Quickly Identifying Hip Tendonitis: 3 Tests You Can Perform at Home

In this video I’m going to cover with you three tests to quickly check if your hip pain is coming from hip tendinitis. After I show you the three tests, I’m going to talk about two more signs to be able to tell the difference between hip tendinitis and hip arthritis because you need to know if you also have hip arthritis going on. With the hip tendinitis they commonly happen together.

My name is 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 that we post every week.

The first test is quite simple. It’s called the tenderness test. All you got to do is find out where your tender for hip tendinitis, it’s going to hurt right on the outermost part of the hip where there’s a bone on the skeleton here. It’s right here on the outside of the femur, the thigh bone. There’s this bony part that sticks out on all of us on yourself. It’s going to be kind of below your this is your hip bone up here, it’s going to be below that usually around this area right here.

If your pain is right there or anywhere around it, that is going to be likely hip tendinitis. Now hip tendonitis can occur a little further up into this area as well. And the front of the hip too. You can get hip tendonitis in the front hip muscles, the hip flexors, but the most common part to get it on is right in here. And if you can poke it, if you can feel right where it hurts, then that’s usually the hip tendinitis.

The second part where you can feel It Is just Inside your hip bones. So where my leg folds right here, right at that fold inside the hip bone right in there is the second most common place to get tendinitis symptoms. Now if it hurts on the front of your hip, it could be hip arthritis, as well, as I’ve already alluded to.

But the difference between hip tendonitis and hip arthritis here is you can’t really poke hip arthritis, if you had just hip arthritis, you wouldn’t be able to really find a tender spot hip tendinitis, you can poke the front of the hip and find the muscle, the tendon, especially the tendon, where it’s tender. But like I said, this tenderness test, nine out of 10, people will get it on the outside of their hip, some do get on the front of their head. So just poke around the edge of the of the bone here or on the bone directly.

Now, what happens with hip tendinitis is often hip bursitis. So just in case, you’re thinking, I might have hip bursitis, too, they happen for the same reasons. So you need to worry too much about whether you have bursitis, or tendinitis. They’re treated the same way. And they usually come on the same way. So if you fix the root problem, which I’m going to talk about a bit more, then you don’t have to worry too much about whether it’s one diagnosis or the other.

Which reminds me to tell you that we’ve got other videos on hip problems, including hip tendinitis, hip bursitis, and more. If you just go down into the description below, you’ll find links to other videos, we’ve got explaining more details about the causes for many hip problems, and how to treat it other tips and advice. So go check that out down in the description below.

So that wraps up the first test. If you can poke the spot that hurts, that’s a sign that you’ve got hip tendinitis, if you can really find that one spot. If it’s kind of diffused or it’s too deep, then it’s likely not hip tendinitis, you’re looking at something else happening. Now that you found where the hip pain is, if you can proceed on to the next test, the second test, it’s going to be the cross legs test.

So for this test, I’m just going to sit up here so you can see my legs a bit better. Say I had the hip pain out here, the suspected tendinitis, or it could be here as well. Usually, if it’s right here, what you’re going to do is cross your leg. Now there’s two ways to cross your leg, you can cross it like this, with your foot over this way your knee this way, if you stretch it out and push down, you might need to hold it there for a bit. And if you feel stretching, maybe even pain outside in the hip right where you had that tenderness.

That’s another sign that you’ve got hip tendinitis. Another way to check is to cross your legs more like this knee over knee, and you can push your knee over this way. And that’ll stretch out just a different way on the side of the hip. But you can also set off the tenderness in that area too. And if you want to just check with absolute certainty, go find that spot that you’ve checked on the tenderness test, and then stretch it and poke it and be careful in my life quite a bit. But if you do that, that is pretty good certainty that you’ve got hip tendinitis.

Now the third sign is looking back to your recent history. What have you been up to? Because one of the most common signs of hip tendinitis the reason why it tends to come on is some repetitive activity. If you have a recent increase in a repetitive activity, like you started a new exercise routine at sort of a go walking for exercise or running, jogging, or maybe you began to go to the gym, or maybe you just got more active at home with chores inside your house or yard work outside the house, but it’s a notable increase from say the month before that, then that’s another sign that you are experiencing hip tendinitis.

This happened to me recently, I began to run more. And I started to increase my mileage kind of aggressively, and then began to get pain on the outside of my hip. And luckily, I’ve been able to treat it just fine. I’m okay now. But I was reminded how hip tendinitis begins to develop. I recently had a patient who’s in her 60s, and we’re actually seeing her for her back problem.

She was having trouble being on her feet and standing picking up anything heavy, because her back would hurt more. But once her back started to get better, she got back to all the activities that she had left and done all the work around the house, all the chores that she was doing, she was trying to clean out her garage, and she was picking up heavy stuff.

So all that stuff got backed up for her schedule. But what’s her backstory to feeling better, she went to town, she went to go pick up her garage, she went to go do the yard work she hadn’t done, she was around the house cleaning because nobody else would clean as good as she would. And she began to come in with pain on the outside of her hip.

So she developed hit tendinitis after her back problem had gotten better, because she’d been more active recently. So think back to your recent activity. And if you if you’re doing something repetitive, usually where your legs are constantly moving. This could also come on from just being on your feet for long periods of time we just standing because you have tension through the tendon and the muscle. And that’s what sets off the tendinitis.

Now let’s talk about two signs to check on yourself that you don’t have arthritis as well. The number one sign that you don’t have arthritis is that you don’t feel stiffness in the morning, if you’ve got this hip pain, but more so comes on as a day goes on. Or if you poke the right spot, it’s not really there in the morning, then that’s usually consistent with hip tendinitis. hip arthritis tends to be painful right there in the morning, first thing when you get up.

And oftentimes if you’ve been sitting for long periods of time, and then you get up and begin to walk later on. And oftentimes, you’ve been sitting for long periods of time, like more than 30 minutes to an hour, and then you go to get up and move. That could be more a sign of hip arthritis. The pain for hip arthritis tends to be deeper in the joints. And it usually is in the front of the hip, not on the outside of the hip.

So if you’re having pain on the outside of it, it’s likely not hip arthritis, it’s more likely hit tendinitis or bursitis. Like I mentioned, same problem, pretty much, just a different tissue in the same area. But you could have hip tendinitis on the front of your hip, which could mask as hip arthritis, the second sign to tell that you don’t have hip arthritis is a loss of motion. If you have a loss of motion, then you probably are experiencing a hip arthritis flare up, or maybe more advanced hip arthritis.

But if you’re just having hip pain, and you check your hip by just moving in another direction that it can, which for you, you would go all the way up all the way back like this. And then you would go outwards and across your body, you can do this sitting down or lying down as well. And then you would twist your leg in and out.

And if you can compare it to the other side, and make sure that it feels about the same doesn’t really feel like it’s limited at all, then you probably don’t have hip arthritis, of course, you’d have to go get checked out by the doctor, you’d have an x ray to properly diagnose hip arthritis.

But also, if you’re in your younger years, if you’re less than 50 years old, the chances of you having hip arthritis bothering you right now are quite low unless you’ve been a very active individual, like you’ve been a marathon runner or half marathon runner, and you have a long history of being on your feet with repetitive activity.

Those are the type that are going to likely run into hip arthritis much sooner than the rest of the population. Now I brought hip arthritis into this video, of course, because hip tendinitis and hip arthritis, they can act like each other, they can be mistaken for each other. But what’s important if you’re suffering from hip tendinitis, right now, it’s super important for you to fix it to make sure that you do the right things to make it go away.

Because if it persists, even at a light amounts, if you just have a little bit of hip tendinitis kind of off and on as time goes on, that is a setup to eventually get hip arthritis. And the reason for that is if you have hip tendinitis, and that means that you’re overusing certain muscles in the area, and it’s irritating the tendon and the bursa is going to begin to compress the hip joints.

And if that goes on for months, years, decades, it’s just a matter of time before that hip joint becomes affected, and you develop hip arthritis, which leads to bad stuff like hip replacements, hip surgeries that you don’t need. And if you can fix the hip tendinitis right now make sure that it’s not coming back, then you’ll be alright. You won’t have hip arthritis, and you can live a healthy and active lifestyle.

So if you want to learn more about hip hop arthritis and other hip tendinitis videos that we have remember go down into the link and check those videos out hey give us a thumbs up if you liked this video and please share this with somebody that you know needs to hear this thanks so much for watching friends we’ll see in the next video. bye