Walking engages all of the muscles of your hip. During walking, the muscles of the hip stabilize the pelvis, low back, and control the coordinated movement of the entire lower extremity. In addition, the hip muscles provide power to most of our daily movements.
Hip Pain Can Result from A Previous Injury
If you can’t point to a specific injury to your hip, often the pain is due to hip dysfunction and can come about from altered movement patterns secondary to a previous injury such as to an ankle, knee or back injury. After an injury like that, you change your weight bearing strategy to put less stress on those areas of injury to avoid pain.
Dysfunctions in the low back can affect hip control via the nervous system. If there is irritation to the nerves that control the muscles of the hip, there will be alteration of muscle function. Spinal dysfunction can directly affect the nervous system.
Hip Pain Is Associated with Altered Movement Patterns
Hip dysfunction, and then later pain, is usually associated with altered timing of muscle activation and changes of strengths. If muscles don’t contract at the right time, with sufficient intensity, other areas begin to compensate. These changes affect hip joint, low back or lower extremity stability. Unfortunately, after a while of compensating, the new pattern becomes ingrained, and is now the “normal” pattern…unless specifically addressed and changed. This is how previous injuries become lifelong problems…and how lifelong patterns can be changed.
After a while of this new “normal” pattern the stress builds in tissues, invariably away from the initial injury, and they become overloaded and begin to fatigue easily. The longer the overload persists, the greater the irritation grows and these tissues begin to fail, causing destruction, pain, cramping or weakness. This is when you begin to hear about diagnoses such as bursitis, tendinitis, torn labrums, degenerative changes and arthritis.
Prevent More Serious Problems
Often, before the changes become structural, such as with tears and arthritis, the problem can be corrected, the dysfunction improved, the overload reduced, allowing the tissues to heal. Once the changes become structural and repairs are performed, such as hip replacement, the altered movement patterns will persist, continuing to stress the joint with instability, muscle and tendon overload, and altered movement patterns affecting stability with the ankle, knee, low back, even a shoulder!
Treatment Options
Treatment should include both chiropractic and therapeutic exercises. Ensuring proper spinal function is necessary to establish good activation of the hip muscles. Exercises should be functional in nature. That is, they should replicate activities commonly used in your daily activities. For example, most of our activities are performed wight-bearing. That is, standing with our feet firmly planted on the ground, not sitting or moving our feet.
An appropriate exercise program should be paced and progressed, train correct movement patterns, correct central programing, and improve coordination of the hip, low back and lower extremity.
