Pain on the outside of your hips?
Trochanteric Bursitis, Gluteal Tendinopathy, Greater trochanteric pain syndrome!
This can go by a number of different names but usually it means that the Glute medius tendon (outside hip muscle) has become irritable and overloaded causing pain.
The answer is to build strength in the hip muscles in a way that doesn’t over stress, compress or overload the irritable tendon. Like all strength building, this will take time but over 6-12 weeks you can make a massive difference to your pain.
Here we’re demonstrating:
- Isometric hip abduction against a wall – try long holds 5 x 40 seconds
- Bridging with resistance band
- Skater variations on the reformer – this is one of the best exercises around for this condition.
Things to avoid:
- Stretching your hip across your body. This will feel good at the time but the compressive load of the this stretch will aggravate the glute tendon and make it irritable and painful
- Sitting cross legged – this does the same as the cross body stretching.
- Hitching on you sore hip – again loads the tendon with compressive force which will aggravate.
- Try to stay away from the cortisone needle. In severe cases it might be necessary to settle things down but often the pain will return if you don’t do the work to strengthen and rebuild the capacity of your hip and leg muscles and strengthen the tendon.
As always – if your pain persists come and see us for an assessment to make sure we get the diagnosis right and set you up with the correct program.