Mastering the Hip Hinge
What is a hip hinge?
The hip hinge is a fundamental movement pattern that involves bending at the hips while maintaining a neutral spine. This technique requires you to push your hips backward, keeping your back straight, rather than bending forward at the waist. By focusing on hip movement, you engage your glutes, hamstrings, and core muscles, which helps alleviate strain on your lower back.
Why would we need to do a hip hinge?
For some presentations of back pain, the spine rounds more easily than the hips can bend. This can lead to a relative excess of motion in the spine with relative stiffness in the hips. Bodies like to choose the path of least resistance, and will then continue to move in their spine rather than their hips.
In the clinic, we often hear patients say, “I bent over to pick something up, and my back went out.” This often suggests they initiated the movement with their back rather than their hips, from their improper mechanics. By promoting motion in your hips as your primary movement pattern for activities like squatting, lifting, or transitioning from sitting to standing, you can promote a healthy spine and significantly reduce, or even eliminate, low back pain.
How to learn a hip hinge:
Starting Position:
- Begin with a soft bend in your knees.
- Place a dowel along your back, ensuring it touches three points: the back of your skull, between your shoulder blades, and your tailbone.
Movement:
- Begin by pushing the hips back while maintain contact with dowel in all three place and keeping a neutral spine
- Squeeze your glutes to drive your hips forward as you return to a standing position
- A common mistake is for the back to round which would result in the dowel coming off of the sacrum
It should look as Abbey is demonstrating here:
