News Day Laura posted this earlier. Hysterical!

I've been having some hip flexor issues lately that have kept me from performing a lot of the higher kicks in taekwondo. There's quite a lot of pain resulting in all angles of hip rotation beyond a few degrees. I have no issues with walking and running, however. I used to be able to self-adjust my hips - and it was part of my morning stretching and joint manipulation routine - but since I started working out in taekwondo again, I have not been able to successfully manipulate my hips and relieve the pressure in the joint. From researching hip joint pain associated with martial arts kicks, it's possible that the hip flexors are tightening and pulling the joints out of alignment or the joints are out of alignment and the tightened flexors are keeping them from falling back into proper alignment. Either way, hip flexor stretches may be in order. Here are a few helpful videos for stretching the hip flexors. I hope this helps others with the same issue.

This had me cracking up all night last night.

http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/10/forget-pre-exercise-stretching/

I was just telling my daughter about this the other day - the differences between static and dynamic stretching. She's finally old enough for martial arts and we've been going to a taekwondo/hapkido dojang for the past month. They do a lot of static stretching before the workouts and, for an old guy like myself, it hasn't been easy. My hips have been giving me the most trouble so I did some research a few weeks ago and found study after study talking about the benefits of dynamic stretching over static stretching before exercise. I've been warming up and gradually stretching while performing basic techniques at home before going to class and then doing static stretching after I get home from the workouts. It has made a huge difference!