Forget stretching – an expert recommends this exercise to fight tight hips instead
As a coach and fitness writer, having tight hips is one of the most common complaints I hear about. People usually default to stretching to sort this out, but a specialist says there are more effective ways to address the problem.
Movement mechanics expert and Training Stimulus founder Ash Grossmann says regular movement and developing stability around the joint are likely to yield better long-term results for those seeking to banish tightness.
'In terms of broad, generalised advice, we want to establish what is causing the tightness,' Grossmann says. 'There are indirect reasons why a muscle could be becoming tight – the clue is if you stretch it and the tightness keeps coming back, stretching isn't solving the tightness.
'In a lot of situations, stretching can actually make it feel worse because you get into a wrestling match with your nervous system. Your nervous system generally has your best interests at heart with the tools it has available, so it thinks it's doing you a favour by tightening the muscle. Yanking on that tight muscle [via stretching] can be hurting your bigger picture goal rather than the small muscle tightness you're dealing with.'
Below, Grossmann explains the possible causes of muscle tightness, and an accessible protocol for combatting this around the hips.
Possible causes of muscle tightness
Protection
'The first role of the nervous system, when it comes to movement, is survival and protection,' Grossman says. Muscle tightness might be your nervous system's way of preventing you from accessing a position it perceives as dangerous. For example, you might not be able to complete a full squat because your body 'doesn't feel strong, stable or in control' in the bottom position.
Habit
If we do anything consistently, the body will adapt to get better at it. Sitting at a desk all day with a flexed hip sends a strong message that this is a position to prioritise. As a result, the nervous system might tighten the hip flexor muscles (which raise the knee towards the chest) to do you a favour and save some energy. Regular, varied movement is the obvious remedy to this – think desk breaks, walking, side bends and rotations (like you'll find in this three-move ab workout).
Instability
Alternatively, Grossmann says the nervous system can use tightness in the hip flexors as a way of compensating for other muscle's shortcomings and creating stability in an otherwise unstable joint.
'If the body perceives a joint as loose or unstable, it will tighten the muscles it has to hand or that it's familiar with to try and create stability, even if they are not the ideal muscles to get the job done,' he explains.
If this is the case, your first course of action should be to recruit and strengthen other key players such as the glutes, adductors and glute medius. You might do this through traditional strength training, or any number of other methods. As Grossmann says: 'Anything that gets length and load through the tissues [around the hip] will help.'
The exercise below allows you to do just that, as well as work the hip through a wide range of motion, making it a top option for most people suffering from hip stiffness.
The best exercise for fixing stiff hips: The Stimulus Six Lunges
The body operates on a use it or lose it basis, as far as movement is concerned. To persuade it to regain range of motion around the hips and banish tightness, we need to build a solid business case for doing so, says Grossmann.
'The body is pretty rational, so unless you give it a compelling case to say, 'Actually, we need length through our hip flexors quite often and for reasonable amounts of time', it won't buy into it.'
Doing the Stimulus Six Lunges daily is a good way to go about this. It involves lunging in six different directions, recruiting all the main musculature of the hip and moving in all three planes of motion; sagittal, meaning up, down, forward and backward; frontal, meaning side-to-side; and transverse, meaning rotational.
Doing this acts like a mini movement assessment in itself, as you can work out your weaknesses by observing which lunges you struggle with.
'If you don't like doing a side lunge, maybe the adductors are super tight,' he explains. 'If you don't like doing a crossover lunge, maybe the lateral hip or the glute medius is really tight,' Grossmann says.
'By regularly training those movements, we're telling the body, 'We're going to be doing these movements, so you'd better get used to getting length in these muscles'.'
Done daily, this will help the hips of your average desk job worker feel 'way, way better', he says.
'There's obviously a lot more nuance you could dig into on an individual basis, but their hips are going to be exposed to more positions and ranges of motion than even a lot of people who go to the gym all the time,' Grossmann explains.
'A lot of gym rats will just do squats and deadlifts, only moving up and down, but not moving sideways or rotating. If you do the Stimulus Six Lunges, you are maintaining your body's ability to access all the joint motions of the hip.'
If you simply want to maintain your mobility, doing the sequence daily will help. If you're looking to improve your body's strength and performance in these positions for sport, you can progressively overload them by adding weight, upping the number of reps or increasing the range of motion accessed in each direction.
'If you can only do a side lunge to 90cm at first, gradually working towards a wider side lunge is another way to track and improve, beyond adding weight,' says Grossmann. 'Whether you need to do this all comes back to what your goals are. Do you need more mobility, or are you just trying to keep those hips feeling good and not lose access to those joint positions?'
Ultimately the best thing you can do is listen to your body but if you're struggling with tightness, it could be worth asking yourself why the feeling keeps returning and look to Grossmann's advice for help. By taking a slightly different approach you might start to see changes and hopefully, improvements too.
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