Understanding how your hip moves is crucial to fixing lower back pain.

This video is more for the therapists out there, because I show you how to quickly assess someone hips while they are standing to get an idea of how well they move in function, i.e when a person is standing and gravity is loading the body.

Moving your hips in all 3 planes of movement will show restrictions that may not appear in a standard table based physio or orthopaedic examination. This is because the joints, muscles and proprioceptors (those little things that tell the brain what is going one) are all loaded when someone is standing up. When they are lying down the ‘pressure’ quite literally is off, so the joints can move differently.

First part of the evaluation is moving your hips left and right to see adduction in the frontal plane.

Next take the legs wider apart and again move the hips left and right. This movement highlights abduction in the frontal plane.

The third assessment is in internal rotation of the hips in the transverse plane.

The fourth assessment is for external rotation, again in the transverse plane.

The fifth assessment is extension in the sagittal plane. We could add a sixth assessment here which would be flexion in the sagittal plane. I didn’t do it as I find that not many people display a difference in standing flexion.

Give this a go, experiment with it if you are assessing your self or practice if you are going to use it with patients. Also see if you can consistently find a difference between a standing up test and supine one.

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