Do you have tight hips? Chronic hip pain or soreness? Often there are imbalances in the strength and tightness of the muscles around the hip. Try our simple hip strengthening exercise for balancing the hip – strengthening the internal rotators and opening up the buttock region. This will help you feel better and your hips be more open and relaxed and more balanced.
Hi this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy and today I’m going to show you a hip strengthening and rebalancing exercise.
Do you get tightness in your hips from sitting all day? This is a great exercise you can do at home to open up some of the tension across the back of the hips. Some people get quite tight across the back of the hips so they’ll feel some tension or pain the the gluteal area or in the buttock region.
The Exercise
- Lie down with a pillow underneath your low back to try to keep the back neutral
- Put a soft ball or towel between the knees to help them stay in line with the hips.
- Bend your knees up. You can only do this if you can bend your knees without your back arching too much.
- If it feels too tight through your thighs, you have to be careful doing this exercise.
- Then we’re going to take a piece of TheraBand or stretchy band and wrap it around the ankles
- Now work at pulling your heels apart.
- So breathing out, engaging your core muscles and pulling your feet away.
We’re working on strengthening the internal rotation of the hip, so this is a very difficult exercise. I would encourage you not to push too heavily into tension. There’s not a huge motion here with the tension we have on the band. We’re trying to get muscle activation, working back and forth through repetition to fatigue.
You’ll get to about 8 to 10 repetitions, maybe even less than that, and then take a short rest. We usually aim to 2 to 3 sets.