The How: My Hip Injury

For this blog, I wanted to write about my hip injury. This will be the first blog relating to the hips and I will do another next week. For this particular blog, I talked about how I set myself up for injury last year. It took me about six months to rehabilitate it to the point where I could do my yoga practice like I wanted to return to normal daily activities.

I am a relatively healthy person. I do have headaches that I have struggled with from high school until now and they are very stress-related (check out my meditation podcast to see what I am doing to combat them). Beyond that, my painful hip injury last year was the only injury I have had to recover from besides childbirth (this will play out to have more to do with the hip than you may think too).

How I Developed My Hip Issue

My hip issue wasn’t a single injury, fall, or trauma. It was a gradual deterioration of the area coupled with not doing the things I knew I needed to do. Because of the line of work that I am in, I know what my weak spots are and was already doing prehab (exercises to PREVENT injuries) exercises to make sure my body does not fail me in work or play.  I got busy the fall of 2020 and stopped doing the core rehab post partum after my 10 pound plus pound son was born in 2019.  This led to an excruciating hip injury and a reality check that I had to take the time to do my prehab/rehab or I would be in a lot of trouble. 

After not doing any core work or hip joint centration exercises in the fall, by January, I had excruciating pain in my left hip whenever I externally rotated when my hip was at a 90 degree angle. When I was lying in bed and brought my left knee up and out to the side, the pain was so sharp that it would wake me up. I couldn’t even sit at the head of my treatment table because I had to bring my knees apart. I couldn’t sit cross-legged.  I couldn’t do the lotus pose and other Ashtanga poses.  If you are a yogi, I couldn’t even do warrior 2 because of external rotation of the leg. The pain was not the type to make you think, “Oh man, I am really tight. I am just going to stretch it and push into it and it will loosen up.” The pain was more like a sharp pain and bony stopping point. 

When you think of what the hip looks like, we’ve got the top of the femur and a ball sticking out of the side of it.  This part is meant to sit into a cup like portion of the pelvis.  It should move nice and smoothly in that cup. You can have a labrum tear, which gives you that sharp sensation, or a cam lesion that can give you that sharp sensation, too, or you can just have degeneration of the joint. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened during my hip injury, but I knew these three things were in the running and if I didn’t address them, I would be headed for a hip replacement at some point.

Why I Was Not Surprised About My Hip Injury

I was not surprised even though I am healthy, active, and not that old. 

I was not surprised because in my early years, I’d always been predisposed to almost gumby like hips. When I was four years old, I started dancing, and I always did full splits and straddles. I also did gymnastics and cheerleading all the way through college. Once I got out of college and grad school, I also got into yoga and did more extreme poses requiring an amount of hip flexibility that goes beyond the norm. 

The thing with being hypermobile is you might not rely on your strength to get you there. Your body is a wizard at compensating to get your desired outcome. Your body will do whatever it needs to do to get where you want it to go even if it’s not the most biomechanical and sound way to get there.  Being super flexible, I could cheat things. It is natural to lean into the things that we are good at and much harder to bolster the skills that don’t come naturally to us.  I know this is true for me.  

With all that hypermobility, my ligaments give much more play at my joints.  If the ball at the top of the femur does not have stability around it or there is a looseness to the ligaments, it will kind of slosh back and forth to give the mobility it needs, and will not be on the center of the hip socket joint. The muscles also play into the centration of the hip joint because all these different muscles are attached in and around the femur and control where it sits in the hip joint. If you have some imbalances of those muscles, then it is going to pull the head of the femur in one direction and another. Once it is not centered, that’s where cam lesions can happen, or grinding, or a labral tear. If left unchecked, it will lead to the degeneration of the joint and maybe to a hip replacement.

What Helps With Your Hip Health

To avoid worsening my hip injury, I took active steps. The steps I did tied with my work after having kids because working on your core, your pelvic floor, and related areas, will really help with your hip health. The things I did helped the hip joints centrate again. I will let you know about the steps I did in the next blog regarding hip health that I will write in the next few weeks.

What I can share with you for now is doing ten minutes of exercises a day to prevent my hip injury was way easier than rehabilitating it after. Rehabilitating it was much longer and took way more effort and time. By summer, I could do my Ashtanga practice already because of the things that I did. It is still a little bit tight, but it doesn’t have any of the sharp pains I had last year. Feeling tight is not necessarily a bad thing because you really need a huge amount of play in that joint. I am willing to sacrifice a little bit of the extra play in my hip joint so as not to undergo hip replacement soon.

Conclusion

The situations I covered today are two different things, but both are equal when it comes to the end point. I will not go into detail on the things I did to help me with my hip injury as I am saving that for next week. Read my next blog as I will also talk about some key points regarding hip health and the muscles that help centrate the joint.

If you have any questions, you can drop it in the comment section or you can send me a message through Facebook or Instagram. I’d be happy to do another podcast about your questions. Also, if you want me to talk about something specific, let me know!

You can also check my TikTok account as I use the platform to educate viewers about movement, chiropractic education, yoga, pregnancy, and more!