Tight Hips? Try These Mobility Exercises

You may be familiar with your level of flexibility, but what about your mobility? There’s a big difference between mobility and flexibility — but both deserve your attention. While flexibility focuses on your ability to stretch or lengthen your body’s connective tissue, mobility is all about moving your joints through their full range of motion. You may not need to be able to do a split to move comfortably through life. But mobility plays an important role in your longevity. Injury, inactivity, overuse, and aging can all reduce your mobility over time. 

And you likely spend a lot of time sitting — whether you work at a desk or spend a couple hours each night in front of the TV. That means your hips may be an easy target for stiffness. If they’re stiff, going up and down stairs, bending down to pick something up, or even playing with your kids can be difficult or painful. We talked to Julia Blackwell, a mobility expert and “pain relief wizard” to break down how to loosen up tight hips and improve your range of motion back. 

Featured expert

Julia Blackwell - Julia Blackwell is a fascia release expert and practitioner whose work focuses on reducing clients’ pain and increasing mobility.

theSkimm: What are the best mobility exercises for tight hips?

Blackwell: Fascia is the biological fabric that holds everything in your body together. It attaches ligaments to bones, it keeps your structure in alignment, [and] it holds your organs and muscles in place. It is like a three-dimensional plastic wrap suit that you wear on the inside. Tight fascia tends to pull the body out of alignment and creates a lot of tension that restricts our mobility.

[Poor hip mobility] could just generally be feeling stiff and [difficulty getting] into certain positions, like yoga positions, or getting all the way down to the floor. But it also can manifest as low back pain, [or] hip pain. Even knee pain is usually caused from a lack of mobility in the hips.

My top recommendations are to use a foam roller. And the way that I suggest [doing that] is through bending the knees and moving from the hip. 

How to foam-roll your quads:

1. Lay on the foam roller in a plank position with the roller somewhere along the mid- to upper-thighs. 

2. Instead of rolling back and forth, just stay in that spot and slowly bend and straighten your knees a few times. 

3. [Optional] When your knees are bent at 90 degrees, hold them there and rock your heels side to side. 

How to foam-roll your IT bands:

1. Lay on  the mid- to upper-part of the side of your thigh. (Make sure it's not on the pelvic bone. So if anything feels bony or sharp, move down.) 

2. On one spot you bend and straighten your knee slowly a few times. 

3. Then, when your knee is bent at 90 degrees, lift your heel up toward the ceiling and down toward the floor.