Beginner Hip Mobility Exercises
Hip mobility exercises for beginners do not need to be complicated, but they do need to be done consistently. We often feel so tight in the hips we don’t even know HOW to begin stretching and mobizing the hips, these tips and this video should help you get started.
As you start to stretch and mobilize each day it is importent to work on a bit at time. You are better off doing a little bit each day than doing a super long intense routine every once in aheile.
You will start to feel better in your hips when you are consistently mobilizing and stretching your hips. Try to work for a few minutes each day to start. The rule is to challenge yourself while keeping good form.
Video Transcript of Two Hip Mobility Moves:
The hard truth that we have to accept about having tight hips is that we need to do a mobility routine every day to feel better.
But here's the good news:
It doesn't need to be like this super complicated, fancy hip mobility routine that's impossible to do.
It doesn't need to be this super long, hour-long class that you need to do exactly perfectly for your hips to feel better. It simply needs to be a few really useful and usable movements that work for you and your body.
And that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to go through one of the routines I teach my students all the time that they can do on their own.
It can only help.
And the main thing, by the way, these are my wrist weights. I use them all the time. It helps me so much with bone density and feeling strong. You can ask me about them, but the thing I want to focus on right now is your hip mobility routine. we're going to be using a timer for these exercises because I want you to see how just a minute of this and a minute of that and a minute of this can help you feel so much better.
And it only takes a few minutes a day to feel better.
I'm starting the timer, and we're just going to shift the legs side to side. So the main thing we want to think about with this is that we're not looking for any pain here. If pain worked, it would have worked years ago. We're looking to warm up the hips and let the body know that we're working on a few simple, useful, and usable movements.
That's going to help our hips feel better today. That's going to help us move better today. If you need to go slower, please go slower, but try not to go, at least for this one, faster. And just kind of see what happens when we stay with something. Um, in this case, a minute, long enough for it to work. And even if the rest of the exercises are too much for you today, try doing this one.
Be a researcher and not a judge, and trust that when you come back to this class, your range of motion will get better, and you'll be able to do this exercise more efficiently. Let's get a few more times to make it a minute.
Sometimes, a minute can feel like a long time, especially if it's the first time you're doing these. That was one minute. Sit again in a relatively comfortable position and notice the heat, the mobility, the intelligence in your lower body. And if a minute was too long, that's also okay. You're doing it for 30 seconds.
And every time you come back to this class, because I want you to save this class, it will be easier. We have one more exercise.
We're going to lean back on our hands. The legs are in front and you're going to pivot your legs to the right. Then we're going to take our hands to the front of the shin. Now, if this is too much for you, you can put your hands on a yoga block or even a chair, but you want to have your upper body relatively relaxed.
Now bring your attention to your rear leg, right? The first exercise. We went up like this. Now we're going to do the opposite movement. We're going to rotate the thigh so it's facing the floor. You're going to relax your foot, and then you're going to rotate up and down. Now this is going to be a small movement. The timer is on, by the way. And if it is way too much for you, just focus on pushing that back knee down into the floor. But if you can try and lift the leg.
And you're going to lift the leg a little bit higher. And the only goal is that we're rotating the thigh in the hip socket, right? The femur. in the hip socket. And if it needs to be a little bit, that's okay. The goal of these movements is to remind your body that it's capable of moving in all directions,
We get so stiff because we sit too much or don't move enough that our body forgets how capable it is of moving and stiffens up.
.Be a researcher and not a judge. The main thing we want to think about is that when you come back to this class because it's super important that you do this routine regularly, the range of motion will increase, and your comfort with the exercises will increase. It will just become, this routine will just become, something that you do most days to feel better.
And when you think about it, we have about 15 seconds. What we do some days to feel better is drink a cup of coffee, take a walk, or call our favorite person. We can do this most days to feel better. Let's get one more time.
We don't need a zillion exercises.
We don't need hours and hours, but we do need to be consistent with what we do so that we can feel better in the body we live in now.
Exercise works when you know how to do it.