Hips on a Swivel

This past weekend I briefly assessed a friend's hip as he had tweaked a flexor playing platform tennis last week.  Aside from the acute pain he was experiencing on his right side, the most obvious finding was his lack of hip rotation on both sides.

Why does this matter?

Your body was designed to be both mobile and stable.  But some areas are better suited for mobility, and others for stability.  When a big ball-and-socket joint like the hip isn't as mobile as it ought to be, then your body will seek it elsewhere.  Usually, that's somewhere above or below in your kinetic chain.  With the hip, that means the knee and/or the lumbar spine, neither of which are designed for a heck of a lot of rotational movement.  When you force a relatively stable segment of your body to move beyond its capacity, you risk painful dysfunction.

As I've written about in the past, many of us are living life in only one "lane" of movement, the sagittal plane.  That's the front to back plane.  Since we generally don't run around playgrounds in our adulthood as kids so aptly do, we lose mobility in one or more of these three planes.  Then, we head out for our weekend warrior activities and injuries ensue.

Be mobile where you were meant to be mobile, and allow your stable parts to do their thing.  Normal ranges of motion for hip internal and external rotation are 45 degrees.  That is to say, if you were to lie prone on your abdomen with your knee bent to 90 degrees, you ought to be able to make a windshield wiper movement with you lower leg totaling roughly 90 degrees, without your pelvis coming off the surface of the floor/table.  It looks like the middle image below:

Grab 30 seconds and do a self assessment.  If you find yourself limited in either direction, or have a large right to left asymmetry, then get to work doing something about it.  Your back and knees will thank you for it.