Hips Don't Lie: When Your Hips Don't Move, Something Else Has To

The hip is a ball and socket joint.

The ball is the head of your femur, which is the large bone in your thigh.

That rounded femoral head fits into a socket in your pelvis called the acetabulum.

And compared with something like the shoulder, which is also a ball and socket joint, the hip is built to give us quite a bit more inherent stability.

The socket is deeper.

The joint is surrounded by a very strong joint capsule, and around the rim of the socket, we have something called the labrum.

The labrum is a ring of fibrocartilage that helps deepen the socket and contributes to the stability of the joint.

So already you can see that the hip is designed to do two things at once.

It needs to be mobile enough to allow a huge variety of movement, but stable enough to support the weight of the body and handle a lot of force.

And because it's a ball and socket joint, it can move in several directions.

We have flexion and extension, we have movement out to the side and back toward the body, and we have internal and external rotation.

In normal human movement, we're usually combining several of those at once.

So when somebody says, "My hips are tight," my immediate thought is, "Okay, tight doing what?" Because hip mobility is not one single measurement.

You might have plenty of hip flexion and struggle with internal rotation.

You might have great external rotation, but limited extension.

You might move beautifully on the floor, but have trouble controlling that same range when you're standing.

That's an important distinction.

Now let's talk about the muscles because there are a lot of them, and this is another reason the phrase tight hips doesn't tell us very much.

On the front of the hip, we have the hip flexors.

The one most people have heard of is the iliopsoas, which is actually the iliacus and the psoas working together.

These muscles help flex the hip, but the psoas in particular also has connections to the lumbar spine, which is one reason conversations around the hips and the lower back often overlap.

Then we have the rectus femoris, which is one of the quadriceps muscles.

It crosses both the hip and the knee, so it helps flex the hip as well as extend the knee.

On the backside, we have the glutes.

The gluteus maximus is the largest and most powerful of the group, and it's heavily involved in hip extension and force production.

The hip is a ball and socket joint.

The ball is the head of your femur, which is the large bone in your thigh.

That rounded femoral head fits into a socket in your pelvis called the acetabulum.

And compared with something like the shoulder, which is also a ball and socket joint, the hip is built to give us quite a bit more inherent stability.

The socket is deeper.

The joint is surrounded by a very strong joint capsule, and around the rim of the socket, we have something called the labrum.

The labrum is a ring of fibrocartilage that helps deepen the socket and contributes to the stability of the joint.

So already you can see that the hip is designed to do two things at once.

It needs to be mobile enough to allow a huge variety of movement, but stable enough to support the weight of the body and handle a lot of force.

And because it's a ball and socket joint, it can move in several directions.

We have flexion and extension, we have movement out to the side and back toward the body, and we have internal and external rotation.

In normal human movement, we're usually combining several of those at once.

So when somebody says, "My hips are tight," my immediate thought is, "Okay, tight doing what?" Because hip mobility is not one single measurement.

You might have plenty of hip flexion and struggle with internal rotation.

You might have great external rotation, but limited extension.

You might move beautifully on the floor, but have trouble controlling that same range when you're standing.

That's an important distinction.

Now let's talk about the muscles because there are a lot of them, and this is another reason the phrase tight hips doesn't tell us very much.

On the front of the hip, we have the hip flexors.

The one most people have heard of is the iliopsoas, which is actually the iliacus and the psoas working together.

These muscles help flex the hip, but the psoas in particular also has connections to the lumbar spine, which is one reason conversations around the hips and the lower back often overlap.

Then we have the rectus femoris, which is one of the quadriceps muscles.

It crosses both the hip and the knee, so it helps flex the hip as well as extend the knee.

On the backside, we have the glutes.

The gluteus maximus is the largest and most powerful of the group, and it's heavily involved in hip extension and force production.