The hips do a lot more than get immortalized in rap songs.
They are the body’s centers of power and play a vital role in how force moves through it. That’s why just stretching them is not enough.
Let’s start with the glutes. Glutes aren’t just there for others to admire. Their main function is hip extension, which powers many lower-body movements.
What about the muscle that gets blamed for everything from poor posture to lower back pain: the hip flexors? They can be weak as well as tight, so stretching them isn’t the only solution.
In my latest joint-by-joint series, I will break down why the hips matter, their anatomy, the muscles that act on them, what they need, how to tell when they need more attention, and six exercises to improve hip mobility, strength, and stability.
Why Your Hips Matter
The hips are working every time you move while upright, but they don’t work alone.
The hips influence what happens at the knees and the lower back. With a lack of hip mobility or stability, the body may start borrowing motion from elsewhere. For example, limited hip mobility may cause lower back rounding during squats or deadlifts.
Training the hips and giving them what they need will keep your movement options open. The hips need mobility, strength, and stability to control the position of the pelvis and femur while the rest of the body moves around them.
Hip Anatomy
The hip is a ball-and-socket joint. The top of the femur forms the “ball,” which sits inside the acetabulum, the socket formed by the pelvis. That’s why the hip is mobile. This means the surrounding muscles provide stability.
Those muscles are:
Glutes: Include the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus. The gluteus max is the main hip extensor, and the gluteus medius and minimus help with hip abduction and pelvic control.
Hip Flexors: Are made up of the iliacus, psoas major, and psoas minor muscles. These muscles help flex the hip and also connect the upper and lower body. The psoas contributes to hip and trunk flexion, while the iliacus performs hip flexion.
Hamstrings: Engage the back of the hip to aid in hip extension. These muscles are essential for all hinging movements, and their strength and mobility are crucial for maintaining lower back and hip function.
Adductors: Run along the inner thigh and are often thought of only as the muscles that pull the leg back to midline, but they do more than that. They also assist with hip extension and hip stability during many lower-body movements.
The Major Hip Movements
Here are the major hip movements that will be the focus of the best exercises below.
Hip Flexion: Happens when the thigh moves toward the torso. You use it when you walk, run, squat, or step up.
Hip extension: Is the opposite motion, where the leg moves backward, or the hips drive forward.
Hip abduction: Moving the leg away from the midline. This motion matters for pelvic control and single-leg stability.
Hip adduction: The movement of the leg toward the midline, stabilizing the pelvis, and contributing to hip extension.
Hip internal rotation: Happens when the femur rotates inward within the hip socket. It helps the hip accept and control force rather than staying locked in one position. Take a split squat. As you lower, the hip needs a combination of flexion and internal rotation to allow the pelvis to move over the femur.
Hip external rotation: External rotation of the femur within the hip socket is essential for maintaining hip stability. During squats, the hips require adequate external rotation to align the femurs with the feet, allowing you to squat deep.
What The Hips Need
If you thought the motion of the ocean, we can be friends. But here’s what they really need.
Mobility: The hips’ range of motion across all the major hip movements mentioned above. Hip mobility is about whether you can get into the position you need without compensations from somewhere else.
Stability and Control: Mobility is not helpful unless it’s controlled. Hip stability means not locking everything down, but ensuring movement comes from the right places.
Strength: All major hip functions require strong muscles for movement. That means training:
- Glute strength for hip extension
- Hamstrings for posterior-chain strength
- Adductors for both strength and pelvic control
- Hip abductors for single-leg stability
- Hip flexors for bringing the thigh toward the torso
- Ensuring access to internal & external rotation
You want enough mobility to get into good positions, enough strength to generate force in those positions, and enough control to keep the pelvis, femur, and lower back doing their respective jobs.
Are The Hips Really Tight?
The hip flexors get a lot of attention for many reasons. The lower back hurts; it’s the hip flexors’ fault. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s not, but here’s a hip flexor fact.
The hip flexors can be tight, weak, or both.
True hip-flexor tightness is assessed using the Thomas test, where the thigh position helps determine whether there is an actual loss of length. Knee position can also help distinguish whether the restriction is coming more from the hip flexors or the quads.
If the hip flexors feel tight but the test determines no shortness, it could be a strength issue. If it is tightness, your best bet is to strengthen and mobilize the hip flexors, which can help improve the usable range of hip motion and better support all hip movements.
Signs The Hips Need More Attention
The hips will give clues if something is amiss.
One clue is poor hip-hinge form. Can you push the hips back without rounding the lower back, keep the shins relatively vertical, feel tension in the glutes and hamstrings, and maintain balance?
Other signs may include:
- Difficulty getting into a deep squat
- Turning a hinge into a squat
- Rounding the lower back during deadlifts
- Trouble achieving full hip extension
- Poor single-leg balance
- Feeling most hinge exercises in the lower back
- Difficulty bringing the knee toward the chest
Unilateral lower-body movements can also reveal problems that bilateral exercises hide. If you notice a noticeable difference between sides during single-leg work, hip stability and mobility could be the issue.
These are clues that your mobility, strength, or control may need more attention.
Persistent pain, significant loss of motion, or symptoms that keep getting worse are different. Those deserve an assessment from an appropriate healthcare professional.
How to Train Your Hips
You know what the hips need and the signs that they need more love, but where do you start? You start here.
Improve Mobility: Start by improving the hip range of motion you need. So instead of chasing flexibility for its own sake, focus on getting into the positions your training and daily life require.
Strengthen Hip Extension: The glutes are where it is at, so hip extension deserves attention. Hip thrusts, RDLs, cable pull-throughs, split squats, and kettlebell swings all train the hips to produce force in different ways. The goal here is not just to “feel the burn,” but to use progressive overload to make Sir Mix-A-Lot happy.
Train Hip Stability: Unilateral lower-body exercises are essential because they require the hips to control the pelvis and femur as your body moves around one leg.
Hip Flexor Work: Hip flexors are often stretched but rarely strengthened directly. That means marches, resisted hip-flexion drills, and other controlled hip-flexor exercises to cover all the hip bases.
Train the Adductors: They’re not just “inner-thigh muscles”; they also contribute to hip extension and help stabilize the pelvis.
6 Exercises for Better Hips
These exercises might not feature in a song, but they will improve the movement and function of the hips.
90/90 Hip Switch
Exercise Type: Hip internal and external rotation mobility and control
The 90/90 hip switch trains both internal and external rotation in the same drill. As you move from side to side, one hip internally rotates while the other externally rotates, giving you a chance to control both ranges.
Where It Goes: Warm-ups before lower-body training. It also works well as a mobility drill on a recovery day.
How to Do It:
- Sit on the floor with both knees bent and your feet wider than hip-width apart.
- Drop both knees toward one side until the front and back legs form roughly 90-degree angles.
- Keep the upper body tall.
- Without using your hands (if possible), rotate both knees through the middle.
- Drop them toward the opposite side.
- Continue moving slowly from side to side.
Sets and Reps: 2 sets of 5–8 switches per side.
Big Form Tip: Stay tall and control the rotation rather than throwing your knees from side to side.
Half-Kneeling Hip Flexor Stretch With Posterior Pelvic Tilt
Exercise Type: Hip-flexor mobility
This hip flexor stretch places the hip of the kneeling leg into extension, while the posterior pelvic tilt helps keep the movement at the hip rather than in the lower back. Too often, this exercise gets butchered, but emphasizing the tilt stops that.
Where It Goes: Lower-body warm-up or as mobility work between exercises.
How to Do It:
- Get into a half-kneeling position with one knee on the floor and the other bent at a 90-degree angle.
- Keep your ribs down and torso tall.
- Gently tuck your pelvis underneath you by bringing your belt buckle toward your ribs.
- Squeeze the glute of the kneeling leg.
- Hold for the desired time, then switch sides.
Sets and Reps: 1– 2 sets of 30-60 seconds per side.
Big Form Tip: If you arch your lower back to create a bigger stretch, you’ve missed the point.
Cossack Squat
Exercise Type: Adductor mobility and strength
The Cossack squat gives you something many lower-body exercises do not: both mobility and strength. As one leg works, the opposite leg’s adductors lengthen while the working leg’s quads, glutes, and adductors help stabilize and reverse the movement.
Where It Goes: Use a bodyweight version during your warm-up or a loaded version as accessory work.
How to Do It:
- Take a wide stance with both feet.
- Shift your weight toward one leg.
- Bend that knee while sitting your hips down and back.
- Keep the opposite leg straight, but allow the foot to move.
- Lower as far as your mobility allows.
- Push through the working leg to return to the start.
- Repeat on the other side.
Sets and Reps: 2–3 sets of 6–12 reps per side.
Big Form Tip: Go only as low as your mobility allows while keeping the working foot planted.
Wall-Supported Single-Leg RDL
Exercise Type: Unilateral hip stability and strength
The wall-supported single-leg RDL trains hip stability, hamstring and glute strength, and pelvic control, and exposes side-to-side differences while giving you enough stability not to lose your balance.
Where It Goes: An accessory exercise following your main squat or deadlift variation.
How to Do It:
- Stand facing away from a wall and balance on one leg.
- Place the foot of your non-working leg against the wall with the knee bent 90 degrees.
- Keep a soft bend in the working knee.
- Hinge while keeping your spine neutral.
- Lower until you feel tension through the glute and hamstring.
- Drive the working foot into the floor and extend the hip to return to the starting position.
Sets and Reps: 2–3 sets of 8–10 reps per side. Start with bodyweight, then add load as control improves.
Big Form Tip: Push the hip back instead of reaching for the floor.
Bulgarian Split Squat
Exercise Type: Unilateral glute and quad strength
It really sucks, but there are other reasons, including that it’s a unilateral exercise emphasizing the glutes and quads while also improving lower-body strength, balance, and mobility. Use a slight forward torso lean to further bias the glutes.
Where It Goes: Use it as a main strength exercise or as an accessory exercise.
How to Do It:
- Stand a few feet in front of a bench.
- Place the top of your rear foot on the bench.
- Establish your front-foot position as demonstrated in the video
- Lower the back knee toward the floor while bending the front knee.
- Lower as far as your mobility allows.
- Drive through the front foot to return to standing.
Sets and Reps: 3 sets of 8–15 reps per side.
Big Form Tip: Keep the front foot grounded while keeping your shoulders down and chest up.
Barbell Hip Thrust
Exercise Type: hip extension strength
The hip thrust is all about full hip extension and places a great demand on the glutes when they are short. It’s a go-to glute exercise that can be loaded heavily, which is excellent for muscle, strength, and lower-body performance.
Where It Goes: As a primary strength exercise or an accessory exercise.
How to Do It:
- Sit on the floor with your upper back against a weight bench.
- Roll a padded barbell over your hips.
- Bend your legs and get your feet hip-width apart.
- Brace your core and keep your chin tucked.
- Drive through your feet and extend your hips while your legs form a 90-degree angle.
- Finish by squeezing the glutes at lockout
- Lower with control and repeat.
Sets and Reps: 3–4 sets of 6–12 reps.
Big Form Tip: Finish with your glutes, not your lower back.
Wrapping Up
Your hips need more than stretching; they need mobility to hinge and bring the knee up toward the chest. They also need strength to generate force for the fun stuff and stability to keep the lower body working together.
That means training more than just the glutes. The hip flexors, adductors, hamstrings, and smaller stabilizers all matter. The six exercises above cover the big pieces: rotation, hip-flexor mobility, adductor strength and mobility, unilateral stability, and glute strength.
That is the goal.
Not loose hips. Not stiff hips. Capable hips.
Next up in the Joint-by-Joint Series: the lower back.
Work With Me
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Customized workouts you can do at home.
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