Do you have weak hips? Do you have hip pain or tightness when walking, running, or doing basic activities? Watch and try our simple hip strengthening exercise that you can do at home. Your hips will get stronger, making movement much easier with less pain and tightness.

Hi this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver. I want to show you a glute strengthening exercise today. One of the muscles you want to work on is your glute med, or gluteus medius muscle, which helps stabilize you when you’re standing.

I’ve shown some other exercises on our website for this, and one of the most common ones that we start with is called the clamshell. Once we’ve started that, we want to work on progressing it. In this video I’ll show you the base exercises as well as the progression.

So we’re going to take a piece of thera-band which is like a stretchy tube that we use for strengthening and resistance.

The Clamshell

We’re going to put the band around our knees, just above the knee.
Lie down on your side, working on keeping your body in line with the band.
Now with the clamshell exercise, we work on lifting the leg.

So if you’ve done this one already, this is a progression on that to add resistance. So that now as you lift the leg, it’s giving you more resistance through a range of movement.

The biggest thing is that you work on maintaining your pelvis and your core neutral as you lift the leg.
Breathe out, engage your core, lift your leg
Breathe in, lower down

You should feel it working in the lateral part of your hip. Sometimes you may feel the underneath leg working as well.

Aim for 2 or 3 sets of 10 to 15 repetitions on each side. This should help you strengthen up your glutes and increase endurance.