Former UFC veteran Middleweight champion Luke Rockhold (@lukerockhold ) competed in the CJI grappling event last weekend. A few days before, he posted an interesting video displaying a lateral shift in his upright posture as a result of a back injury.
But what was happening and why?
Quite often I’ll see this compensation as a reaction to the body trying to solve a lateral stability weakness by using the muscles around the thighs to solve this problem.
We can easily check with a few minutes work on a foam roller to release some tightness and observe if the posture improves. If it does and we find one leg tighter than the other, we have a lateral stability issue to investigate. Again, we can check by trying a side-bridge test on both sides and observing not only overall weakness but also left vs. right imbalance.
Long-term this lateral stability weakness will need to be resolved through some choice programming to prevent re-injury.