The Autistic Yogi Reflects on Walking Stride, Tight/Short Hip Fllexors and Things

  Over the last couple years, my flexibility in my hip flexors decreased due to how much time I focused on acro yoga, which increased my pant size from a 32 to 34 just in muscle. I  use to think myself as a lanky guy but that all started to change first with yoga and then especially with the acro. On average I would have 120-150 lbs held up in the air on my feet anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours daily over the last couple years, but do to a back injury that I neglected to focus on healing and GERDs (Gastroesophageal reflux disease ) I was unable to focus any attention on yoga the last few months, which caused quite a dramatic increase in my fat content haha. Now that I have managed to get the GERDs under control with a medication I am able to once again resume my yoga practice and walking.
  Walking has caused me to analyze my stride and how tight my hip flexors are and my lack of hip extension, and how those combine to aggravate my back. What I noticed is that I have always had a fairly long stride as I like to get from point A to point B fairly quickly. What the long stride does to my back is hellish now. When my leg that moves into extension can no longer extend at the ball socket joint it makes my whole pelvis slightly move into anterior tilt which drives force up into my lumbar. What it does in my SI joint I can only imagine but the most pronounced is what is happening in my lumbar.
  I will have to shorten my stride and either learn to enjoy a slower walk to my destination or learn how to properly speedwalk without wreaking havoc on my back and hips.
  I use to attempt to train with harder depths to force tissue distension in quickest gains possible, but over the years I have come to believe that this is more detrimental over the long term than good. So my approach is to work tissue distension slowly over a longer period of time, instead of gaining attempting to gain a centimetre I will try for 1 millimetre or just enjoy my baseline and focus on maintaining movement instead of increasing range of motion, especially when rom doesn't really matter in the long term.