How To - Fire Hydrants

Fire hydrants, both quadruped and standing with the monkey foot are really going to challenge your hip abductors, the outside of the thigh, as well as your deep hip rotators. Reason being is that when you lift up doing a normal fire hydrant, now you've got weight in the foot. So that weight is wanting to stay down.

You could cheat and just lift your leg over and over and over. But now you have to work on keeping the foot level with the knee the entire time. Gets the hip rotators involved. To start, quadruped pressing through the floor, finding that neutral position, not too arched, not too rounded, right in the middle.

You're going to engage that core, keep everything from moving, lift that side up. You're going to slowly lift the hip up and back down. Now we want to prevent twisting through the body. We don't want to have rotation occurring through the shoulders. Through the spine, through the pelvis, it's isolated in the hip and you're having to work on keeping that foot at the same height of the knee the entire time, throwing a little bit of bar or dance into this, you do a nice hinged over reaching forward, find something nice and stable.

I'm going to kick that leg back 90 degree angle here, and then I'm going to lift it out to the side. Again, I'm making sure that nothing else is moving except the hip, not twisting. I mean, it's way easier if I let the rest of the body get involved. I could use a lot more weight right now. Eight pounds is my max, nice and neutral engaged.

Tight, lifting that leg out to the side, back up. All the movement is isolated to the hip joint. It should be a lot more effective than just flailing around.