Top 3 Exercises To Do To Start Helping A Hip Strain Or Sprain

In this video, I’m going to tell you the top three exercises to do if you’ve got a hip strain or a hip sprain. 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 this channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post every single week. And before we get into the exercises, I’m going to show you here, I need to let you know that I’ve got a video called hip strains and sprains, everything you need to know that talks about the symptoms of diagnosis, other treatment options besides the exercises, which I’m going to cover here, and you can find that video linked in the description below.

So for the first exercise, it’s called hip flapping Are you going to do is find some where you can sit comfortably, a couch works great. And usually you need to scoot to the edge of your seat, just so that you have some freedom of movement for your thighs, because what you’re going to be doing here is just flapping your hips in and out just nice and comfortable like this, this motion right here, you need to do it for about a minute or two to get the benefit of it, all you’re trying to do is get motion inside the hip joint, the ball and socket joints, there’s fluid inside that joint that helps to nourish the inside of the joint.

And then this movement also is very light, easy motions for the muscles, the tendons and the ligaments around the joint, which is what you’re trying to heal for a hip strain or a hip sprain. So it’s kind of like you’re fidgeting This is an easy motion to do that almost looks normal doesn’t really look like an exercise. And you can do this as much as your body can tolerate, I would encourage you if you’re doing this, because you have a hip strain and hip sprain right now, to do this every 30 minutes for a minute or two at a time.

If you want to do it more often than that, or for longer periods of time, it would be okay, as long as you’re not feeling anything become aggravated in your hip. Now, as far as how fast to flap and how big the motion should be, it’s really up to you, you can go all the way out. And if you want, you can go fast if you like it’s going to be a little more aggressive on your muscles.

So just be careful going faster, where you can go nice and slow. And you can do little tiny motions as well. What you want to avoid doing right now is any sort of marching exercise where you’re picking up your legs like this, because that is going to aggravate your hip, likely, you may get away with it right now, but it may aggravate your hip later on.

Because what typically sets up a hip strain or a hip sprain is a muscle imbalance. And if you’re marching, it usually feeds into that imbalance. Although my feel good to do it right now, in the long term, you’re going to feed into the imbalance. So it’s not a good thing to pursue right now, you want to have your feet supported flat on the floor on some surface. And you’re just going to wiggle your hips and knees in and out just like this.

The second exercise that I want you to do is a standing glute squeeze and it looks just like this, I’m going to turn around so you can see me just fine, you’re going to stand comfortably and put your weight evenly between both legs. So 5050. And then what you want to do is start to squeeze your butt muscles kind of gently, and then eventually harder and harder as hard as you can.

But without firing your thigh muscles, you want to just feel your glutes your buttock muscles tighten up, and you’re going as hard as you can which you may not get to 100%, you may get to like 80%, or for some people, even just 20%, maybe 40 or 50%, before the thigh muscles start to fire. So you’re going to hang out at the percentage of glute tightening that you can, without your thighs firing hold for 10 to 20 seconds there, you’re going to do this 10 times.

So it looks just like this, you’re going to squeeze the glutes and think of a percentage right now at about 80%. And if I go all the way 100% Then if you’re just starting to want to engage, so I’m going to back off just a bit, I got to like 95% this shut off here. And I’m going to hold there for 10 to 20 seconds. These muscles are working right here, they’re tight.

After about 10 seconds, you can relax them, and then repeat. And the point of this exercise is twofold. One, you’re trying to wake up these muscles here so that they can begin to take some pressure off the sprain or the strain that you’re going through. But then to is you’re also beginning to treat the root problem, which is making sure that you can fire your muscles independently because oftentimes when people have going on that sets up this hip strain or hip sprain is that they’re firing the wrong muscle at the wrong time.

Often the quads or the front of the hips. The hip flexors right here are engaging when they’re not supposed to. They’re trying to they’re trying to move, run exercise, do things around the house, and this muscle should be dominating the motion and taking people through their walking pattern, their exercise pattern, but because of learned compensations, they’re now using the thigh muscles quite a bit the front of the hip muscles when they shouldn’t be.

And you need to reteach your body, how to just fire the glutes back here without firing the front of the hips and thighs here. So do 10, second to 10 to 22nd holds and do 10 reps, you should feel like your glutes are getting a bit of a workout after you’ve gotten several reps into this. By the time you’ve done 10 rounds of this exercise, you should be nice and warmed up back here. And you might even feel like you can increase the intensity without firing the front’s a bit better.

That’s what I would expect if you go through all 10 reps of this. And as you get better at this over time, because if you’re dealing with a hip strain or a hip sprain, you need to be doing this until your symptoms go away. And then maybe for another week or two afterwards, to make sure that these muscles are behaving properly. And these you’re not building a compensation or feeding into a compensation you already have.

You should feel like your glutes, fire better and better without your quads taking over so much. Now this exercise sets you up for the third exercise, which is a diamond bridge for the diamond bridge, you’re going to lie down on your back comfortably. And then you’re going to put your legs into a diamond position or a frog leg position is another alternative way that it’s described.

Basically put the soles of your feet together and let your knees fall outwards here and only go as much as you comfortably can. If your hip is bothering you, you’re sprain or strain just hanging out where you where you feel comfortable. And an alternative to this is just to put your feet flat like this that might be more comfortable for you.

Rather than going all the way out. You can work from this I’ll show you in just a moment. But to do the diamond bridge, feet together, flat soul to soul, just like so. And then you’re going to think about tightening your butt muscles. So you’re flattening your back. So I’m thinking about if my hand was back here, smashing my back down, which sucks my abs down against the table against my hand back there. And that almost begins to lift my butt right here, my glutes tighten up and it begins to just lift a little bit.

While I’m trying to keep my knees relaxed here, my legs inevitably start to come up a bit. That’s okay. But what I want to feel what you should feel at home if you’re doing this right now is your glutes tightening up quite a bit. It’s okay, if you have other muscles engaged like your hamstrings in the back of your thigh, or the front of the thigh muscles may engage a little bit too.

That’s fine right now, as long as you can definitively say your butt muscles are the ones that are definitely tight tighter than everything else, then you’re on track. Then what you’re going to do next is begin to lift your bottom a little bit. So you’re still holding your back flat, it might come off the table a bit.

But then you’re pushing your you’re tightening your glutes and you’re lifting your bottom up just an inch or so you don’t have to go very high, half an inch, an inch is just fine, a centimeter to three at most is just fine. And you’re holding it here for 10 to 20 seconds, just like the standing glute exercises the squeezes. Now after 10 or 20 seconds, you’re going to relax everything down. And you should have felt your glutes get a good tightening right there, get a little workout. You can repeat this for 10 reps.

So back flat, but tight and then lift just a tiny bit. Feel those glutes working. After about 10 seconds you can come back down and relax. Now questions I get on this exercise is how far how far away? Should your feed be from you like out here? Is that okay? Or as close as you can get him as possible. My answer is always as comfortable as you can make it.

For some people, it’s going to become more comfortable to bring your feet in or out or just find the sweet spot the spot that’s best for you. Generally, if you want some guidance on this some more specific guidance. The closer you bring your feet to you, the better generally, but it’s not a hard and fast rule because some people don’t fit this.

Generally, you’ll fire your hamstrings a little less the closer you bring yourself in, which targets the glutes a bit more. So I would shoot for that. But don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work out for you and be okay with moving your legs away your feet away from your bottom. back flat but tight squeeze those glutes real good. Hold it for 10 seconds. And you should feel your glutes getting toasty they should be getting fatigued a bit and go for 10 to 20 seconds.

You’re just trying to tighten the cheeks bring everything together as best as you can. And you don’t need to lift very high at all because that can begin to stretch out a sprain or a strain in your hip. It’s just a small amount of motion that you’re trying to lift up. And by the way, if this does not agree with your with your hip, if your hip starts to hurt, you don’t lift just back flat and butt tight. And you could just do it like that without lifting up because it does open up the hip joint a bit.

The intent here is to open up the hip joint and make the glutes work in a fully shortened position. So that’s why the knees are open like this. But if it’s if you have a very bad strain or sprain, it can over tension it. So it’s okay to come into a more closed knee position or not go so far out. So if you just can’t drop the knees out at all, you could just do what we would call a normal bridge.

So feet flat just like this, you do want to point your toes out a bit, and then you do that everything else is same back flat, but tight, and you just lift up a tiny bit. And you can still get your glutes working quite a bit here to say your knees are not in a full, open position. So they’re not, the joint position changes the position of the tendons and the ligaments changed a bit. It’s just not as optimal of exercise to do versus the diamond bridge.

So there you have it, those are your three exercises that you’re going to do, we did the hip flapping, so you’re just going out and then like this, and you do that for one to two minutes at a time, you get diminishing returns after two minutes. So you don’t really need to do more than that. You can, it usually doesn’t hurt people, but it’s not going to benefit you a lot more, you’re better off saying to yourself, I’m going to do this again in 30 minutes, or an hour and doing it more frequently throughout the day, rather than doing it for a long time, once a day. And the second exercise is a stabbing glute squeezes.

So you’re trying to remember how to fire your glutes without firing the front of your thighs and hips. And you’re holding it for 10 to 20 seconds, 10 reps, and then we did the diamond bridges. Or you could do just a normal bridge. If you want to modify it for your hip position, also 10 to 20 seconds and hold for 10 reps. If you’re dealing with a hip strain or a hip sprain, right now, I would be doing these exercises as much as possible as much as you can tolerate without getting worse.

Usually every hour every two hours at most is what I would do. As long as you’re improving and benefiting from that kind of frequency. I keep that up. And as the symptoms subside, and you feel better than a good idea would be to keep going with these exercises for another week past when your symptoms are gone. And then you can start trailing off these exercises.

And at that point, I go look at solving the root problem, which I have a video for solving the root problem for hip pain, and it’s linked down in the description below. You can go check that out. Hope you liked this video. If you did, give us a thumbs up please share it with somebody that needs to see this and hopefully we’ll see you in the next video. Bye friends