which I’ll link to right here, but it is going to be really important that you know how to use your hips. Because when you have your butt back whenever you’re doing all of your activities, it’s really hard for your leg to get up past hip height. But, if you pull your hips in and engage them, you can get your leg up to chest height.

The hips are a huge part of kicking and punting. To be able to access your psoas muscle is very valuable. It’ll add a lot of power and whip on the ball, and confidence as well, once you can really use this muscle to help you out.

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