Mobility of the hips is important for any athlete, gym goer or person. Our hips provide a stable base for the spine to keep the body in an upright position, but also provides enough movement to allow our lower limbs to move around the spine. With poor hip mobility can come poor movement, poor posture and inhibited muscles - all of which can lead to injury and distress. In this article we will go through the movements of the hips, why they are important and an exercise to improve the movement.
Hip Flexion:
Movement: Bringing your knee towards your chest (standing or lying down)
Flexion of the hip is an important component of everyday movement. Weak hip flexion (bringing the knee to the chest) can have detrimental loads across the body. Without adequate amounts of flexion, it can cause stresses across the lower back, knees and ankles due to imbalances of load. It is extremely important to maintain strength and mobility in the area to calibrate the body’s weight distribution.
Exercise to help: Dead Bugs
This is a perfect exercise to both strengthen and improve movement of hip flexion. Start by lying on your back with your knees bent, feet in the air and hands straight out in front of you. Complete a rep by extending one arm (left) above you (overhead), so it is an inch off the ground, at the same time straighten out the opposite leg (right) so it is an inch above the ground. Hold this for a second before returning to the starting position and changing sides.
Complete for 3 sets of 10 reps each side.
Hip Extension:
Movement: Keeping your leg straight and pushing it directly behind your body (whilst keeping chest upright, not leaning forward)
Extension is important as it uses some of our strongest muscles in the body - hamstring, glutes and spinal erectors. Having good enough extension allows us to lunge, squat, walk, run and move at a greater capacity than if our extension is restricted. However with restricted extension, our step length is reduced, our hips rotate which then have a downstream effect on our knees and ankles during movement.
Movement to help: Static Lunge Mobe
So when our extension is restricted, it is due to tightened hip flexors, this is a perfect mobe to address this. Start in a lunge position, with one knee on the floor and the other leg bent in front of you. Keeping your back upright, abs squeezed at 20% of max and glutes firing hard, slowly push your body weight forwards, feeling a stretch in the front of the hip. Hold at your end range for a couple of seconds, before pushing back to neutral and relaxing. Having the arm overhead is optional but good for lengthening the lower abdominal muscles.
Repeat this for 15 reps on one side, before swapping over.
Hip External Rotation:
The rotation of the hip is slightly more complicated. ER is defined as “Lifting the leg and rotation of the head of the femur (thigh bone) within the socket/acetabulum of the hip joint away from the body”. The muscles that control these are known as the oburators, they sit below the glutes, around the pelvic floor. When our ability to externally rotate the hip is poor, it causes the hips to tilt into a poor position which then leads to the lower back taking the stress of movement. This can cause vasts amounts of back pain and movement issues with the body.
Movements to help this: The Pigeon
This is a perfect mobe to help improve a person’s hip ER. Start on all fours, place one foot on its side in front of you, with the knee bent to 90 degrees, with the other leg push back as long as you can and with your arms, have them in front of you keeping your chest up. If you have poor ER, you will notice you are unable to maintain the 90 degrees of the bent knee. If you need to increase the knee bend to compensate, that is fine as long as you are feeling a fierce stretch in the lateral aspect of the hip.
Hold for 2 minutes on each side to achieve changes in tissue length
Hip Internal Rotation
IR of the hip is also a slightly more complicated movement, it is the opposite of ER so “Lifting the leg and turning the femur into the body”! The prime movers are piriformis and glute medius. If our ability to IR the hip is inhibited it can cause a real backlog of errors, especially effecting walking/running and lifting in the gym. If our IR is restricted the body tries to find ways to produce IR elsewhere. The body then over extends the spine, knees collapse inwards (valgus), feet externally rotate (point outwards) and foot arch collapses. This makes causes some muscles to over bear weight and other muscles turn off resulting in poor mechanics.
Movements to help this: Reverse Clam Shells
Side lying with your knees slightly bent (not quite to 90 degrees), knees slightly in front of your body and ankles in line with your body. From here lift the top foot away from the other foot as high as possible. You may feel a slight pulling/cramping sensation in the hip but that is completely normal. Hold the foot up in the air for a second before relaxing down.
Repeat this for 3 sets of 15 reps each side
And that concludes this article on the importance of hip mobility, we hope you found it useful! In the future we will go into more detail of each movement and why it is important, today just scratched the surface. If there is anything you want to know about with regards hip mobility, have any issues, want to book in for a session or any questions then please let us know! Either send us an email on rob@nrgsportstherapy.com, or leave a comment below. We look forward to hearing from you.