What is the best way to help hip arthritis, rest or exercise? This is hotly debated
amongst people in the medical field because some people get better with
rest and some people get better with exercise. So how do you go about it?
Well, it depends what your current situation is.
If you're currently flared up in your hip and you can't tolerate being on your
feet more than 10 minutes, or maybe you can't even go 30 or 60 minutes,
but your hip begins to hurt after a certain amount of time on your feet, then it is not
a good idea to be exercising because you have what would be considered a flared up
hip if it just hurts at rest or it bothers you at night, or you're very stiff in the morning,
or at the end of the day it's getting more and more painful as the day goes on.
That's what I would consider a flared up, osteo, arthritic hip and pursuing
exercise as a form of treatment. Especially that exercise makes you hurt more is not a
good idea. You need to make sure that you're doing things that calm it down,
that pain is your body telling you that the lining on the inside of your hip joint,
the cartilage lining, is injured or irritated.
And when you go to do things, when you're on your feet more or you're
exercising like you try to do some specific exercises or we try to walk for exercises,
you're just further irritating an already irritated tissue in the cartilage.
if you force your way through whatever exercise you're doing, then you're going to be forcing
more irritation through that cartilage and it's just going to stay irritated.
You're never going to give it a chance to heal.
It's just like rubbing a wound on your skin. If you had a scab on your skin because you
cut yourself an accident or you scraped yourself somehow, you wouldn't go rub it. Everybody knows
that because you're going to peel off a scab and you're going to start the healing process all over
again. It's going to bleed and you have to scab up again and it's just going to delay healing.
Well, you'll get a scab on your cartilage, but it needs to go through a healing process that
is similar to every other healing process in the body. And if you disrupt that healing process,
like if you're peeling off the scab, then you have to start it all over again.
But now, if you're not flared up, you actually feel okay. You can tolerate
being on your feet. You don't have that many issues. Maybe you run into pain here and there,
then it's probably about time to be doing some exercises. You just have to make sure
that they're the right exercises for you, that they're not going to make you begin to hurt.
Now most people fall somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum.
There's somewhere where they can exercise. But then after a while,
maybe after a set or two sets or so many minutes of exercise, they do begin to get pain.
There's usually three reasons for this. Let me go into those reasons so that you
can figure out how to best move forward with your arthritic tip without making it worse.
The first reason might be that you're doing the wrong exercise. There's some exercises that are
just flat out not good for hip arthritis. One of those is doing a leg lift straight up and down.
Like if you're lying on your back, picking up your leg. Another one is knee extensions, like
where you're sitting down and you're extending out your knees, bringing your feet out against
resistance. Those exercises strengthen the muscles that are usually too strong or too dominant,
and they put even more compression through the hip joint. So you don't want to be doing those.
Even if they feel good in the moment, they're going to be compressing the joint more so in the
long term. And as the hours of the day go on or as the days and weeks go on, you're adding gradually
more and more compression to that ball and socket joint and not allowing your cartilage to heal
into. The variation of this idea is that you might be doing an exercise
that's good for arthritis, but not at this point.
In other words, squats, for instance, just a good old fashioned squat,
even without weights. That's a good exercise if you're not really having
any pain. But if you're in pain, when you just go to stand up and your hip is stiff,
it's not good exercise to be doing at that point. There's a right time for it. And by
the same token, there's other exercises that are really simple and easy to do.
They're not even that tiring. And those are good exercises to be doing when you're in
high pain situations, but they're not going to do much for you as far as correcting the
muscle imbalance and progressing yourself out of hip arthritis. If you're not that flared up
and you can tolerate more exercise. So you had to figure out when to do the right exercises.
The second thing to think about when it comes to exercising in that in-between
stage is that you have the right exercise, but it hurts you. The reason for this is
because you probably have a technique issue. You might be doing a squat, for instance,
at the right point. You're not really flared up,
but it begins to hurt you and you're thinking, Well, I've been able to be on my feet all day.
I've been able to do all these other activities. I'm getting better overall,
but now this darn squats hurting me or this this machine exercise is hurting me.
Whatever it is, you need to figure out what the technique is, what the proper technique,
which usually comes down to using the right muscle groups during that exercise, because
it's possible to shift your body subtly, shift your foot position and turn on different muscles.
And that can influence the pressure at your hip joint. So you've got to
make sure that you do it with right technique.
Getting guidance from a professional or checking out more videos here and our
YouTube channel could be something that helps you figure out the right technique
for the exercise that you need to be doing for your hip arthritis problem.
The third reason you might run into pain if you were having this hip problem is that the
intensity might be an issue. Now, the way that I think of intensity is it's a variable
of exercise of which there's many variables. One could be the number of reps you're doing,
two could be the number, the amount of resistance that you have, like the number
of pounds that you're carrying or holding, or maybe, you know, resistance or just doing body
weight or you can even offload your body weight, take some of your body weight off.
There's ways to do that. And still exercise your muscles with less than your body weight.
Another thing is how much rest you give yourself between reps and sets. And then the last one
would be your cadence or how fast you're going through an exercise. You know, if you're doing
one rep every second versus doing two or three reps per second, that's a much faster cadence.
You're going much faster to do the reps. And so there's more intensity associated with that.
Everybody's got a certain tolerance, a certain threshold for what their hip
joint can take right now, even if you don't have hip arthritis based on the health of your hip,
if you I'll put it to you this way, if you think back to when you were 15, 20 years old,
you're hip joint probably was in a good shape at that at that point in your life,
unless you had issues for some reason, your tolerance for walking or being on your feet
or running or doing other activities, sports was probably pretty high.
But if you're suffering from hip arthritis right now, going back to those activities,
you're not to be able to take it. In fact, just walking through your house might be painful.
Right now. Walking through a big store or a grocery store could be bothersome to
you. So your threshold is going to be a lot lower when you're thinking of exercise now,
like doing reps of an exercise, you may set out to do 20, 30, 50 reps, whatever it is,
but your body's telling you all I got in me right now is ten and that's all you can do.
And you've got to be okay with that. Even though you don't feel tired in your muscles,
that might be all that your cartilage can take. And the cartilage has to adapt slowly
as it's healing. So you have to think about the intensity of what your cartilage can do
right now. Does it mean it's a bad exercise? Maybe you actually have good technique in the exercise.
All those points might be fine. It's just the intensity is off and you need to be patient
with your progression. Now, I explain all of this and a lot more in detail in
my Hip arthritis recovery program, tell you exactly which exercises you should be doing
and when you should be doing them. We go into the form, the technique.
They give you the ranges of reps and sets you should be doing. There's a whole lot of
teaching going on there, much deeper levels. And what I'm showing you here on this video,
you can learn about the Hip Arthritis Recovery program down the link below. There's there's a
link in the description. It's online. It's on demand. So you can get it from anywhere.
You can access the Internet. And if you want more free videos for hip arthritis,
I've got plenty of those too. Here on our YouTube channel. There's a link in the description too,
for the Hip Arthritis Help playlist. Go check that out and please share this with
somebody you think needs to see this. If you know somebody suffering from hip arthritis.
Copy the link for this video and email it to them, text it to them
direct message it to them somehow so that they can benefit from this information to
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