3 Reasons Knee Pain Is Coming From Tight Hips

Do you have knee pain and tight hips? Are you wondering if your tight hips can be causing your knee pain, or maybe making it worse if it’s for some other reason, tight hips directly influenced knee pain, I’ll explain three ways that happens in today’s video.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist, El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active, and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgeries, injections and pain medications, please subscribe to this channel and turn on your notification bell so you don’t miss any videos that we put out each week. Currently, we’re putting out two videos every week. So don’t miss those. So let’s get right into it.

The first way that tight hips affect knee problems is a loss of range of motion. If you’re sitting at home right now, or wherever you are, and you know that your hips just don’t move like they used to or you know that one side does not move like the other like if you try to pick your knee up towards your chest or your body, or if you try to twist your whole leg one way or the other way, like where your foot rotates out this way or this way. And you do that on the other side and just they don’t rotate the same way one goes farther than the other.

Or if you try to reach back, maybe try to extend your leg back behind you. And you don’t feel like you can do it the same on one hip versus the other hip and you just feel that the muscles and the motion just feels different on one side versus the other side. You bet you’ve got a loss of range of motion on one hip, and it may be causing worse knee pain in that knee or the other knee because of how you’re walking, how you’re moving around.

It’s not always the same knee and the same hip that’s involved like the right knee and the right hip, it could be the right hip affecting the left knee or vice versa, the left hip affecting the right knee, it can also be the same side to that does happen. But because we’re bipedal In other words, we walk on two legs, one leg, things that happen on one leg can affect the other leg. And it can go back and forth. Just to explain in detail a bit more about hip range of motion and how it affects the knee, I’ve got my skeleton here.

And so if your hip can’t come up towards your chest this way, very good. It’s blocked the hip joint for some reason, then you’re the when you walk and you go to pick up your leg to move your leg forward and progress to walking or go to pick up your leg to step on a stair and then push your body up, your muscles are not going to operate properly because of that loss of motion.

And of course, your hip might be affected the joints, but the way that your muscles are being used will affect your knee. And that loss of motion can make you compensate on your other side and make your other knee work differently. So if you’ve got tightness in your hips, and you detect that there’s less motion, you’ve got to begin to fix that.

If you’re wondering, well, how the heck do I fix that I’m going to I’ve linked in the description of video that you’ve got to go check out where it goes over exercises on how to improve your hip strength. And I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. But just stay with me for a moment because this bone right here the femur, the longest bone in our body makes up the hip joint, the top and the top of the knee joint at the bottom.

What happens at the hip as far as motion directly influences what happens at the motion at the knee. So clearing up, that motion is critical for you. If you’ve got a different side to side, then you may be a stiffer person in general, like you just don’t have lots of range of motion.

But if that’s been the case for you pretty much your whole life, then you can call that your normal, especially if you feel like people in your family weren’t that flex, nobody was into gymnastics, or any sort of tumbling or anything like that, then it’s okay to be like that, you’ve just got to realize that you’re not going to be the flexible type.

On the other hand, if you’re very flexible, then you’re going to have problems with strength, which I’ll talk more about next.

The second way that tight hips affect knee problems is through muscle imbalances. The hip joint, here’s the ball and the ball. And then of course the soccer would come over here is surrounded by muscles of course in the back but what you’re looking at here is there’s glute muscles, the buttock muscles.

On the outside, you’ve got some other glute muscles, the abductors are coming in for them. On the front, you’ve got the hip flexors and then on the inside, you’ve got the groin muscles or the adductors. The ad doctors and all those muscles together work to provide the normal stability and motion and control of the ball into the socket.

And if there’s an imbalance there, meaning there’s muscles on one side of the hip joint that are stronger or weaker than the other than the mechanics, the way the ball moves on the socket is going to be different which translates to motion occurring differently at the knee because it’s the same bone that’s been influenced those muscle imbalances.

The muscles themselves can become tight, overworked, they can become painful, and it can hurt to just stand up and walk or even just sitting in the same position for a while can be uncomfortable for the hip joint and the hip muscles around there. If you’re more the flexible type people that are more Flexible genetically people that are more inclined to do gymnastics or to be able to do the splits or put their foot behind their head that very flexible, people tend to have weaker muscles.

Because in order to be that flexible, generally the muscles have to give up all that motion, which means they’re going to be weaker, that person is going to be susceptible to getting muscle imbalances, because they still have to walk and do all the normal things that everybody does. But they’re doing it in a way that’s compensated, which over time causes the hip joint to not move well. And it can often cause me problems.

Now, if you’re younger, if you’re in your 40s, or 30s, or 20s, and you’re watching this video, you probably aren’t dealing with arthritis yet. But if you’re 50, or over in your 60s 70s, or beyond, and you’re dealing with hip pain, then flexibility has probably gone down significantly over the decades. And if you’ve had hip issues over the years, where you’ve had knee issues over the years, then you might begin to develop hip issues like arthritis.

And that’s the third most common problem that can cause tightness in the hips, arthritis to be really simple. If you see that ball that connects to the socket, it’s a smooth surface is covered by cartilage and, and the lining of the socket is also covered in cartilage. So that smooth motion can occur there. But if there’s been bad mechanics, meaning the ball is in quite centered in the socket, there’s muscle imbalances, there’s been losses of motion over time. And that’s been the case for decades.

That’s why I see people in their 50s and older than the tissue around here can change very much like how you get calluses on your hands. If you do a lot of work with your hands or exercising, weightlifting, that kind of thing. Your skin will get thicker, to protect itself from breaking down so that you can go do that same activity again, like weightlifting or housework without tearing your skin, or cartilage and our bones and muscles all do the same thing.

The thing is, it happens a lot slower. And it’s dangerous if it happens inside of a joint, because you don’t want to bump on this smooth ball or a bump on the inside of the socket, because then you’re not going to get normal motion. And that can cause tightness. That’s what arthritis is the surfaces of the joint changed gradually over time, in a way that’s negative, that influences motion in a negative way, and doesn’t allow the hip to have its full mobility.

Once that happens in the muscles will change the way the person walks, typically changes. And it can improve it can be remedied in most cases. But you’re going to have some more permanent changes that may just limit you and a few things you do in life. If you’ve got hip arthritis, it’s not the end all be all of us get hip arthritis at some point or another.

You know, it’s just may not be affecting us as we get into our 70s and 80s. But we don’t want it to keep us from walking from to keep us from enjoying life to the fullest. So if you’ve got hip arthritis, what you need to know is that you’ve got to begin to exercise it in a way that gets you that full range of motion and calms down any hip pain that you might have, so that your knee pain can be healthy as well for people that come in to see us that have both knee pain and hip pain or fixing the hip

First, if you’re at home and you’ve got pain in both areas, you’ve been told you have arthritis out here in the hip, you should prioritize fixing the hip in order to get your knee better for the long term. I’m not saying don’t do anything to help your knee right now I’m just saying if you’re looking to fix a long term, if you address only the knee if you’re going into a treatment or you’re doing exercises or stretches just for your knee and ignoring the hip, you’re going to deal with the knee problem for much longer than you need to because you need to fix the hip problem.

First, you need to address that arthritis first. And you’re probably asking what exercises should I be doing? I’m not going to cover that in this video. I’ve got another video that’s going to help you exactly with that. Go into the description below and you’ll see a video titled The top five glute exercises for people with knee problems. watch that video start doing those exercises daily at least several times a week.

So you can begin to get the right strength in your hip muscles to influence your knee problem and put it to rest for good it is possible to fix knee and hip issues naturally without surgery if you’re doing the right exercises. I hope this video was helpful for you please drop a comment and let us know if it was the drop a comment and let us know those glute exercises were good for you.

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