Written by Suzanne Krowiak, with additional reporting by Heather Longoria.
The hip is one of the most important joints in the human body— a source of stability and mobility when it’s healthy and functional; hip pain and stiffness when it’s not. Despite its central role in our ability to move through the world confidently and safely, it remains one of the most misunderstood anatomical structures.
Myths about what is “good” for your hips are so embedded in popular culture that people in gyms, yoga studios, and other fitness settings overuse and misuse their hips for years, causing irreversible damage that leaves them with few treatment options.
How are myths about the best exercises for healthy hips perpetuated? One reason is that the common language and principles around hips don’t always align with current science or comprehensive approaches to joint care. When digging deep with healthcare and fitness pros who work with a variety of populations, there is broad general agreement on three important points:
- Flexibility is not always a reliable benchmark of hip health
- “Hip openers” are often fetishized to the detriment of practitioners, especially in some group fitness and yoga environments
- Hip strength is undervalued
Flexibility Is Not Always A Reliable Benchmark Of Hip Health
If you asked a random group of people on the street or in any fitness setting if they have tight hips, most of them would probably say yes. With all the sitting we do culturally— from work, to cars, to streaming the latest must-watch show on television— a sensation of tightness isn’t uncommon. But that doesn’t always mean we aren’t stretching our hips enough.
Amanda Tripp is a kinesiologist and Yoga Tune Up teacher that sees this confusion a lot in her work. “Just because you feel tight doesn’t mean you need to stretch more,” says Tripp. “In fact, it could mean the opposite. Inflexible hips by yoga standards— for example, not being able to put your ankle behind your head— is not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re an athlete, you might need stability more than you need extreme flexibility so you can generate explosive power for your sport. How much flexibility you need really depends on what you want to be good at.”
Jill Miller, creator of The Roll Model and Yoga Tune Up fitness formats, says the tightness you feel could be your nervous system trying to send you a message. “A lot of what we experience with this term ‘tight hips’ is neural tension,” says Miller. “So the nervous system has decided on a safe range for our hips and will give us feedback . The muscle spindle response will be ‘Okay. That’s enough stretch. That’s enough.’”
Hip Openers Are Fetishized
If you search the #hipopener hashtag on Instagram, you’ll find over 300,000 posts. (By comparison, search #healthyhips and you’ll find 15,000 posts.) Anatomist, yoga teacher, and movement therapist Lauri Nemetz thinks vocabulary in studio culture is really important in helping people take better care of their bodies. “I think we have to avoid the term hip openers,” says Nemetz. “Unless you’re dislocating your hip, you’re in essence always going to be opening part of the hip, and closing another part of it. That dual action is always happening. But for some reason, especially in the yoga and Pilates worlds, we think of lateral rotation (away from the body) as being hip openers, as if that’s somehow more enlightened than if I’m internally rotating (toward the center of the body) my hips. But we need both. There’s a tendency to do extreme poses in yoga because they look good.”
“I think we have to avoid the term hip openers,” says Nemetz. “Unless you’re dislocating your hip, you’re in essence always going to be opening part of the hip, and closing another part of it . . .”
Amanda Tripp agrees. “In the yoga world there is this idea that you need to do hip openers, which means stretching. That’s what people mean when they say ‘hip openers’,” says Tripp. “But you can overemphasize stretching and have too much of a good thing. We need to be equal parts stable and mobile, strong and flexible. Unbridled pursuit of unlimited flexibility can destabilize your joints.”
Hip Strength Is Undervalued
Because of the intense, almost exclusive focus on flexibility in the hips, we may miss one of the best ways to reduce pain and increase mobility in the joint— strength training.
“A lot of times, a tight muscle that’s giving you feedback about its limit of stretch might be very weak,” says Jill Miller. “I’d say 90% of the time when you’re feeling tightness, it’s because the body doesn’t feel safe going into that stretch for fear that it can’t manage the load. So if you try strengthening the hip muscles instead of stretching them, and then go back to try the stretch again, your brain may feel safer going into that range. A joint that doesn’t bear weight is a joint that degenerates.”
Mehmet Gem is a musculoskeletal physiotherapist in the United Kingdom who specializes in hips. His reputation as The Hip Physio brings him into contact with people with a variety of hip complaints, and his sessions often include educating patients about the importance of strength work in a hip treatment plan.
“If someone comes in with hip pain, I want to know how many times they can move from a seated position in a chair to standing up on one leg, and I’ll compare their left side to the right,” says Gem. “How many calf raises can they do on their left leg compared to the right? Then we’ll do bridges. Can you do a hamstring bridge from a chair? What’s the maximum number of repetitions you can do on your left and right? Those subtle tests will give you information you can use to guide the exercises that will improve your hip strength, rather than just doing stretches alone, because there isn’t going to be much benefit from that.”
The good news is that no matter where you land on the spectrum of hip mobility— loosey goosey, stiff and sore, or strong and centered— there are things you can start doing now to feel and move better for many years to come. Not only will practical and accessible exercises help you identify body blind spots and opportunities for improvement in your own hips, you’ll learn why strength training could be the missing ingredient in restoring movement and reducing pain.
At its most basic, the hip is where the top of your thigh bone (femur) meets the pelvis in your hip socket (acetabulum). Tune Up Fitness co-founder Jill Miller, who’s publicly shared her own experience recovering and rehabilitating from a total hip replacement in 2017, takes us on a tour of the anatomical hip— where it is, what it connects to, and all the ways it can move. Understanding how your hips work is the first step in taking better care of them.
Like all other bony structures in the human body, hips differ from person to person. Almost nobody has the “perfect” hips we see in anatomy books. “There are many variables in hip anatomy,” says Gem. “The hip socket and shape will be different, depending on if you have a ‘normal’ hip or dysplastic hip (a congenital condition in which the hip socket doesn’t fully cover the ball at the top of the thigh bone). Different ethnicities are predisposed to different shapes of hip sockets. And that alone— the shape and orientation of the hip socket— will mean that someone has more hip mobility one way than the other. So someone may think their hip is stiff because they’re looking online and see someone else stretching and twisting in hip rotation in ways that they can’t. But they’re comparing themselves to a person in a video who might have a completely different hip shape. The person who’s decided that they’re stiff just may not be meant to do that anatomically.”
One clue that you’re not meant to move your hips in certain ways can be sound. Amanda Tripp says even if you don’t feel pain, you should literally listen to your body when it makes noise. “In one of my very early yoga teacher trainings, before I learned the Yoga Tune Up method, I was taught that if it doesn’t hurt, it’s okay, “ says Tripp. “So, for example, if you’ve got hip snapping, popping, clicking, or grinding, it’s okay as long as you don’t feel pain. When the fact of the matter is that sounds often come from friction. And friction leads to inflammation, which can lead to pain and injury. So we don’t want to ignore sounds coming from the joint space. Just because a certain movement doesn’t hurt today doesn’t mean it won’t eventually be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
In addition to the bony structures of the hip, it’s home to a complex set of muscles that work in coordination with each other, and dysfunction in one muscle can have a dramatic impact on the entire joint. Jill Miller takes us on a tour of what she’s termed our “sensory aquarium,” where muscles attach, joints articulate, and sensory receptors communicate with our central nervous system. This intentional exploration of that region of the body with soft therapy balls can help you identify major muscles, including the most popular hip flexor in town, the psoas, and some of its lesser known neighbors, like the sartorius.
Your body has its own story; a structure you were born with, and the one that developed and changed over the course of your lifetime, influenced and shaped by the way you moved it. Jill Miller has been hypermobile since she was a child, a condition which allows her to go to the furthest range of her joints without pain, something she did for decades as she pursued her interests in dance and yoga. “Because of my hypermobility, I was able to compress bone on bone without alarm bells going off in my body,” she says. The consequence of doing that for decades resulted in completely wearing down the cartilage in her left hip, and led to a total hip replacement at the age of 45. After her doctor saw the x-rays showing Miller in end stage osteoarthritis, he did a simple range-of-motion test with her hip. When he saw the extreme swings of her hypermobile hip joint his first words were, “Well, there’s your pre-existing condition.” Her hypermobility, coupled with years of extreme postures and physical movements, necessitated a total hip replacement immediately.
Her own personal experience, combined with years of teaching students with different skeletal structures and ranges of motion, is what led Miller to create Yoga Tune Up. “When I would think of certain traditional yoga poses, I knew it wasn’t really the best path to go down,” she says. “So I stopped teaching poses that I thought would exclude the majority of my classroom a very, very long time ago.”
Samakonasana, or lateral splits, was one of those poses. Here Miller shows us what the pose is, why it can be problematic for some people, and what she suggests doing instead to honor your own biological range.
In addition to reframing how she considered her own yoga practice, Miller made strength work central to her recovery plan after surgery. Here she shares one of her favorite “least favorite” strength exercises— one everyone could benefit from incorporating into a regular practice.
Adding strength work into your hip health routine and focusing on flexibility exercises that honor your own biological range should have a noticeable impact on your stability and mobility. Yet even with that, all that time in chairs for meetings (in-person and Zoom), meals, transportation, and even relaxing activities like watching favorite movies with friends or family, can make you feel stiff and older than you actually are when you get up to move around. To counteract some of the natural tightening of your hips after too many hours in a seated position, try these exercises to release three marquee muscles that contribute to hip stability and mobility— psoas, iliacus and quadratus lumborum.
It’s not just the position of your body that can restrict your psoas and put your hips in an uncomfortable position; the way you breathe is inextricably linked to hip mobility. The psoas and diaphragm work together to bring fluidity to your hip joint.
“You don’t get a psoas without a diaphragm sewn to it, so on a fundamental level, those things are stuck together,” says Miller. “You want to have the ability to have your diaphragm ride up and down the psoas, and you want your psoas to be able to move forward and back, regardless of what your diaphragm is doing. Your diaphragm can really help orient your alignment for postural integrity, and that allows the hips to be at a better location for maximum flexion or maximum extension.”
Michael Mullin, a clinically-based athletic trainer and certified clinician through the Postural Restoration Institute, explains it this way when describing what happens to the hips if the diaphragm is restricted: “The brain is going to try to do whatever it can to make breathing as easy, comfortable, and effortless as possible. You want the respiratory diaphragm to be stacked and balanced over the pelvic diaphragm. On inhalation, both diaphragms descend and then recoil on the exhale. Any change in that position will change the orientation of the pelvis, and the bones will tip, rotate, or torque. The pelvic floor loses its position, and the ribs change their orientation to compensate. The imbalance will manifest where it’s easiest to land— the hip joint.”
Here is a closer look at how the diaphragm and psoas work together, and exercises you can do to free up restrictions for better breath and mobility.
Hip Replacements Are Trending
The number of total hip replacement surgeries is rising dramatically. According to the CDC, the number of inpatient total hip replacements among patients aged 45 and older went from 138,700 in 2000, to 310,800 in 2010. Research published in The Journal of Rheumatology in 2019 predicted total hip replacements would increase by 34% in 2020 (to 498,000), to 75% in 2025 (652,000), and 129% by 2030 (850,000).
It’s impossible to pin the rise in hip surgeries on one specific cause. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Nicholas A. DiNubile of the University of Pennsylvania coined the term “boomeritis” in 1999 to describe a population of Baby Boomers who overtrained or overstressed their bodies as they got older to the point that they needed medical intervention. More recently, innovations in surgical techniques have made hip replacements more attractive to people who might have avoided the procedure in the past.
The most important thing to know about your hips is that you have more power than you think to keep them healthy, strong, and mobile. By being more intentional about strength training and stretching within your biological range, you may find that you have less pain and more fluidity in short order, which could help you avoid a dramatic surgical intervention down the road.
Equally important is making a commitment to challenging your hips with different activities whenever you can. Variety isn’t just the spice of life; it can be the key to longevity for your bones and connective tissue. “I live for novelty in my practice,” says Amanda Tripp. “No modality can give you everything you need. You should jump, run, walk, swim, stretch, and lift weights. Do all of the things.”
“I want people to spend more time exploring movements,” says Michael Mullin. “I want them getting on the floor and off the floor regularly. I want them rolling, I want them crawling. The best fall prevention I can give someone is to have them get on and off the floor five times, twice a day. Because if your brain doesn’t feel safe getting on and off the floor, guess what? You become more protected with your gait. You become compressed mentally and physically. Your world gets smaller and smaller.”
Jill Miller agrees. “Let’s stop fetishizing certain poses and ranges of motion. Let’s be fascinated by our ability to sense all of the movements of the hip,” she says. “You can’t rely on a person at the head of a class or on a phone screen to be a good mirror of your own skeletal structure. Only we can embody our body; only we can experience our true hip range of motion. And it would be ideal to master it before a surgeon’s scalpel uncovers it for us.”
Ready For More?
Shakira may have been right when she said the hips don’t lie, but do we really know what they’re trying to tell us? If you want to keep exploring exercises that will help you identify the interconnectedness of your bones and fascial tissues and its impact on the way you move, here are two more videos that can help you find body blind spots that could impact your hip health.
First, a foot rollout from Walking Well with Jill Miller and Katy Bowman.
And next, information and a rollout for the hip stabilizing tensor fascia latae (TFL) from Rolling Along The Anatomy Trains with Jill Miller and Tom Myers.
Read More on Tune Up Fitness
Incredible article with such important knowledge and great ideas for strength building around the hip region. Ty
Incredibly fascinating that what presents as general hip tightness may be neural tension as a result of muscle weakness. This speaks volumes to the importance of the language movement teachers use when speaking to clients about hip health – when solely promoting “hip openers” could actually be compounding the problem of weakness.
I enjoyed this article for two reasons, I agree with the author regarding the importance of evaluating the amount of mobility that is needed for each person’s specific goals. I don’t think you need to train the hips to be hyperflexible if you don’t need that much range. I also agree that most people don’t have strength enough for their day to day activity, and that neural tension is what dictates the active range that a person has.
The number of hip replacements rising is alarming – although, as mentioned in the blog, the reason could be the success rates encouraging more people to get them when in the past maybe they wouldn’t have, I am sure changes in lifestyle and more sedentary lifestyles are adding to those numbers. The hip is such an important joint in the body that allows us to move in so many directions. I agree with the idea that new and different movement is key to having a healthy happy joint – also taking into consideration that we all have different hip shapes and we must learn to recognize where our limitations and boundaries are rather than just pushing because you might not feel flexible. I feel a big scene in the movement world is about releasing the hips and as much as this is true, maybe we also hyperfocus on releasing and stretching the hips rather than improving strength to bring stability. Again, I think there is never one formula for all and is always important to look at the individual but I would argue that it is important to focus on strength!
This article has so much great information about the muscles that move and stabilize the hip including pre-test and post-tests for assessing my own hips before and after roll-outs. I loved the message to check-in with those muscles to discover tightness, weakness, imbalances before a workout. I will share this post widely.
This is such an important reminder that hip strength is critical for healthy hips.
Thank you for the healthy hips the exercises and info in the videos and articles give the awareness needed to understand strengthen, stretch and balance my hips!
A combination of this post & “Rolling Along the Anatomy Trains”, provided me with a lot of insight into my muscle imbalances that are causing overuse injuries as some muscles are compensating or completely taking over movements that should come from other muscles
I learned this the hard way back in 2020 when I dislocated my hip. I thought my hamstrings and hips were tight and needed more stretching, but turns ut the hip flexors were weak and the back chain muscles were trying to protect the joint! Once I started strength training for hip strength, my whole sense of embodiment shifted and now I have a connection to the low core and stabilizer strength that I could never understand or connect to. I see so much of what’s discussed here in my practice and from personal experience, similar to Jill, and understand the need for retraining ourselves not to focus on “open hips” over strong hips, compare to people on the internet or try to live in their bodies instead of our own.
The idea of weakness, rather than tightness, being the more likely cause of pain resonates with me. As I consider which areas may be weak, I think about the concept that every action has an equal and opposite reaction… so in my anterior left hip pain, I’m considering a potentially weak blind spot in my posterior right hip
I struggle to sit cross-legged and this session helped me feel more comfortable sitting down 🙂 Thank you for the guidance and all the tips with using supports!
naturesblendshop
C’est le premier blog que je lis ?, j’ai trouvé cela passionnant. J’ai une de mes élèves qui a des prothèses de hanches et d’épaules , à la rentrée je vais pouvoir lui préparer des séquences où nous allons renforcer les muscles pour lui permettre d’être plus stable , plus mobile , plus forte, plus flexible et donc plus fonctionnelle dans sa vie
This blog covers so many important aspects regarding the lack of hip education in the yoga and fitness worlds! “Hip Opening” has become an obsession and with that the undervaluing of “Hip Strength”. After being in the yoga industry for so long, it is so refreshing to teach students how to strengthen their hips and all the muscles that support the pelvis by sneaking strengthening exercises into a class. I like to add a series of squats before Chair Pose or a few repetitions of hip raises in Bridge Pose. Students leave the class more confident in their practice as they gain strength (and possibly range of motion too) to perform their poses with more ease… and then they feel more empowered in their body. It’s so necessary to remind students that what they feel in their hips could be related to many of neighbouring body parts like the psoas, thoracic diaphragm, adductors and abductors! Such an inspiring read!
This article on hips is complete and filled with resources. It is useful for a lot of people suffering from the hips pain
Thank you for these resources. I have found the coregeous ball work with the psoas/hip area to be very useful on my own body, especially the relax and contract and will explore more of the information provided in this blog. The psoas and diaphragm connection is also quite amazing with the connection of the diaphragm via the medial arcuate ligament.
We have to teach that! “If you search the #hipopener hashtag on Instagram, you’ll find over 300,000 posts. (By comparison, search #healthyhips and you’ll find 15,000 posts.) Anatomist, yoga teacher, and movement therapist Lauri Nemetz thinks vocabulary in studio culture is really important in helping people take better care of their bodies. “I think we have to avoid the term hip openers,”
Article très complet et intéressant sur les hanches. Il m’aidera certainement à mieux aider ma clientèle surtout féminine qui se plaint très souvent de douleurs aux hanches. Encore une fois une des clé reste le renforcement.
merci pour cet article très intéressant sur la hanche, cela me réconcilie avec mes hanches qui ont bien du mal à s’ouvrir en position du tailleur, c’est sans doute lié à leur morphologie. Isabelle
Article très intéressant ! J’ai très peu de souplesse dans les hanches mais je vais travailler à les renforcer !
Je n’ai pas de souplesse dans les hanches tout en étant hyper lax à d’autres articulations mais le manque de force c’est sûr qu’il est partout même si je ne suis jamais dans un bureau et que je travaille physiquement et relativement varié. La force n’est jamais assez chez moi !
Articles très intéressant sur les hanches qui lève un voile sur les fausses croyances de ce qu’est “une hanche en bonne santé”. Ce que je retiens c’est qu’il faut travailler en force et varier nos exercices. La phrase qui m’a le plus marqué est celle -ci : “La bonne nouvelle est que peu importe où vous atterrissez sur le spectre de la mobilité de la hanche – lâche, raide et douloureux, ou fort et centré – il y a des choses que vous pouvez commencer à faire maintenant pour vous sentir et bouger mieux pendant de nombreuses années à venir”
Car elle donne de l’espoir pour offrir une meilleure santé a nos hanches et nous donne envie de suite après la lecture de l’article d’ajouter une routine a nos belles hanches. Merci pour cet article.
Ce que je retiens, c’est d’ajouter plus d’exercices de renforcement des psoas, des quad, des ischio-jambiers, des fesses et des adducteurs pour aider à la santé des hanches. La respiration relier aux hanches a été une découverte pour moi.
I would like to read your emails…
“How much flexibility you need really depends on what you want to be good at.” Love this quote! And will definitely be doing Bulgarian split squats and giving it to my Pilates clients. As well as “let’s get up off the floor.” Brilliant! So much of this rings true and is a great reminder of how we need to get strong and stay strong for longevity!
I can’t believe how much this article speaks volumes to me. As a professional dancer, I’ve witnessed and experienced my fair share of what I call “hip envy”. The fetishising of flexible hips has been the cause of countless career ending injuries. I feel so much relief knowing that the fitness world is bring this misconception to rest.
Wow, I’ve had a log on for this website for a while and I’m realizing I haven’t been tapping into this amazing resource (the blog). I have wickedly tight hips, great for strength and forward movement but i am realizing now not just stretching is necessary (or trying to stretch), I also need to strengthen in different directions (different muscles). I’ll be revisiting this article because it’s so packed full of interesting videos. Thank you for assembling it.
C
I’m intrigued by the idea of exploring my hips more without a biased need for them to do certain movements or to be “flexible” the idea of aiming for strength for mobility is so much more valuable. I love all the videos interspersed throughout!
Hip strength is under valued!! I’m familiar with this topic, but it’s so refreshing and informative to hear others perspectives especially when it comes to flexibility vs. strength! I’m always a student and this was so amazing learning. Love how light was shed on yoga and hip openers, as I fully agree!
Very interesting blog post! I totally agree that understanding how your hips work will help you take better care of them and everyone has to STOP fetishizing “hip openers”. I am a Sports Acupuncturist and Registered Massage Therapist who treat many athletes with hip pain amongst other things. I have found that many people who have weak hips have tight hamstrings. If people did more strength training WITH mobility and flexibility training, they would definitely feel and perform better!
Wonderful to have such a variety and number of YTU poses in one place. Recent hip challenges took me back to this article. While I totally felt my lack of strength, I feel motivated to keep it up. Hips and hip strengtheners are my challenge – and I’m finally “getting” why that is.
These are some of my favorite articles, myth busters. I’m constantly reminded in the yoga world that many think they want to open their hips to relieve pain. I really love how the YTU poses bring awareness to the hips strength, weakness, and range of motion and the how it works. I love this concept of bringing in strength to reduce pain instead of thinking only opening and stretching. Thank you.
I love many things about this article, but can personally relate to popping and snapping in the hip, because my left hip almost always snaps/pops in circumduction… and i too have been told that if it doesn’t hurt, all is fine. I love all the videos listed because it gives me a visual of not only the structure and it’s landmarks, but how breath and the diaphragm affect the hip along with exercises to strengthen and lengthen the hip. I am excited to work with breath because it’s the most foreign to me and not something that has been emphasized a lot in my life.
I really appreciate the videos that are in this blog because the focus on strength, not flexibility. Interesting is the quoting of the surgeon addressing baby boomers, and hip degeneration/overuse could be a generational thing – associated with the attitudes/activities/finances/ etc of baby boomers? Is that including high impact aerobics, running on pavement, and then sitting around taking our kids to gymnastics and soccer, and working our sitting jobs at computers ?
Will the number of hip replacements really increase 129 percent by 2030? Hopefully I wont be one of those statistics (but I could see my husband being one….)
The blog says : Stretch within your BIOLOGICAL range – I love that! Just today someone asked me ” so, my hips are tight… I’ve always been “inflexible” what should I do?” Im going to say -” chill, and strengthen!”
It’s all about the hips for me! Loved this insight and suggestions for what we can do more of to get to understanding our hips.
Thank you for spotlighting the matter of fetishized opening of the hips in the yoga world. This is already helping me to examine my dialog around working with the hips in classes and in my own practice. This is a super “meaty” blog and such a wonderful resource to return to for tips and reminders on preventative maintenance, pre-hap, and rehab of hip surgery and replacement. I will be returning to this to help my clients who have had hip replacements find more mobility (not more open hips :))
As someone who spent a lot of time in the yoga space not only fetishizing but striving for hip flexibility, but who for the past few years has since been almost exclusively working on hip strength, I can attest to the truth of everything Suzanne writes and of others quoted here. It’s easy to get addicted to the feeling and release we get from stretch– but the payoff from doing strength work can’t be overstated. And honestly, I’m okay with having a *little* less flexibility in my hips for everything I get in return– power, explosive strength, the ability to move better, honestly. Towards the end of my yoga-only moment (we’ll call it), I noticed that I was no longer really going for runs–which I love, or doing dance or strength training– doing the things that require powerful jumping and landing and in not having that explosive power in my hips, I was missing out on so much of what I love, (not to mention that I also wasn’t gaining any more flexibility in my hips from endless pigeon variations and warrior poses any longer– my hips weren’t having it– I didn’t understand why this was at the time). Thankfully, two of my yoga teachers actually encouraged me to go outside of the yoga box– and that was game changing for me.
I really resonated with this article because although my hips “feel tight” I know I’m definitely working with some weakness that contributes to the feelings. What I found most fascinating is how “the psoas and diaphragm work together to bring fluidity to the hip”. Bringing more attention to my breath in all movement is a constant for me as I find myself holding my breath when I’m doing something very challenging or when I’m upside down.
I like the concept of considering what it is you want to do with your hips – meaning, if I am a person going through regular activities and want to not have orthopedic pain, feel strong enough to do fun recreation stuff, and not get hurt, then doing extensive “hip openers” my not benefit me (as compared to an athlete where that movement is required as part of the sport). Focusing on the idea that “tight” muscles are also weak muscles makes sense, and easily forgotten. This also reminds me to focus on the antagonists – they may be having some of the same issues. My own experience is that when I have had knee pain (injuries) the “fix” has been to work on my hip…. Its complicated because often the thing you need to work on is fuzzy, and hard to figure out when you are an active person – it takes a lot of patience to STOP and pay attention and give the body part the attention needed, because frankly I want to keep hiking, running, dancing, jumping, and fortunately and unfortunately, its easy to compensate and “fake it” with other muscles, and just continue to have the issue
What you’ve described here is what Yoga Niyama of Svadhyaya (self-study) means to me. Finding my biological range, understanding that it is not my “limitation”, and working to either stretch or strengthen from there.
What a fab post! I had never considered the “fetishism” of hip openers, though all of my students demand them. It is so important to help practitioners identify that taking care of hips involves more than stretching the adductors with lateral rotation asanas such as pigeon, baddha konasana, and lizard. Moving forward, I will help students instead find soft tissue freedom through strengthening of the psoas, quads, hamstrings, TFL, glutes, ADDUCTORS, and — thanks for pointing this out — QL! Much appreciated!!!
WOWWWW!!! This article is so rich. Starting with Gem’s gems (could not help it) of his assessment tools when patients come in with hip pain-
“If someone comes in with hip pain, I want to know how many times they can move from a seated position in a chair to standing up on one leg, and I’ll compare their left side to the right,” says Gem. “How many calf raises can they do on their left leg compared to the right? Then we’ll do bridges. Can you do a hamstring bridge from a chair? What’s the maximum number of repetitions you can do on your left and right?
These tools of assessment here are excellent exercises in and of themselves, and I will share that standing from a chair with my left side is very challenging and that in itself very informative. Also, I had never done a hamstring bridge, and I could not help but think that I was “closing the chain” with the coffee table.
It was also very humbling to hear about Jill’s hip replacement journey and her cautionary tale of the splits. Too often, we see ourselves more fascinated with what our body movement looks like rather than if it is within our range and to our benefit; as we say in mindfulness, and I like to remind myself in movement too, “is it skillful? “is it onward leading?”
Bulgarian hip squats, here I come. AND “I spy Stacy in Arch Cross High Heel Rollout.”
I will visit this post again and again. And again!
This article opened a doorway for me. While I have lost some hip movement with a more sedentary life during these Covid times, I’ve been focusing on my lack of flexibility. What I recognize now is that my strength (or lack of) really needs some attention. I appreciate the direction this took me.
This article will change the way I talk about and teach when it comes to hips being more open. While I have not always subscribed to the notions that your hips are not open if you can’t do this or that pose or get knees on the ground in sitting poses, I can say that I have not focused on strengthening to find more space. It is a good read with lots of food for thought. Thank you.
Thank you for highlighting how the psoas and the diaphragm are connected. I like the idea of using breath work to treat hip dysfunction. It is true that we get caught up in stretching when we feel tight but I do agree that strengthening the hips, the glute med in particular is super important when the hips don’t feel quite right.
Great post!
2022-my year for understanding yoga at this therapeutic level
So much valuable information here!
What a wonderful article. The videos, article, I have to read and study this information multiple times. Thank you so much ?
Thanks for the videos. They are great.