How Long Does It Take to Loosen Tight Hips?
As a chiropractor, I work with clients who have tight hips all of the time. Whether you are an active person, someone who sits at a desk inside your New York City office all day, or someone who is a weekend warrior playing CityPickle pickleball, you have likely dealt with tight hips a time or two.
Tight hips and loosening those tight hips are not likely solved by what you likely think they are solved by (hint: endless stretching isn't the way).
This blog post is going to walk through how I help patients loosen their hips and some exercises that you can get started with at home.
What Causes Tight Hips in the First Place
The hip is a very large ball-and-socket joint similar to your shoulder. We have your pelvis that has a cup in it, and then your femur, the big leg bone, fits inside of the hip. In order to keep your bones connected, our muscles surround the joint.
The hip muscles that are often bothersome to patients are the piriformis, the glutes, and the hip flexor muscles (the hip flexors are a group of muscles on the front of your hip). The tightness within these muscles can sometimes lead to tightness in other muscles like the low back.
If you're like most people, you spend time inside of a job that either keeps you standing for long periods or sitting for long periods. Hip tightness can be a side effect of either of these jobs.
If you are standing all day, your muscles then need to work to keep you upright and stable. If you are sitting all day, your muscles are stuck in the same position, whether they are lengthened or shortened, and not getting much variation.
People will say that sitting all day can cause tight hips, but realistically, sitting or standing all day, or having a job that requires excessive walking, climbing stairs, and doesn't really allow for you to get relief from excessive sitting or standing positions, can both cause tight hips.
The feeling of having tight hips can come from muscles that work all day or muscles that are stuck in the same position all day.
Now, to throw you for a loop, you can also have tight hips when you have poor core stability. Most times, when patients have tight hip flexors, it is coming from a weakness elsewhere, typically the core. I see this in a lot of athletes and those who have to spend a lot of time lifting things.
As an aside, you can also have tight hips because of an injury, but we will not talk about that.
So if you want to know what exactly causes this, there are three things that I like to really keep in consideration.
Time sitting and excessive sitting that causes the muscles to be stuck in one position for an extended period of time
Excessive standing or single-leg movements, like walking and going upstairs, cause the muscles to be active for extended periods of time.
Core muscles that are weak, which causes everything around the core to tighten as a result and to compensate for the core weakness.
...and/or a blend of all three.
If You Have Tight Hips, You Might Feel These Symptoms
Most of my patients with tight hips feel similar symptoms, regardless of the "why" (which is why we focus on finding the "why" in a chiropractic assessment, so that you can get the most specific treatment).
Here are some of the specific symptoms that most patients have:
Feeling like they need to stretch out their hips when they stand up from a chair or get out of bed
It feels hard to stand up from a squatting position, and you can feel your hip muscles get a little tense when you try
When you do core work, like leg lowers or bicycles, you can feel the front of your hip snapping
You have lower back pain, either every once in a while or pretty regularly
You may experience some knee pain (right or left knee, it's not discriminatory)
You feel like your range of motion is limited when you extend your leg backward or when you do stretches like pigeon pose or figure four stretching
If you do a kickback for glute strengthening, you feel limited in the front of your hip when you kick back, and if you have your knee bent, you're able to kick back a little bit further
You find yourself swaying and shifting side to side when you are standing for long periods
If any of those sound like something you're actively dealing with, you may have tight hip flexors, but the why is what's important.
Without knowing the why, we can't accurately treat those symptoms, and you're essentially throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Why Stretching Isn't Typically the Answer
Typically, when people have hip pain and want to relieve tightness, they jump in and do one million hip flexor stretches, glute stretches, etc.
Patients will tell me they do stretches in a lunge position to stretch their back leg and the front of that hip. They do deep squatting. They get down on a deep squat to rock side to side. They do a ton of pigeon pose and figure four, they roll out their glutes and the front of their hip before they work out or when they get home from work, and some people just say that they hug their knees a little bit and move on with their day.
At the end of the day, stretching can help, but it is not the only thing that you need to do.
Oftentimes, you need to add in strengthening in order to keep your muscles feeling safe in different positions and to improve the stability of the joint.
If one side of our hip is not great at stability and not as strong as it needs to be, another side of our hip is going to compensate and get tighter in order to hug the hip joint and make sure that your leg bone stays inside of your hip socket.
On the other hand, if our muscles are so tight and they're constantly tight around that hip joint, they're going to hurt because they are always in a shortened position. Now, if we jump to the core and we imagine a weak core, what happens is the joints around the core will tighten in order to compensate for a weaker core. That means that if our core is weak, our hip joints will oftentimes tighten those muscles in turn to provide more stability for the hip joint because the core is not doing its job.
So, let's imagine we have a weak core and hip muscles that tighten in response to that weak core. If we only ever stretch the hip joint but we never address the weak core side, our hip joint is just going to retighten in order to compensate for that weak core. All of the stretching that you're doing is not a bad thing. It's just not treating the actual problem, so the symptom of a tight hip will keep coming back.
This is why stretching is oftentimes not the answer, because more often than not, it is not tight hip muscles that are actually tight. They are just tightened, which we call reflexive tightening, because another joint is not doing its job.
This is where nervous system regulation and strengthening the areas above and below that area come into play.
Exercises You Can Try for Hip Flexor Strengthening
Instead of just excessively strengthening, here are a few exercises that you can try at home. As always, these are just suggestions. I would recommend that you have a full assessment in order to determine what specific exercises would work for your symptoms.
Here is a link to a video of me performing each of these exercises.
Marching at a wall with a band on your feet: stand about 2 feet away from the wall and place your hands on the wall for stability. Have a light band around your feet. Slowly perform a march on either side. Repeat about ten times on each side.
Kneeling marches: Kneel in front of the wall with one leg behind you and one leg up. Place your hands on the wall for stability. Slowly do mini marches with one leg, really push to reach your end range of motion, hold at the top for 2-3 seconds, for about five to six reps, and then switch legs.
Seated leg lifts: This one is a tough one. You're going to sit on the floor with your back nice and straight with your legs straight out in front of you. Slowly lift one leg so that your heel rises off the floor. The more upright you sit, the harder it is and the more targeted it is, so try to avoid folding forward when you lift your leg. Do four to six reps on each side, and then take a rest.
These exercises are helpful for strengthening your hip flexors rather than just stretching them, which is often something that patients need. None of these exercises should hurt, of course.
Regardless of whether or not you choose to get these started or if you give them a try and don't see a change, I would recommend reaching out for a chiropractic evaluation so we can determine exactly what your body needs to alleviate your symptoms. It is different for each person, and also the difficulty of the exercise that you may need could be a little bit lower than what's shown here in order to get started.
Where to find chiropractic care for hip tightness in Midtown
At Cruz Chiropractic Wellness, we offer in-office chiropractic care in Midtown Manhattan and concierge chiropractic care in NYC designed to treat the actual cause of what you're dealing with, not just the symptoms.
Not located in NYC? I also have virtual chiropractic options.
We'll figure out the root cause of your hip tightness, and then the goal will be to alleviate that tightness long-term, not just for the hour or so after you do all that foam rolling and stretching.
Book a free 15-minute virtual consult and let's talk through what you're dealing with.
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