Hip Exercises for Power and Mobility

Most hip complaints aren’t really hip problems.

When patients come to me with hip pain, hip tightness, or “something’s off in my hip,” the issue almost never lives just in the hip joint itself. It’s a system that’s stopped working together — usually because the hips have lost the ability to move and load through their full range.

The fix is to understand what your hips actually are and give them the work they need. That’s what this article is for. The anatomy, the common complaints, what’s actually behind the labels you might have been given, and how to think about getting your hips working again.

If you want the daily routine, our hip mobility routine has you covered. This article is the why behind it.

One important note before we go further: nothing in this article replaces being seen by a professional in person if you have ongoing pain, weakness, or a recent injury. There are rare but serious conditions that cause hip pain and need to be treated by a physician. If something feels wrong, get it checked.

Here’s How Your Hips Really Work

This is just one part of the complex hip joint.

The hip joint connects the femoral head — the ball at the top of your leg — to the acetabulum, the socket in your pelvis. Compared to your shoulder, the hip’s socket is deep. That’s by design. Your hip is a load-bearing joint, built for stability under heavy demands like walking, running, lifting, and carrying.

But the hip joint isn’t a single structure. It’s surrounded by an enormous amount of muscle, fascia, and connective tissue, and most of what people call “hip pain” lives in those structures rather than the joint itself.

When patients describe their hip issues to me, they often gesture across a wide area — from below the low back to the middle of the thigh. That’s reasonable. The “hip region” is much bigger than the hip joint, and that’s where most of the work needs to happen.

Here’s what’s working in there:

• Hip flexors (rectus femoris, pectineus, psoas, iliacus, tensor fascia lata)
• Hip extensors (gluteus maximus, semitendinosus, semimembranosus, biceps femoris)
• Hip rotators and abductors (quadratus femoris, obturator internus, gemelli, gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, piriformis, sartorius)
• Hip adductors (adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, obturator externus, gracilis)

All of these support the hip and let it generate force across a wide range of angles and positions. Weakness or restriction in any of them can show up as pain, tightness, or compensations somewhere else — your back, your knees, your gait.

Why Your Hips Feel the Way They Do

Your hips feel tight, achy, or weak because they’ve stopped doing the work they were built for.

Most of us spend most of the day in a fraction of our hips’ available range. We sit, we stand, we walk a bit, we sit again. Walking is what we’d call a mid-range activity in the clinic. Useful for general health, but it doesn’t take your hips to the end of their motion in any direction. When you don’t regularly visit those end ranges, your body slowly stops giving you access to them. Use it or lose it, in the most literal possible sense.

Tight, weak, and achy are three views of the same problem. Your hips need to move through their full range under load, and they aren’t getting it. Each symptom is just where your body’s drawing your attention to that fact.

The Three Most Common Hip Complaints

Three patterns show up in almost every hip case I see. They overlap more than people realize.

1. Muscle Strains

Usually in the hamstrings, hip flexors, or adductors. Almost always tied to unfamiliar exertion or overuse. The root cause is usually a movement pattern that wasn’t ready for the load — a hip that doesn’t extend fully, a glute that doesn’t fire when it should, a back that picks up the slack until something gives.

People often want to know which specific stretch or exercise will fix the strain. The honest answer is that the strain is downstream. Address the movement pattern that caused it, and the strain stops being a recurring problem.

2. Hip Tightness

The most common non-painful complaint. Sitting all day shortens the hip flexors, eliminates hip extension, and lets rotation atrophy. Most adults walk around with significantly less hip range than they had as children, and they don’t notice until something asks them to move differently — sport, hiking, gardening, getting up off the floor.

Our hip mobility routine is built specifically for this pattern.

3. Hip Weakness

Less talked about than tightness, but just as common. The big and small muscles around the hip need real stimulus to stay strong, and walking doesn’t do it. The flood of hamstring and groin strains in weekend athletes is what happens when sedentary hips meet sudden demand.

Here’s the trap people fall into: treating these as three separate problems. Most hips are tight and weak at the same time, which is why stretching alone rarely fixes the issue, and why pure strength work without mobility usually leads to compensation injuries somewhere up or down the chain.

A Note on FAI and Other Named Conditions

If you’ve been told you have FAI (femoroacetabular impingement), labral damage, snapping hip syndrome, or some other named hip condition — that diagnosis isn’t a sentence.

Plenty of people walking around have the bone shapes that look like FAI on imaging and zero symptoms. Plenty of people with symptoms recover full function through targeted mobility and strength work without surgery. Imaging shows you what’s there. It doesn’t always tell you what’s actually causing the problem, and it definitely doesn’t dictate your future hip function.

A diagnosis is useful information. It points you toward what to look for. But a label is not a destiny.

If you have an active diagnosis, get evaluated by a physical therapist who actually moves people — someone who watches you walk, squat, and load your hips, not just looks at images. Follow their guidance. For most people without acute injury or progressive symptoms, working through full hip range with thoughtful loading is the path forward, and it’s a path that’s worked for many of our clients with FAI diagnoses.

Self-Test: Where Are Your Hips Right Now?

Before going further, let’s see where your hips actually are.

Ryan walks through a quick self-test in this video. You’ll know immediately whether your hips are stuck somewhere, and which side might be tighter than the other.

The kneeling lunge test is one I use with patients all the time. Front foot forward, back knee down, squeeze the glute on the back leg, gently shift your hips forward. If you feel your hip flexor screaming, you’ve been sitting on tight hips. If one side is noticeably worse than the other, you’re compensating somewhere — often without realizing it.

This test isn’t a diagnosis. What it gives you is data. You now know, concretely, that your hips have somewhere to go. The work is getting there.

What Actually Works for Hips

Three things, woven together, are what actually fix hips: full-range mobility, loaded strength through that range, and ongoing practice.

Mobility Through Full Range, Not Just Stretching

Static stretching has its place, but a stretch alone teaches your nervous system one specific thing: how to relax in this exact position. Hips need to move through ranges, not just sit at the end of them. Dynamic mobility work — moving in and out of stretches, exploring rotations, loading positions you’ve just unlocked — is what builds usable range.

This is why we use locomotion patterns (crawling, the various animal movements) so heavily in our programs. They take your hips through full range repeatedly, with your whole body coordinated, the way your body actually moves outside the gym.

Strength Through the Ranges You’ve Unlocked

A position you can passively achieve isn’t really yours until you can move and produce force in it. The hip flexor stretch you can sit in needs to also support a step-up. The squat depth you can drop into needs to support a load. Strength is what makes mobility durable.

This is also where most stretching-only programs fail. People get more flexible, then lose it within weeks because they never trained their body to use the new range. Strength locks it in.

Ongoing Practice

Hips don’t get fixed once and stay fixed. They get maintained. The clients who keep their hips healthy treat hip work the way they treat brushing their teeth — short, frequent, automatic. The ones who chase a six-week solution and stop end up right back where they started.

In the clinic we use a simple loop: assess where you are, address what’s stuck, apply the work in real movement. Then reassess. The hips you have today aren’t the hips you’ll have in three months. Keep checking what’s changed.

How Elements Trains Your Hips

Here’s what that integrated approach looks like in a single movement.

The Long-Leg Monkey is a foundational pattern in our Elements program. In one shape, you’re working hip flexion, hip rotation, strength under load, and active control through end-range — exactly the combination most hips are missing.

This is how we train hips at GMB.

Not isolated stretches and isolated strength sessions stacked on top of each other, but movements that build all of it at once, because that’s how your body actually uses your hips in real life.

Elements is built around this integrated approach. You’ll work hip mobility alongside the strength, control, and movement skills you use every day.

Elements

Practice essential movements for practical physical fitness

Already lifting, running, climbing, doing martial arts, or otherwise training regularly? GMB Mobility is the focused option to round out what you’re already doing.

For Daily Practice

The day-to-day routine that pulls all of this together lives in our hip mobility routine. Same integrated approach, packaged as a 5–10 minute daily practice you can drop into any time of day.

👉 GMB Hip Mobility Routine

More Hip Resources

Depending on what’s going on with your hips specifically, these may be more directly useful:

• Routine for Hip Pain — If you’re in active pain, this routine is built to help you address it without making things worse.
• Fix Your Tight Hip Flexors — A focused look at the front-of-hip tightness most desk workers carry, and how stretching plus strengthening work together.
• Hip Opener Exercises — Functional hip-opening movements that build strength alongside the range.
• Hamstring Flexibility Guide — Hips and hamstrings travel together. If one is tight, the other usually is too.
• How to Train the Splits — You don’t need to do the splits, but training for them is one of the best ways to build hip and leg flexibility for everything else.

Hip Mobility Is a Practice

Hips don’t get fixed in a six-week sprint. They get better when you keep showing up — a few minutes a day, most days, for as long as you’ve got hips.

The clients who keep their hips healthy treat the work as ongoing practice, the same way they brush their teeth. The ones who stay frustrated treat it as a project to finish, hit the goal, and stop. Hips don’t work that way.

Pick a starting point. Practice consistently. The work compounds.

Elements

Practice essential movements for practical physical fitness

Already training and just need the focused mobility component? GMB Mobility is purpose-built for that.