%202.png)
Service Secondary Icon & Slogan Name
MSK Health
Brighton & Hove and West Sussex
Brighton & Hove and West Sussex
Hip pain is a common complaint. Your hip is built to take your weight while walking, jumping, and running and it is very difficult to damage it. Pain from the hip can be felt in your groin, on the inside or outside of your thigh, in your buttocks, and at times down your leg. Although this may be worrying, it will usually get better on its own with time.
There are things that you can do to help your hip while it is painful. Try to use your hip in the normal way but change the amount you do.
How to Protect Your Joints Leaflet
10 Things not to do if You Have Lower Limb Tendon Pain
To keep your hip strong it is good to continue to exercise despite the hip being sore. Strengthening exercise is particularly good for your hip. There are some exercises in this section you may wish to do.
There are some examples of exercises to do below. You can use our symptom tracker to check if what you are doing is helping you to improve.
X-rays and scans can help for a small number of people and in certain situations. However, most of the time it shows us things that are normal for the age of your hip and are not related to your pain. These sorts of findings will not help the hip get better. This is why your GP or clinician may say that it is not needed.
Most hip pain will settle naturally in time with little or no help. Occasionally you may need some extra help to get your foot and ankle better.
If you feel you would like to talk to a healthcare professional to help you further with your hip you can fill in a self referral form.
Exercise is often used to help you improve your symptoms by increasing your muscular strength. We all need to improve our muscle mass (the amount of muscle we have) before being able to increase our strength, power and endurance.
Strengthening is a process that requires us to challenge our bodies with activity to be able to drive a change. These changes are not immediate and strengthening will take at least 6-8 weeks before we notice big changes.
Below are some ideas of how to choose what repetitions you should be using. Remember that you need muscle mass and strength before you can improve your power and/or endurance:
This is the process where we build muscle mass.
Rep range tends to be greater.
3 sets x 12-15 repetitions.
Improve your strength with lifting heavier loads.
Improve your strength by lifting more repetitions.
3 sets x 3-5 repetitions with a heavier load.
3 sets x 8-12 repetitions slowly.
Hard work (80%)
When you are ‘strong’ you can increase the speed at which you move a load.
4 sets x 4-6 repetitions.
50% maximal effort.
Explosive.
The goal is to be able to improve the amount of time that you can keep going for.
3-4 sets x 15-25 repetitions.
Light resistance.
Do you find it too difficult?
Is your pain worsening
Do you lose good technique/movement patterning?
If Yes, Regress.
Reduce the load.
Reduce the repetitions.
Reduce the depth of the movement
Have you just recently progressed?
Do you feel that there is still a challenge but your pain does not worsen?
If Yes, Maintain.
You might need a bit longer doing what you’re doing.
Do you find it easy?
Can you complete your whole program without a challenge?
Do you not have any flare ups?
If Yes, Progress.
Increase the weight.
Increase the repetitions.