Outer Hip Pain: Why Does The Outside Of My Hip Hurt? 4 Common Reasons

In this video, I’m going to answer the question, why does the outside of my hip hurts, I’ll be covering the four most common reasons for outer hip pain. And the last one I’m going to talk about is the more serious one. And I’m going to mention another one. That’s kind of a notable one, but it’s not real reason for outer hip pain. So you want to listen to all of that coming up next.

I’m Dr. David Middaugh, and I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active, and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. Please consider subscribing to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we upload every single week.

And before I go into the four reasons, I want to let you know that in the description below this video, if you drop down that description, I’ve got links to all the reasons I’m going to mention your next, I’ve got playlist of videos to help you more specifically with the reasons for outer hip pain. So if you’re looking for exercises, more tips and advice on how to address the problems that I’m going to talk about, just go down into the description and find the links that are relevant to what you’re dealing with.

The first most common problem of hip pain on the outside of the hip is bursitis, more commonly known as Trochanter ik bursitis. And the reason why they call it that is because on the hip here, this part of the bone I hear is called the greater trochanter. So sometimes what you hear this called greater trochanter, Eric bursitis. But the common term is just hip bursitis, you’re usually talking about a bursa, which is a fluid filled sac ran on the outermost part of the hip bone right here that becomes irritated, inflamed, and painful.

Now the way that you can tell that you’ve got this hip bursitis, or truck enteric bursitis is that it’ll hurt right there, there’s a spot right where the bursa is, it’s a little tiny size, like the size of a coin, you can poke it, and it is tender, it’s point specific, sometimes you can note a little bit of swelling in the area, it’s a little harder, because you know, the hips have big areas don’t like a like a knee joint or a wrist or elbow where it’s easier to find swelling.

But more often than not, people come in saying it hurts right there. And they’ll point to a certain spot right on the side of their hip, where they feel the pain. And as long as the rest of the testing checks out, it’s likely hip bursitis. And a few other things to look for as this comes on with more physical activity.

Like if you haven’t been as active and then you start to do something that increases your physical activity, whether it’s exercise, or chores around the house or other things, it just gets you up on your feet more if there was a kind of a sudden spike in your activity, and then you start to get this problem, that that’s the reason why you might get choke enteric hip bursitis usually rest is needed for this that will calm it down.

But that’s not the only thing that’s needed for sure. Cantera Kip bursitis, there’s more treatment necessary, which we talked about in those videos that I mentioned down in the description below, go find those to get the more specific detail to help for hip bursitis. The second most reason for pain on the outside of your hip is hip tendinitis. Now this acts a lot like hip bursitis. In fact, it comes on for the same reasons, a spike in physical activity norm above normal from what you’ve been doing.

It could be exercise related or chore housework related. And rest does also calm this down. But there’s deeper problems that need to be addressed for this to not be coming back on a regular basis. The difference in how it feels to people is like hip bursitis, it’s in the same area. So here’s where the hip bursitis pain would be with hip tendinitis. The muscles that are on the outside of the hip right here, they all come down and they come together, they converge and attached to different points on this part of the bone.

This is called your greater trochanter. And the tendons are what connect the muscles to the bone. So if you look at anatomy pictures, you’ll see the red muscles. And then at the Android before it connects to the bone here, it turns white, that white stuff is the tendon. And what happens in hip tendinitis is it starts to become irritated and painful. So it’s a little more diffused or spread out. It’s not as point specific when people have hip tendinitis.

The way they look when they come in is instead of saying like with bursitis, where they say it hurts right here, they start to say, well, it kind of hurts in this area, it’s less specific. And then they’ll typically be able to move their leg a certain way and kind of make the pain come and go as they move. That’s a lot more common with hip tendinitis. Now, the good news is they’re both related to the same root problem, and they’re both treated pretty much the same.

It’s just a matter of what which one broke down first, you know, what’s the weakest link in the chain of tissues in your body, some people the bursa goes first. For other people, the tendon becomes affected, and for others, other things become affected. Now the third most common reason for pain on the outside of your hip, is it band syndrome. It stands for Iliotibial and then band after that, so sometimes you just see it be but they mean iliotibial band.

And what that means ilio means the bone of the hip this this bone specifically is called the ilium. So ilio tibial tibia is the bone down here in the shin. So here’s the femur. And then here’s the shin. And on the outside of the hip, and thigh is where there’s this big, long white tissue that connects all the way up here from the hip, and goes down past the knee joint and attaches to the tibia, the top of the shin bone, kind of on the outside of the knee joint, because that IT band goes all the way down past the knee joints.

IT band syndrome typically has knee pain associated with it, you might have pain on the outside of your hip, but you might also have some irritation damage your knee that’s more characteristic of IT band syndrome, like bursitis. And like tendinitis. This tends to worsen with more physical activity, whether you began to exercise more lately.

Oftentimes, this happens to runners or people that are cycling people that are doing repetitive endurance type sports, we’ve seen people get it from using the elliptical in the gym, or even rowing machines at the gym as well, or at their personal gyms at home, at any repetitive activity tends to set this off.

And so it has to be looked at as the way that they’re moving, the way that they’re running, the way they’re walking, walking consists off to the way they’re using the machine, whether it’s an elliptical, a stationary bicycle, or a rowing machine or some other cardiovascular exercise machine that involves leg movement, any of those can possibly set off IT band syndrome, the characteristic feature of the location of pain for IT band syndrome is on moreso on the front of the hip. But on the outside still.

So I’ll show you right about here where you put your hand in your front pocket, but it’s more on the outside of the hip, whereas bursitis is going to be more in this area. tendinitis will be kind of diffuse, IT band syndrome will will tend to affect the outside front of the hip right in this area, right where you would put your hand in your front pocket. And the reason for that is because then it van runs all the way down on the outside of your leg to the knee.

But there’s a muscle right here called the TFL muscle. TfL is short for tensor fascia Lata. And it’s the only muscle that connects into that IT band. And it starts up at the edge of the hip bone right here runs down a bit right where the front pocket would be and then inserts into that it bent. And that TfL muscle commonly gets overused, it gets kind of stiff, sometimes it can become painful itself. And then it starts to yank on that it bend when it becomes shortened and stiffened. And that’s what causes the knee pain and the hip pain.

If it goes on for some time, it can eventually cause back pain or pain in other parts of the hip. Because that muscle tightens up so much, it can start to yank this bone in funny directions. And that influences how the spine moves. And so you don’t want to have it bent too long. It’s very fixable, you can treat it band syndrome. So if you’ve got it, go down to the playlist below for IT band syndrome and start addressing it immediately.

The fourth reason for pain on the outside of the hip and this is the more serious one, the one that takes a little more treatments a little more digging a little more understanding and potentially has the worst long term impact if not treated properly. It’s sciatica of sciatica in a nutshell is a pinched nerve, the sciatic nerve specifically which runs out of the this edge of the bone right here, and it sends nerves down into the back of the thigh all the way down the back of the leg and the front of the leg and into the tops and bottom of the foot.

Now there are some nerve branches that go toward the outside of the hip. And there’s a lot of muscles that are innervated by the sciatic nerve that run to the outside of the hip specifically out here. And they’re they’re influenced by that sciatic nerve. So if your sciatic nerve becomes irritated, it can it can shorten those muscles affect those nerves and causes sensation of pain on the outside of your hip.

The biggest differentiating factors of the way that you can tell whether you have tendinitis, bursitis IT band syndrome or sciatica is sciatica tends to be a lot more widespread. Some people tend to have back pain before the hip pain comes on. Some people will have pain in the back of their thigh, they might get cramping in their hamstring, even cramping in the calf muscle or the arc of the foot because that same sciatic nerve goes all the way down into the arc of the foot and cramping can happen there.

A common other symptom of sciatica is plantar fasciitis type pain, not true plantar fasciitis, but pain at the heel and into the arc of the foot because of the nerves that run from the sciatic nerve down into that area. And the reason why this is more serious is because it’s a pinched nerve muscles tend to recover a lot quicker and even tendons can recover a lot quicker and easier than pinched nerves do and if nerve state pins for a long time and you got some Serious problems you can, you can really have some long term implications.

And with sciatica specifically, because the sciatic nerve or is made up of nerve roots that come off the low back, you might have a herniated disc, or some other back problem appear like arthritis that could be influencing your sciatic as well. Now, we’ve got tons of videos on how to treat sciatica. Again, go to that description, and find the link for sciatica videos to begin working on that if that’s what you think you’d have going on.

Now bonus reason that I want to talk about that I want to include here, but not as an official one of the four reasons for pain on the outside of your hip. But it’s an honorable mention. It’s hip arthritis, like osteo arthritis. And the reason why they make it one of the four is because hip osteoarthritis, otherwise known as hip arthritis, tends to cause pain in the front of the hip more so.

So for people coming in with hip arthritis will say it hurts right here on the front of the hip, rather than out here, like the last four conditions that I’ve talked about. But the reason why I’m talking about it to you right now is because if your hip is arthritic, meaning the joints, the ball and socket joint of the hip right here, is not moving properly, that can affect the muscles on the outside of the hip, like the ones that cause tendinitis, the ones that cause it band syndrome and bursitis. And so you can have hip arthritis that is causing one of these other problems.

So if you got pain on the front of your hip and the side of your hip, you might have hit an underlying hip arthritis problem. Now, this tends to affect people once they hit their 50s and 60s and beyond. It does affect some people that are even younger than that, but they have to be super sedentary.

What we’ve seen is people that have desk jobs like where they’re working for 40 plus hours a week stuck at a desk and they’re sitting, which means they don’t get a whole lot of motion to their hip joints. Those are the people that tend to be most susceptible, most likely to get hip arthritis at a younger age or earlier than they should. So just watch out for that. And just in case you want to learn more, we’ve also included a link to a playlist completely about hip arthritis videos.

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