Meet Victoria. She is a 56-year-old IT project manager at a large bank. Just two months ago, the pain in her hip was so bad it woke her up all night and made walking difficult. He had tried to rest. He had tried physical therapy. He was constantly straining. Nothing seemed to provide lasting relief.
Today, that pain is gone.
How did he do it? That is exactly what we will cover in this article. We will go:
- Victoria’s life before the hip injury
- What He Tried When He First Got Hip Pain (And How Well It Worked)
- The exercise program we used with her to get rid of her hip pain
- The results he achieved
- Obstacles encountered along the way
If you want to hear Victoria tell her own story, watch this 4-minute video:
And if you want help with your own hip pain, we have a special program called “Happy Hips.” To see if you qualify for this program, simply fill out the application form our home page. This will set up a short 10-15 minute call where we will discuss your current situation and see if we can help you. There is no obligation, pressure or sales pitch.
Victoria’s life before the hip injury
Before her hip injury, Victoria used to do exercise videos on YouTube, 3-4 times a week for 30 minutes.
Finally, her hip flared. What started as a nuisance turned into a major problem. Her pain reached 10/10. Sleep became difficult. Walking became difficult. Her leg gradually became stiffer. Daily activities began to revolve around her pain.
What did Victoria try to improve her hip pain?
Usually, when someone is in pain, the initial approach is just to don’t make it worse. Just rest and hope it goes away.
That didn’t work. Indeed, the rest made it worse. Her hip needed it right move. No stillness.
When rest didn’t work, he went to physiotherapy for 2 months. And right after her appointments, her pain would improve, but not for long. He would always come back. This is one of the most frustrating situations people find themselves in. You begin to wonder if you will ever solve the problem for good.
It got to a point where it was stretching her hip every hour. Clearly, this didn’t work, or the pain would be permanently relieved and he would no longer need to keep stretching.
Fast forward a bit, and she had been getting my newsletter for about a year by then, and after all those approaches failed, she contacted me, I introduced her to her personal trainer, Deanna, and they got to work.
But it was not without hesitation. He had some big hesitations before starting to work with us:
- Price. Personal training doesn’t come cheap (although we have lower priced options for different budgets).
- That her pain would get worse. Understandable, since weightlifting is how he got into this predicament in the first place.
Victoria’s exercise program
When planning an exercise program for folliculitis, we need to understand what causes folliculitis in the first place.
It used to be thought that folliculitis was the inflammation of the follicle (after all, that’s where the name comes from). A bursa is a fluid-filled sac that reduces friction between bones, muscles, and tendons near joints. Here it is what does it look like I say, “was”, because the The modern understanding of folliculitis is different (may need a name change in the future). Bursitis symptoms are now thought to be more related to degeneration or irritation of the gluteal tendon (for terminology, a tendon connects a muscle to a bone).
Once we understand the pathology and what structures are involved, we can design a plan to improve it, using the methodology I described in my article, Why do overuse injuries take so long to heal?.
Here are the highlights of Deanna’s exercise program for Victoria:
- Live side kicks. We often talk about the glutes as if they were a muscle. Is not. Actually it is 3 different muscleswith different functions. There is the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus. All 3 must be strengthened for full recovery. Banded side kicks primarily work the gluteus medius.
- Squats and deadlifts: work the gluteus maximus in a “real world” way. One of the problems with fitness exercises is that they look good on the therapy table, but then, you’re living your real life and those exercises haven’t transferred. The goal is to train the muscles the way you actually use the muscles. Squats and deadlifts are very transferable to everyday life because they replicate real-world movements.
- Hip lift and rotation. When we walk, the glutes must stabilize the pelvis. But if we only do symmetrical exercises in the gym, the transition to real life is not so good (because walking is inherently asymmetrical). Hip raises with a twist simulate contracting the glutes with an asymmetrical pelvis.
- Side bends: these work the obliques (the sides of the abs). The obliques help stabilize the pelvis when walking. And if someone walks a lot with an unstable pelvis, it contributes to the constant irritation of the gluteal tendons.
- V sit hold: These work the main abdominal muscle (rectus abdominis), which is also a pelvic stabilizer.
These are just some of the highlights of Victoria’s program. There were more exercises besides these.
Plus, if you just read about the exercises, you’ll miss the “secret sauceof the exercise program – the progress modeland the workout-to-workout adjustments made based on Victoria’s progress from her previous training session, energy/fatigue levels and more. Despite all this, no exercise program should be a static programwhere you do the same exercises for the same weights, sets and reps every time. An exercise program must be dynamic, intelligent, purposeful, and systematically change exercise variables to move the client forward… as opposed to randomly changing the schedule whenever you want, without rhyme or reason… like many personal trainers do.
Victoria’s results
With this exercise program, what results did Victoria achieve? Exactly what it set out to do: complete elimination of pain. None. Zero. Like it never happened. Pain is a complete history. Every movement he makes is now pain free.
He can sleep through the night. He can walk comfortably. He can sit or stand for hours without pain.
In addition to the reduction in pain, she has also experienced impressive improvements in her strength:
- Her deadlifts improved from 20kg, up to 45kg. So her glutes and lower back are much stronger now.
- He went from not being able to squat a weight at all to squatting 15 pounds comfortably.
- Her lat pulldowns improved from 32lbs, up to 42lbs, so she has more upper body strength.
And all this in about 2-2.5 months.
Exercise Dosage
In my article on exercise as medicine, I explained how a a huge part of the “cure” is using the right dose. The same goes for strength training.
Regarding the exercise dose, it contains some important details:
- The right weight/resistance. Not too light and not too heavy.
- The appropriate number of repetitions.
- The appropriate number of sets.
- The appropriate number of days/week.
Choose a dose that is too low and you won’t get better. Choose a dose that is too high and you risk making the injury worse. This is a major reason why so many physical therapy programs don’t work (not to say they all don’t work, but exercise is often seen as an afterthought, rather than the most powerful part of treatment, which it usually is). Physical therapists work under the false assumption that exercise selection is the most important variable. It is certainly an important variable, but the right exercises, with the wrong dose will not do the job.
Part of the art and science of therapeutic exercise is appropriate dosage.
Victoria’s Barriers
Success for Victoria wasn’t exactly a straight line. She is a mother, wife and IT project manager. There were many obstacles.
- Like many professionals, Victoria did not sit around with endless free time. He is working more than a typical 40-hour week. Between work, family responsibilities, and whatever else life throws at you, she only had time for 30-minute workouts by herself. But consistency beats perfection. A 30 minute workout is better than a 0 minute workout.
- Besides the chief complaint he came to us of (hip bursitis), he also had knee pain during squats;. Deanna modified the squats so Victoria could do them without pain.
- Due to weak abs, Victoria also had poor posture. With some immediate posture work and ab strengthening, her posture improved.
Despite these obstacles, Victoria was able to achieve complete pain relief, improved posture, and increased strength.
If there’s one lesson from Victoria’s story, it’s that pain doesn’t always get better with rest.
In fact, proper movement is often just what injured tissues need.
The challenge is figuring out which exercises to do, how much to do, and how fast to do them.
That’s where most people get stuck.
If you’ve tried rest, stretching, physical therapy, massage therapy, chiropractic care, or other approaches and still struggle with hip pain, it may be time for a different strategy.
We have a special program called “Happy Hips”. To see if you qualify for this program, simply fill out the application form our home page. This will set up a short 10-15 minute call where we will discuss your current situation and see if we can help you. There is no obligation, pressure or sales pitch.
