The reason your hips feel tight – and the easy way to fix it

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

Your body adapts to become better at the things you consistently ask it to do. When you lift weights regularly, you become stronger; when you run regularly, your heart and lungs become more efficient.

But nowadays, we sit down a lot. Your hip flexors are held in a shortened position while sitting, with your knees raised towards your chest. And so, over time, your body might tighten them up to make you more efficient at sitting down.

The issue is, when we suddenly try to lengthen them again when running, exercising, or simply moving around, these tight muscles can cause pain, discomfort and even dysfunction. As a result, in my role as a fitness journalist and coach, articles on easing tight hips are among my most common requests.

Fortunately, there is a ready-made remedy for this: regular, varied movement.

“When we’re dealing with an adaptation from stillness, movement is the answer, so any movement is better than just being still,” says The Training Stimulus founder Ash Grossmann. “Most people just need more movement overall.”

This doesn’t mean you immediately need to start tying yourself up like a pretzel – just regularly access the movements available to you.

Breaking up long periods of sitting by standing up, walking or performing a few exercise snacks and stretches is a great start. Varying your movements with motions such as twisting and bending can offer even greater benefits. And if you want a more specific way to soothe your stiff hips, there are certain exercises you can prioritise.

“The body is pretty rational, so unless you give it a compelling case to say, ‘Actually, we need length through our hip flexors quite often and for reasonable amounts of time’, it won’t buy into it,” says Grossmann. To make this case, he recommends doing the “Stimulus Six lunge sequence” daily.

This involves lunging in six different ways: forward with a forward reach, forward with an overhead reach, forward with an overhead bend away from your front leg, to the left, to the right, diagonally forward and diagonally backward. If you cannot currently complete a full lunge in any of these directions, simply step in that direction and lower yourself as far as your body comfortably allows.

These exercises might look somewhat peculiar, but they recruit all the main musculature of the hip and move your body in all three planes of motion; sagittal, meaning up, down, forward and backward; frontal, meaning side-to-side; and transverse, meaning rotational.

Doing this acts like a mini mobility test, Grossmann says. You can suss out which muscles are weak and tight by noting which of the six lunges you struggle with.

“If you don’t like doing a side lunge, maybe your adductors are super tight,” Grossmann explains. “If you don’t like doing a crossover lunge, maybe the lateral hip or the glute medius is really tight,” Grossmann says.

“By regularly training those movements, we’re telling the body, ‘We’re going to be doing these movements, so you’d better get used to getting length in these muscles’.”

Done daily, this will help the hips of your average desk job worker feel “way, way better”, he says.

Read more: The reason we lose movement as we age – and how we can counter it

Join our commenting forumJoin thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in