6 Must-Do Exercises for Hip Pain and Mobility

Can’t figure out why your hips are bugging you? Achy, stiff hips are a common complaint, but the root causes are often overlooked. To keep your hips moving and strong, you’ve got to understand three fundamental reasons why hips cause people trouble. Below I’ll teach you the underlying causes of hip pain, plus six exercises you can do in under 10 minutes for pain-free and mobile hips.

What Are the Causes of Sore and Painful Hips?

The root causes of uncomfortable hips can be boiled down to three fundamental issues:

• Poor Muscle Activation
• Limited Active Range of Motion
• Poor Alignment

Let’s take a look at each.

Poor Muscle Activation

You may have heard the term “gluteal amnesia” or maybe even “dead butt syndrome.” Basically, if we sit on our butts all day, our glutes shut off and have difficulty activating when we need them to – say when we get up from the desk and hit the tennis court or boxing gym after work.

Even bending over to pick something up can turn into a risky movement if this powerful muscle group isn’t firing properly. If the glutes are slacking, other, smaller muscles will start to work overtime, leading to a high likelihood of pain and discomfort, especially in the hips.

Limited AROM

Active range of motion (AROM) is the range you can move through using your own power and is crucial for functional hips. Think “use it or lose it” – if we don’t use our muscles through their full length regularly, the body adapts and shortens the active, usable range of motion. Pain and stiffness quickly follow.

Poor Alignment

Alignment, both static and dynamic, plays a big role in hip health.

Static alignment is your resting stance (think anterior or posterior pelvic tilt). Dynamic alignment involves how the head of your femur, or thigh bone, is aligned in the socket of your pelvis when you’re moving.

Improper static alignment and posture can lead to all sorts of imbalances and poor muscular activation patterns. Improper dynamic alignment can contribute to painful problems like snapping hip syndrome.

6 Exercises for Hips Pain and Mobility

Now I’ll guide you through six exercises that address these underlying factors (poor muscle activation, limited AROM and poor alignment) to improve hip function and fix hip pain.

The whole routine should take you less than 10 minutes to complete and you can follow along with the video here.

Exercise 1: Standing Glute Contraction

This exercise looks basic but packs a punch. Focus on the subtle activation cues to fire up your glutes while creating excellent lower body alignment.

We’ll start from the ground up by creating an active arch in your foot – if you haven’t mastered that, read this article first.

• Start standing and find an active arch in both feet
• Activate your pelvic floor muscles (pretend you were peeing and trying to stop midstream)
• Activate your glutes, internally rotating your hips slightly
• Ramp up the contractions to your max and hold for about 10 seconds
• Gradually ramp down
• Relax and repeat for one set of 4 reps

You can also perform this exercise seated – which I like to call the “ReBUTT” exercise. This is super functional for two reasons. One, it works glute activation with hips flexed – like they are during a squat. Two, you can perform it at your desk to get those glutes firing when they are most prone to shutting down!

Exercise 2 – Slumpy Psoas

This move focuses on the psoas, a muscle that provides both hip flexion and lumbopelvic stabilization, making it important for both healthy hips and preventing low back pain.

Like the glutes, the psoas is often sleepy and underactivated. By firing it up here, we help train good alignment and posture while breaking up dysfunctional movement patterns.

1. Sit on a chair and hunch forward
2. Flex your hip, lifting your left foot from the ground
3. Bring your right arm to your left knee and press them together, activating the psoas
4. Maintain this pressure while sitting up straight and finding an anterior pelvic tilt
5. Hold for 5 seconds, then release

Perform one set of 4 reps per side.

Exercise 3: Standing Hip Rotation

The next exercise activates the hip rotator muscle group in a closed chain movement. Like the name implies, these muscles help perform hip rotation, but they actually play an even bigger role in hip and pelvis stability.

With every movement, fire up your muscles and try to maximize AROM. When working on external rotation, you should feel it in the back of your hip, and when working on internal rotation, you should feel it in the front.

1. Stand on one leg with an active arch, hovering your other leg off the floor
2. Activate your external rotators, so that you’re facing away from the standing leg
3. Activate your internal rotators, rotating your pelvis and trunk toward the standing leg
4. Maintain activation in your hip as you return to the start and perform on the other side

Perform 1-2 sets of 3 reps per side, holding each activation for 5 seconds.

Exercise 4: Supine Hip PNF

This move is a Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) technique that combines multiple movements at the hips, creating good AROM and control while also challenging your muscular endurance.

Make sure you keep even pressure under your pelvis the whole time you perform this exercise – this will ensure your deep hip, pelvic and core muscles are all active and working.

1. Lie on the ground
2. Lift your right leg out to the side while externally rotating from the hips (toes pointing out)
3. Start to make a circle with your right leg, lifting it up high
4. Switch to internal rotation of your right hip (toes pointing in) as you move your right leg toward the left
5. As you cross midline, return to external rotation
6. Perform 3 reps, then switch directions

Remember to maintain internal rotation when your leg is crossing midline and external rotation when your leg is out to the side.

Perform 1-2 sets of three reps in each direction on each leg.

Exercise 5 – Adductor ISO Lunge

There’s more than meets the eye with this next exercise. It may look like a lateral lunge, but we will actually be using the opposite activation pattern.

Instead of pushing off the ground using your hip abductors, or outer hip muscles, we are going to build control and activation in the hip adductors, a muscle group that’s often involved with hip and groin pain in athletes.

This exercise helps us lengthen and strengthen the hip adductors as we work them through isometric (static), eccentric (lengthening) and concentric (shortening) contractions.

1. Find a wide stance, feet pointing straight ahead
2. Squeeze your feet together to create an isometric contraction in your hip adductors
3. Maintain this activation as you shift slowly to one side
4. Shift slowly to the other side

Maintain good alignment and find the biggest AROM you can control. Do 2 sets of 3 reps in each direction.

Exercise 6 – Reverse Lunge

The final move – the reverse lunge – is one of my favorite strength building exercises for the lower body and solidifies all the improvements you made in the previous exercises.

This functional movement pattern has great carryover to sport and life, and it improves strength, hip stability, range of motion and single leg balance.

1. Stand with good upright posture
2. Keep your right foot flat and knee straight as you step your left leg back
3. Kiss your left knee to the ground
4. Push off the right foot to return to standing with control
5. Repeat on the other side

Perform 2-4 sets of 6-10 reps per side.

You can perform this entire routine several times a week or even daily to help keep your hips strong, mobile and pain-free. This routine will help you integrate proper movement and muscular activation patterns to prevent injury and discomfort.

If you’re looking for an even more in-depth approach, check out our Hip Pain Solution program. This program goes beyond the basics and walks you through multiple phases of training to get your hips functioning optimally – so you can get back to doing what you love.