Hey everyone, this is a short video on hip osteoarthritis: what it is, signs and symptoms of if you are dealing with it. And then if you are, what are some treatment ideas that you can do to help yourself.

So first of all osteoarthritis is very common. It is actually the leading cause of global disability with hip and knee osteoarthritis contributing to the most. The hip osteoarthritis is the most common cause of hip pain in older adults.

So what is it?

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease. So what that means is basically the tissues in that joint are breaking down over time.

When it comes to your hips, specifically, what are some signs and symptoms that you can look for?

• If you have stiffness when you wake up in the morning, right when you get out of bed, it takes a little bit of time to get moving. And typically the stiffness will go away within about an hour. So that’s one sign.
• Another sign is if your pain is in the front of your hip, or on the side of your hip, and you’ll have that pain with weight bearing activities.
• Then you’ll also have loss of mobility. And loss of range of motion, specifically when your hip is in flexion. So that’s going to be if you bring your hip up towards your chest, that’s flexion. And then internal rotation is another motion that we see lost a lot with hip osteoarthritis. So that’s if you’re standing if you’re going to turn your foot in, that is hip internal rotation.

If you feel like you are falling into this category of hip osteoarthritis, what can you do about it?

So luckily, exercise therapy has been shown by a substantial amount of research to be really beneficial to help with hip osteoarthritis. When we think about what you can do, we want to mobilize. You’re gonna have stiffness in your hip. We want to get that joint moving better. And then we want to do targeted strength exercises to the area that you’re weak. So I’m going to show you a few different mobility exercises, and then one hip strengthening progression.

For mobility:

One of my favorite things to do is a 90/90 position. So bringing your front leg out in front of you with your knee directly in front of your hip. And then your ankle lines up with your knee. So it makes this 90 degree angle. And then your back hip, or back leg is basically a mirror image of your front leg. Bring your hand to meet your ankle, and then the other one can be on your knee, or on the side of your mat. From this position, you’re going to make your chest nice and proud. Then you’re going to hinge forward from your hips as far as you are comfortable.

Once you get into this position, you’re going to take the whole shape of your leg and you’re going to gently press it down into your mat about 25% effort. Then progress to 50%, 75% and 100%. So as hard as you can, you’re gonna push it down into the mat, and then you’re gonna relax back down that ladder. So progress backward: 75% 50%, 25%. You can then come back up to the starting position. You can repeat that for about a minute.

And then you can also turn to face your back leg, and you can do something similar facing the back leg. So you can start to hinge forward from there. And then I’m going to press the whole shape of my life down into the ground. You can work your way up that ladder, and back down. So that’s one mobility exercise that I like to use to start to get your hips moving better.

Another one that’s a little bit simpler, is a quadruped rock. So you can be on your hands and your knees. And then we’re going to take our right ankle and cross it over our right calf. From here, you’re just gonna sit towards that back right side of your mat. You should feel a stretch through the outside of your hips. So sit down and back, hold for a few seconds, and then come back to the beginning. And again, you can go through that for about a minute or two. So those are two mobility ones I like to use with people.

And then the next thing you want to do is we want to strengthen that hip. So I’m going to take you through a lateral hip strengthening progression, starting with the easiest.

Depending on where your strength level is at, you might start laying down on your mat. For side-lying leg lifts, you’re going to stack your hips and bring one leg slightly back behind you and turn those toes down. From here, you’re going to lift that leg and lower it back down. Max I would work up to is 20-25 reps. Once you’re doing three sets of 20 to 25, it’s time to make the exercise a little bit harder.

So you can go into a supportive side plank. If you’re able to hold this for 45 x 3 seconds, no problem, you could extend that top leg. And now I’m gonna hold this position. Then the last progression is taking it to a full side plank. Again, trying to hold that plank for 45 to 60 seconds, for about three sets.

So that is just a few different exercises that you can start to incorporate if you feel like you’re kind of falling into that category of your hip pain possibly coming from hip osteoarthritis. You want to think mobility and then some specific, targeted strengthening exercises.