The Jaw Cheat Pattern Method
Why a Clenched Jaw Can Be the Real Reason Your Hip Flexor Won’t Fire — and Why It’s Costing You More Than You Think
Every rep of hip flexion should look the same. Same effort, same tension, same result. But it doesn’t — and after years of testing athletes at every level, from weekend warriors to Olympians, I’ve found that almost nobody always flexes their hip the way they think they do. Something else is doing the work for them. And at times or more often than not, they have no idea it’s happening.
This is one compensation pattern I have not seen any other therapy address. I have athletes who’ve been through unbelievable rehab, unbelievable strength programs, and come back to me with the exact same underlying problem still sitting there, untouched.
Where This Starts: Testing the Psoas
In the RPR system, we isolate the psoas at a specific angle and test it directly. It’s a simple test — hold, one, two, three — but the information it gives us is enormous. When an athlete fails that test, we know the psoas isn’t doing its job as the primary driver of hip flexion. And when the primary driver goes quiet, the body doesn’t just stop. It finds another way to get the job done.
That “another way” is what we call a cheat pattern, and in our hierarchy for hip flexion, there are four of them the body can reach for once the psoas checks out:
- Quad
- Tibialis
- Jaw
- Arm
Every single athlete I test is running one of these. Not most. Every one. The only question is which driver they’ve built their movement around — and how long it’s been there.
What I Saw With the Olympic Team
At the Olympics with the hockey team, we’d be running warm-ups — high knees, walking drills, whatever it was — and I’d watch the same thing happen over and over. The moment they went into hip flexion, their jaw or their abs would tense up. That tension is the tell. It means the ab, the quad, the jaw, whatever the driver is — is being recruited to create stability the psoas isn’t providing on its own.
On that particular team, it broke down almost entirely into hand drivers and jaw drivers. No quad, no tibialis. Over time we learned every athlete’s individual cheat pattern and cleared it going into competition. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to — not “good enough,” but optimal hip flexion, rep after rep, with nothing else picking up the slack.
The Jaw Pattern, Up Close
Here’s what it looks like on the table. We test the hip flexor cold — no strength, no stability, it fails outright. Then we let the athlete clamp their jaw down as hard as they can. Same test, same position: incredible strength, incredible stability. Relax the jaw, and it’s gone again. Nothing. That’s not a coincidence and it’s not a fluke of that one rep — it’s the nervous system telling you exactly where it’s borrowing stability from.
The problem is that athletes don’t get to unclench their jaw in real competition. If the jaw is your driver, you are clenching your teeth on every single hip flexion movement in the sport you play — every stride, every cut, every jump. That adds up fast, and it shows up in places you wouldn’t necessarily connect back to the hip.
What a Jaw-Driven Athlete Deals With
The most common thing I hear from these athletes, once we start asking, is tension headaches. That makes sense once you see what’s actually happening — they are gripping their jaw muscles through every single movement that requires hip flexion, all day, every training session. That’s a lot of sustained tension sitting at the base of the skull and through the jaw and neck, and it has to go somewhere.
But the jaw is really just the visible piece. Underneath it, the same failure that’s driving the jaw pattern is also pulling in the abs and the quads to help flex the hip, because the psoas still isn’t doing its share. That’s where this gets serious:
- Quad and ab recruitment increases tension through the front of the hip and thigh with every stride.
- That added quad tension is a common contributor to knee pain over time — the quad is working overtime as a hip flexor, a job it wasn’t built to do.
- Chronic overuse of the quad as a hip flexor is something we see connected to sports hernias and groin pulls.
- And in the athletes I’ve worked with, this same pattern shows up again and again alongside osteitis pubis.
I want to be careful here — this is what I have seen, repeatedly, in my own practice and with the teams I’ve worked with. It is not a claim that every case of osteitis pubis or every sports hernia traces back to a jaw pattern. But when I see one of these injuries, checking the hip flexor and the cheat pattern behind it is now one of the first things I do, because far too often it’s sitting right there underneath.
In the RPR App use the JAW Break up Drills. – https://www.reflexiveperformance.com/app
The Concussion Connection
This is the piece I want coaches and practitioners to take most seriously: in my experience, athletes running an unresolved jaw pattern show up with a noticeably higher rate of concussions than I’d expect to see by chance. I can’t hand you a peer-reviewed study proving that link — this is a clinical observation from years on the field and in the clinic, not a controlled trial. But it has been consistent enough, across enough athletes and enough teams, that it’s now a standing part of how we screen.
Think about what the jaw pattern actually is: the nervous system leaning on the jaw to manufacture stability the hip isn’t providing on its own. An athlete who is already borrowing stability from an unrelated structure is, in my view, an athlete whose overall stability margin is thinner than it looks on paper — and that’s exactly the kind of athlete I want identified and cleared before, not after, a head injury forces the issue.
Clearing the Pattern
The good news is that this is fixable, and it doesn’t take long. (10 seconds in the RPR) Once we’ve confirmed the jaw is the driver, we work along the ridge line of the jaw and pair it with the RPR neck protocol. Then we go straight back to the hip flexor test — jaw open, jaw relaxed — in the same position that failed minutes earlier.
When it’s cleared correctly, the athlete tests strong and stable with an open jaw, in the exact position where they had nothing before. That’s the whole goal: the same strength, the same ability to move, without borrowing it from somewhere it was never supposed to come from.
Every Athlete Has One of These
I’ll say it again because it’s the point of this whole article: every athlete has a driver. It might be the jaw. It might be the quad, the tibialis, or the arm. Which one it is doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether it’s ever been identified. Left alone, it doesn’t just sit quietly in the background — it feeds tension headaches, knee pain, hernias, osteitis pubis, and in my experience, a real uptick in concussion risk. Addressed early, it’s one of the fastest wins we get in the clinic.
This is exactly the kind of layer we go deeper on in the course — how to identify which driver an athlete is running, how to clear each one, and how to build a screening process so this gets caught long before it turns into an injury on your table.
In the RPR App use the JAW Break up Drills. – https://www.reflexiveperformance.com/app
That the course for Coaches and therapist – https://www.reflexiveperformance.com/online-courses
