Here are three exercises to help calm down severe hip osteoarthritis. Know
that fixing hip arthritis for the long term is a process that requires
many different steps. The exercises that I'm going to show you here today are not
going to solve the whole thing. It's just a piece of the entire process.
I've got more videos to help you out with that whole process. I'll tell you where
to find them by the end of this video. But let's get into the exercises first.
Exercise one is a hip wiggle. This is what I call it. I tell my patients to do this at home,
and they'll begin to get some circulation of the fluid inside the hip joint. All
you do is sit somewhere comfortable where your thighs are supported. Your feet can
be flat on the floor or dangling. It doesn't matter. Now all you're going to be doing is
wiggling your hips like this. You can put your arms at your sides like I am. You
can be leaning back into one, a backrest of a chair. You can do this while you're
in a recliner. You can do this from virtually anywhere you're sitting,
as long as you're not actually like, driving. If you're the passenger in the car, you can.
But this is an easy one to do that doesn't even look like you're doing an exercise. It looks like
you're just kind of fidgeting in your seat. What's happening though, inside the hip joint. And so the
ball and socket joining the hip. There's fluid between the surfaces of cartilage on the ball and
on the socket. And when you do this little wiggle, you're just moving the joints like this inside.
And that moves the fluid inside the hip joint. And that fluid is really important because cartilage
that's on the ends of the bones doesn't have an excellent blood supply, which means that
it's not going to heal as fast as other tissues in your body that do have a good blood supply.
So it actually gets a lot of its nutrition from the fluid that's inside the hip joint.
But in order for that fluid to be fresh in your hip, you need to circulate it. You
need to get it to move around so that the cartilage can let out its waste products,
that it's developing as it's healing, and it can bring in new nutrients that it needs to continue
healing. So by circulating that fluid, you can move along the healing process of the hip joints.
If you're still for long periods of time,
then that fluid just doesn't move around. It starts to get stale. You don't get new
nutrients and you don't get the waste products out. You just develop more waste products.
And all you need to do for this exercise is 1 or 2 minutes worth, but it does need to be
frequent. You can be doing this every hour while you're awake. You don't need to wake
up in the middle of the night to do this. I would just do this while you're awake.
The second exercise is a bit more advanced than this. It's a hip rocker,
and here's what it looks like.
You're going to get on your hands and knees. You can do this on the floor
as long as you're comfortable getting off from the floor. Or you can do it on the bed as well,
on your bed or any surface that you feel is is good for you.
I've had people say that they have a nice big couch or an Ottoman and they'd like
to do it there, but I'm going to do is get on your hands and knees. You can be flat handed,
like this. Or fists. It doesn't matter. Whatever's comfortable,
and then you're just going to rock your hips back towards your feet,
like you're sitting on your haunches like a dog or a cat would sit down and nice and easy.
This shouldn't hurt. You don't want to go into a motion that that bothers you. You're off loaded,
so it's not your entire body weight that's going through your hips. It's only partial body weight,
and you're just going to do 1 or 2 minutes worth,
just like the hip wiggles. So rock back and forth nice and easy. Should not hurt whatsoever.
It shouldn't hurt either. A little variation you could put into this is come back at an angle. Come
back towards your left foot. You can come back towards your right foot. Sometimes that little
bit of extra sideways motion helps the hip joint to move in a different way. That might
unlock some flexibility. You have to figure out just how to do this and make it comfortable.
Again, every hour on this exercise, just 1 or 2 minutes worth is enough. And the reason for that
is because you don't get much more benefit after two minutes worth of doing this exercise. I'm not
saying you shouldn't do more than two minutes, because I do have people all the time that say,
I'm doing this every 30 minutes for five minutes each time, and they benefit from it.
That's fine. But what I found is that you don't get that much more improvement if you
do a whole lot more time. What's what's way more important is that you do. You're doing
this frequently throughout the day. So if you're just doing this for 30 minutes once
a day altogether, not as beneficial as doing one minute every hour throughout the day,
that's much more beneficial because we're trying to get that hip fluid to circulate.
The last exercise is what I call a knee follow up. So you lie down on your back wherever you're
comfortable lying down, put one leg straight and then the leg that you're trying to work on,
you're going to have the knee bent with the foot flat just like this. Then all you're going to do
is let that knee fall out a comfortable amount, and then bring it in a comfortable amount as well.
So you're just moving within the range of motion that feels safe and painless to be in,
and which you'll often find if you do have any problems with the motion,
is that after a few reps, maybe after 70 reps, you actually can move easier and farther because
you're doing a little bit of a stretch here. It's not a direct stretch of an exercise, but you're
taking your joint to an end range that you may not be normally getting to throughout the day.
And so it's going to get you more motion as a result of that. Again,
the focus here is getting that fluid to move. And it's the same as the other exercise. You're just
doing 1 or 2 minutes every hour. Now just giving you three exercises to do every hour. And let me
give you some parameters on this, because these exercises are not guaranteed to help your pain.
Let me explain what I mean by that. It could be that you're so severely irritated right
now that anything will make it worse. Even these simple exercises, even the hip wiggles,
might not feel comfortable for you. If you're in that situation,
then you probably need to be resting right now, not doing anything. And after you give
it some time, you could probably begin to do exercise is now on the other end.
I've had people that say, I'm doing this exercise more than every hour from more than 1 to 2
minutes, and I feel fine doing that. Most people fall somewhere in between. What you need to do
is figure out what works for you, and it doesn't need to be a strict, saying like what I'm saying,
like where you need to do this every hour or else it's not going to work.
What you need to figure out is, well, maybe I can do this for half the day. Maybe I can do
30s you need to figure out what amount of time and what frequency works. But generally, as you feel
better, doing this more frequently can help you out. And once you feel like you can max out the
time that you're doing every hour throughout the day, and you're doing 1 or 2 minutes and you're
doing all three exercises because you might just choose to do one exercise, maybe two each hour.
If that's what works for you, then it's probably time to move on to a new phase of exercise,
and these exercises are tapped up. These exercises are not going to
benefit you much more. Like I said, hip arthritis is a requires a process
in order to fix it. And this is not the whole process is just a step.
but if you're very flared up, if it's hurting to walk, if you're being,
if you're up at night, if you're hurting throughout the day because of your hip pain,
then these exercises are very likely to help you out. There's other things that
I talk about here on my channel that can help you out with severe hip arthritis.
You can find those videos all in a playlist called the Hip Arthritis Help Playlist. It's
linked in the description below, and they've also got a comprehensive program that can walk
you through every step of the way to fix a hip arthritis problem. It's a treatment
approach that I use with my patients here in the clinic, and I've shared with patients
throughout the world that have been have come to see me here and that we've held virtually.
It's called the hip Arthritis Recovery Program,
and this program can help people avoid hip joint replacement surgery, even if their hip joint is
bone on bone. So you'll find a link to learn more about that in the description below too.
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