Top 4 Exercises To Delay And Possibly Avoid A Hip Replacement

I hear you thinking you might need to get a hip replacement at some point in the future has your doctor told you that your hip osteoarthritis is getting worse, and that a hip replacement surgery is in the cards for you, in the next year, maybe the next few years? What did you know that if you can get the mobility and the strength up in your hip?

You can greatly improve the chances that you can avoid a hip replacement, or at the very least, delay getting a hip replacement, which is very important, because it buys you time to get stronger so that if you have to have a hip replacement, some people just do, you’re going to be in a better position to recover quicker after they have replacements.

Now there’s a whole process for getting stronger and improving your hip mobility. And here in my clinic, we do see patients that have hip osteoarthritis, and then they get better by doing the right exercises and strengthening over time, so they can improve their situation tremendously. Now I’m going to show you the first four exercises that we’d start people out on when they’re coming into our clinic. And they’re more moderate to severe in their hip osteoarthritis.

And they’ve usually been told at this point that you’re going to need a hip replacement soon, and they’re working to improve their situation. And hopefully avoid a hip replacement altogether. So the first exercise is you have got to become obsessed, and I mean obsessed with hip fidgeting. So sit down somewhere comfortable, you might already be sitting. And all this is it’s the easiest exercise in the world, is you’re just going to wiggle your thighs, move your knees in and out.

Just like so this is fidgeting, you know, it looks like I’m just doing a nervous tic like some people just do this naturally anyway. But what this does for your hip joints, if you think about the ball and socket joint of the hip, it’s putting a little wiggle through it. And if you just do that nice and easy in a way that doesn’t hurt, it should be comfortable, it should be painless, shouldn’t bother you to do this, it shouldn’t feel worse over time either, then this is great for you.

Because what you’re doing inside the ball and socket joint of the hip is you’re moving around the fluid, the joint fluid is called synovial fluid, so that you can get it to all the different surfaces within the hip joints, and improve the lubrication and nutrition of the cartilage inside your hip joint, you may have been told that you have bone on bone hip arthritis, this is probably just some spots that are bone on bone.

Maybe you have several of it’s more severe. But if you can do this here along with the next few exercises that I’m going to show you and your situation is improving week by week, you know after a few days of doing this, you should notice a little bit of an improvement, then you got a chance you have a chance of delaying at the very least and setting yourself up for a quicker rehabilitation after and at the best situation than you would potentially avoid a hip replacement surgery altogether.

So the best way to do this is to do this in five minutes spurts. Literally set a timer on your clock and your watch kitchen timer on your smartphone, whatever you’d like to use to time yourself, just keep an eye on the clock. And go for five minutes like this just nice, easy wiggles you can do the side that’s affected more. So if that works better for you generally set asides easier than going up and down. But you can go up and down. And just to show you what I’m doing here.

Then to give you a better angle on what I’m doing here, my legs, I’m just moving my legs in and out, my feet are planted on the ground. If your feet were gangly, you could still do this. And it’s not tiring at all to go for a few minutes. Now if for some reason this hurts your hip, like it’s hurting you right here, then you can do the motion a little bit less so instead of going all the way out like this, just do smaller wiggles like that. And you can also do it for less time.

Let’s say it starts to hurt you after you do this for three minutes, you notice and just go one or two minutes, stop and rest at that point. And then come back and do it one or two minutes and see what your tolerance is like over time. And then going up and down, you would use your foot to pump your foot up and down just like this. And that’s even it’s a little less muscle using your hip. So this might be more tolerable for you.

You just have to see what your hip likes and doesn’t like in order to get the most benefit out of this. Now that hip fidgeting movement that I just showed you is very powerful. You have got to become obsessed with that I would put you on a schedule if I was your therapists are seeing you in person of doing that hourly, maybe even every 30 minutes while you’re awake of course.

And honestly most people that I sent home with that exercise that that little movement, they tell me that they do it more than hourly because it’s such an easy thing to do. You could do it in the car as long as you’re not driving. You can you know if you’re waiting on an appointment, if you’re sitting at home, if you’re having a meal if you’re watching television, if you’re watching YouTube, your watch if you’re on social media at home on your phone, this is super easy to do.

So there’s no excuse why you can’t do this. That’ll loan should improve your hip arthritis, at least a good 10, maybe 20%. If you’re doing it enough, Exercise number two is called bent knee fallouts, you’re going to have to lay down for this one. And this one allows your hip to move through a greater range of motion very comfortably and safely.

So lie down just on your back with your knees bent, like so, get nice and comfortable. And with your knees bent, you’re falling outwards, that’s why it’s called a bent, knee fall out. So you’re just going to let your knee slowly fall out like this to the amount of motion that’s comfortable for you.

Because if you get, let’s say, 70 80% of your full motion, then it starts to hurt in your hip, your, your arthritic hip starts to pinch or bother you, then don’t go that far in the future, you’re just going to go to the motion that you can, without any discomfort. And generally, I’ll tell people to do both sides, but alternate. So you’d move one leg out than in than the other leg out then in. And you would do this for two minutes at a time.

So you’re looking at 120 seconds, generally people will do about 60 reps. If you’d like rather count reps, then look at the time, whatever works for you, you can just go for two minutes and count the reps the first time you do it and get an idea for how many you’ll do. I like alternating rather than going out in in together just a bit more because it forces you to use your muscles to control better, because you’re having to think about moving one leg at a time and not letting your whole body roll over like this.

You don’t want to do that, because now becomes more of a back movement than a hip movement, you need to try to isolate the hip movement a bit more. And what you’ll find usually as you keep going in this exercise is that the motion that was painful starts to decrease. In other words, if you went 70% out, you felt hip pain, the first few reps you did this, the third, fourth time in the day that you do this, you might say hey, I can go a little bit farther.

I’m like at 80, maybe 90% of my motion, compared to when I first did this, especially in the morning when people tend to be stiffest with hip arthritis. So you want to do this also hourly throughout the day. But I admit that this is a little more challenging to do hourly, because you have to lie down. So I would do as best as you can.

I would shoot to do 10 rounds of this throughout the day. And it generally isn’t too difficult to do this. So people will be okay. But the main difficulty people have is getting up and down from the floor.

So if it’s just not easy for you to go to your bed or a couch, it basically if you’re not at home, then you might skip this one in the day, but you could still fit it, you could still do the first exercise. But this exercise is a little more thorough than the fidgeting exercise because of fidgeting exercises, small movement, this one’s big movements.

However, the fidgeting exercise, the frequency of that is really important to circulate the fluid inside your hip joints. This one frequency is also important but the focus the intent is to work through your full available pain free range of motion. So it’s a little different, intense. Now the third exercise is glute squeezes.

This is critically important because part of the root problem that sets up hip osteoarthritis, which is what leads to getting a hip replacement is glute muscle weakness. And just so you so I’m clear here, the glute muscles are the butt muscles, the muscles that are in the back of your hip right here. These tend to be very weak.

Whenever I see my patients here that have hip arthritis, they tend to have little to no butt muscles. And even for women that are more curvy and voluptuous that have bigger hips, they may appear to have bigger muscles back there, but when we muscle test them, they’re very weak and they’re not using them very well.

So part of getting the hips healthier for the long term, so that you might delay a hip replacements, and possibly even avoid it completely, is you have got to get bigger glute muscles, you’ve got to get stronger glute muscles and use them more frequently throughout the day in the appropriate way. So the best way to start is by simply tightening up your glute muscles while avoiding tightening up all your thigh muscles.

So seems easy, but you got to put some thought into this. So just find somewhere comfortable to sit. And then you’re going to tighten your glute muscles and you should feel like your whole body lifts up a bit just like I’m doing right there because the muscles squeeze and they tighten up and thicken under your bottom here or in your bottom. And when you do that, you should feel that the muscles start to tire out a little bit.

Now what you don’t want to feel though, is those thigh muscles also working a lot. So you’re probably going to feel that the first time you do this, you’re going to feel your thigh muscles right here on the front, maybe in the back to squeeze. So you’ve got to find the percentage that you can squeeze your glutes at without your thighs working.

So if I went 100% Right there, I can feel my thighs kind of wanting to work. So now I’m going to back off and just go like 50% Now I can go 7080 I’m at about 90 right here and my my legs just on the verge of wanting to work, so I’m going to hold it right here for 10 seconds, it’s very important that you hold it for 10 seconds, after 10 seconds, he can relax. And then you got to repeat this 10 times. So squeeze the glutes, not too hard that your thigh muscles are working.

After squeezing it, then relax. And that’s to, I’m not going to do all 10 Right here, but you get the idea. You’re squeezing your glutes, holding it for 10 seconds, and then relax. Now, this glute squeezing exercise key, it’s more of a training thing, not a strengthening thing. At this point, you’re trying to train your glutes to work apart from your thigh muscles.

Because in future exercises that you’ll have to do to get your glutes stronger, you have to be able to isolate those glutes and having that conscious control over your butt muscles is really important so that when you go do the more aggressive exercises that are going to strengthen your glutes, you’re not incidentally working out your thigh muscles too.

And you’re going to accidentally working your thigh muscles. And then that means that you’re going to technically be doing a thigh muscle workout. And it’s those thigh muscles that start to take over for the glutes. And that feeds into the hip osteoarthritis problem, it’s going to feed into the root problem that sets up hip arthritis.

So you don’t want to be doing that. So you can do this in standing too, which I really like. Because then you can do this almost anywhere, you can be standing in line somewhere, you could be at a store, you could be sitting down at home or in the car you can technically do this line down to. So all you’re going to do in standing is squeeze your hip muscles, which is going to shove your hips forward.

But again, you can’t be firing those thigh muscles, you have to find the percentage that you can work at where your glutes work, but your thighs do not so tight. But muscles here I’m at about 70 80%. Now I’m at 90 95%. And I feel my thighs wanting to work, but I’m okay right here, hold it for 10 seconds 2456789 10 and then relax. And this shouldn’t hurt.

This should feel really good on your hips. Now, the only reason it would hurt if you have hip arthritis to do this exercise is if it’s extremely severely flared up right now. Like if you just went through a flare up, it’s gotten significantly worse. Maybe recently, or maybe it’s been really bad for weeks or months, then it could hurt, you’ve got to back off on the intensity of doing this and work at like 10% or 5% Just get your glutes to turn on a teeny tiny bit.

And over time as you flare down, yeah, stop doing things that slow you down, like being on your feet too much. You know what flares you up. I mean, you know, when you go through your day, and you’d say, I’m going to, I’m going to hit those stairs, or I got to go to the grocery store and it just kills me all the time.

You probably should be on a cane, or a walker, maybe some crutches, you need to offload your hips so that you can get that the joint the ball and socket joint to rest a bit. But you can still do your daily activities you get maybe you got to use a scooter at the grocery store to you know, the motorized scooter, you’ve got to get off your feet and let your hip joint rest so that you can do these exercises. So he can delay it, maybe even prevent a hip replacement surgery.

Okay, Exercise number four is head to heel rocking, this one’s also improving your mobility. So you’re going to have to get on hands and knees on this one. So this one’s a bit more advanced, you have to have your knees okay, you may skip this one if you have if you just can’t get into the position or it’s this is not going to be as easy to do throughout the day regularly.

But I would go to do this at least twice a day would be fantastic. Like before you get up out of bed or you know sometime in the morning because you’re usually around a bed. And then sometime in the evening when you’re headed towards bed, because you can climb onto the bed and do this you don’t have to get up and down from the floor.

However, if you feel like getting the up and down from the floor is what you need to do, and go for it. I like this one a lot. A lot of people tell me they really benefit from this one. That’s why I’ve included it here. So you’re just going to get on your hands and knees, you can be on your fists, I like to be on my fist.

It’s just more comfortable on my on my wrists. But you can be flat handed to you if that’s comfortable for you. And if your knee hurts a little trick is to put pillows under it, put a pillow or a folded blanket or towel, just cushion it. And oftentimes that helps. It might if your knee is stiff, then you’re going to have trouble with this exercise, you may skip it and focus on the other ones.

And all you’re going to do on this is slowly and comfortably go back just a comfortable amount and then come back up. And do this for one minute. You might get in 2030 reps, maybe 40 If you go a bit faster, but the point here is not to go fast. It’s to improve your mobility in your hips. Nice and easy. You can pause some people like to pause right here and stretch a bit.

They feel like their hip feels good. When you get there, and then something else you can do is shift your hips over. So I’m moving my hips over this way towards my left foot, and go back with my hips shut out to the left. So it’s like I’m aiming that way. And you can go the other way too. So you can add slight different motions to the hip joints as you go back. So I’ll tell people just to play with the motion, go back and forward. And don’t push it too much.

This shouldn’t be an aggressive stretch, it should be a mild, comfortable motion that is focused out promoting more mobility in your hip. So you need to get yourself into a routine of doing these four exercises, at least a few of them maybe the first two or three exercises depending on your schedule and your location and how you can get up and down from the ground all those factors you need to think about.

But if you get into some consistency and some obsession with doing these exercises, you should begin to see an improvement in your hip mobility and then the use of your glute muscles and that will get you some relief in your hip joints have got a playlist full of videos for people suffering from hip osteoarthritis. Go check that out in the description here below. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye