In this video I am going to show you four
exercises that you absolutely need to start now to loosen up and begin to heal your bone-on-bone, hip
arthritis. If these exercises even slightly loosen up your hip joints, then you've got an excellent
chance at healing your bone-on-bone hip arthritis, and possibly escaping having a hip replacement
surgery. Now if these exercises work for you, you're going to want to watch to the end of the
video so that you can learn about the next steps to take after you've done these exercises.
My name is Dr. David Middaugh, and I am a specialist physical therapist at El Paso Manual
Physical Therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active, and mobile
while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections, and pain medications. Please consider
subscribing so that you don't miss out on any of the helpful tips we upload
every single week. Let's get to it guys. The first exercise is called windshield wipers
for your hips, and it looks just like this, you're going to find a place to lie down,
on the floor on the bed wherever you like, with your knees bent like so, and just be
comfortable, it doesn't matter how close your feet are to the rest of your body, get a comfortable
position. All you are going to do here next is open your knees and bring them together. And
just an easy motion just like this just out in a to do this for five minutes.
Now you don't have to go all the way out or all the way in because if you have hip arthritis,
you got that bone-on-bone situation inside your hip joints, you may have lost some motion and it
may feel uncomfortable to go all the way out here or all the way into it is typically the
more aggravating position. So just move where you feel comfortable.
The point of this is to lubricate the hip joint by getting the fluid inside the hip
joint to move around and circulate. And because you're not standing, you're not bearing weight.
And this is generally pretty easy exercise to do. It's ideal for getting that hip fluid to move
and give nourishment provide nutrition to the layers of cartilage on the inside of the
joint. So, I want to do this for five minutes, set a timer go for five minutes.
If you're doing the video the exercises along with me in this video. Then just pause this right here
and set a timer somewhere and go for five minutes. While you figure out how far out and in you can
go, and just move at a comfortable, pace you can slow down if you need to if you need to control it
or you can go a little faster if you want as well. This just should not hurt it should feel
comfortable to do and you should feel like your hips warm up a bit. It shouldn't feel
aggravating, painful, or achy in any way it should feel good after you're done doing it.
Okay, after you've done your five minutes’ worth of hip windshield wipers. Next, you're
going to do butt squeezes. Now for this one, it's critically important to get the buttock
muscles active to get them to wake up. And that's what you're focusing on in this exercise,
you're trying to get your brain to connect to your butt muscles, so that you can begin to use
them on command for other exercises that you need to do as you progress through strengthening.
Keep in mind these exercises I'm showing you are just the first things you should do when you have
a bone-on-bone hips situation once you're going to start to fix it, this would be a great starting
point for most people. So, in the same position, you're going to just squeeze your butt
muscles and hold it for 10 to 20 seconds. Now what you need to feel is just these muscles
back here, the butt tightening up, what you shouldn't feel is the front of the thighs working
if you do feel the front of the thighs working, then you've got to lighten up how hard you
are contracting or change the position a bit. An alternative way to do this
exercise is to put your legs down just like this so that your flat and tighten
up your butt muscles from this position. For me personally, I feel this works the best for
me, but this could be aggravating to some people, if they have back problems because of
lying down with your legs flat like this could bother a back problem.
So having the knees bent just like this, or putting a small pillow behind the
knees and then lying flat with the knees slightly bent because of the pillow. That may work as well.
So, play with the positioning. The goal of this exercise is to get your butt muscles to tighten
up. You're going to hold for 10 to 20 seconds and do this five to ten times you're trying
to get in about 100 seconds or more ideally, of but contractions without getting into the
front of the thighs or the inner thighs involved. You want to try to get the back of hips back here,
the butt muscles to tighten up and work. So, you can work from this position right here tightening
the buddy and you are really not lifting up you're just squeezing butt muscles. And if that doesn't
work, find some in between, between your legs all the way flat and bent. I'm tightening up right
here, but muscles are working and just tighten them up as hard as you can without them muscles
working for 10 to 20 seconds, five to 10 times. And after you've done your butt squeezes, your
glute muscles should be more woken up now. Now you're going to be ready to do clam,
clam shell exercises a modified clam shell, you're going to have to lie down on your side just
like so. And ideally do both sides. I'll flip over here in a moment so you can see the other side.
Once you get onto your side, you're going to lie down with your legs bent just like this, how far
up your hips are and your knees are is up to you. The point of this exercise is that you feel
the muscle burning or tightening up back here, where your back pocket would be, I would put my
hand in my back pocket, that's where my muscle is it, I want to fire. It's the gluteus medius,
actually the back half the posterior half of the gluteus medius, you might get glute maximus as
well, I want that muscle to fire because it's going to help to position the hip joint better to
optimize the motion to get better range of motion and get the mechanics the movement inside
the hip joints to improve so that you can have less of a bone-on-bone hip joint situation
and offload the cartilage inside your hip joint. So once you're bent like this, what you got to
look at with your eyes is you want the top knee to stick out past the bottom knee by you rolling
over just like so you're not trying to slide your leg correlate that you don't want to do that,
you want to roll your hips and even your upper body over just like this. So that this top
leg sticks out forward past the bottom leg. Once you're in this position, now what you're
going to do is pick up your knee and it doesn't need to be very high, you're just going to hold
it for 10 seconds. If you come up higher, you might feel like your thigh muscles are working,
we don't want that. Remember, we want the back pocket muscle right here working the butt muscle,
the side of the butt should be tightening up. So, for me if I roll over a bit more, right here,
I feel my butt muscle tightening up the most, after 10 seconds, you can relax and
repeat this 10 times on each side. So, roll over, pick up the hip and
play with the position like I feel right here, I get the best contraction. That's
what I'm after is the best contraction, not the hardest feeling necessarily, I want it to
be focused, I want my quad to not work, and my hamstrings to not work, I wanted to
be focused right back here, because that's what's going to affect the hip joint the best.
Right there I feel my quad fire and then relaxed. I'm going to relax right here rolling forward,
picking up just a bit. If I come up higher, it's not necessarily better. Now if I roll
forward a bit more and come up higher, I feel it. So, you can do this modification. And then one of
the tweaks that you can make is if you point your toe up, so I'm keeping my heels touching that I'm
pointing my toe up on my top leg that could light up that hip more as long as you can tolerate it
and you're not firing a bunch of thigh muscles. That's okay, this is not going to be productive
for you if your whole thighs working. Remember, you want to keep it to the glute
right here. It's roll forward and get that muscle to work right here. After you've done 10
reps then you’re just going to, you can roll over. I'll just do that for you. Or
you can put your head over there. But just see so that you can see
the other side of this exercise. Knees bent, roll forward like that. I
want this muscle right here to work. And I'm just picking up my knee so that this
muscle works right here. After about 10 seconds, you can relax it and I'm going to add my toes up.
To get this to burn I must roll forward a bit more in order to get this muscle to work.
Now this is where this is modified. Because a normal clamshell you're not rolling
forward so much you're just straight up and down. You're coming up just like that, and it's
probably going to fire more the thigh muscles. We don't want that in this case and when this
muscle to work back here, the side of the buttock muscle. In order to get the best effect for that
hip joint pressure you check you're trying to take off pressure from the hip joint when you do this.
After you've done your clams, modified clams. Next, what you're going to do is a screwdriver
exercise. Now if you've done all the exercises in order, you should have your glutes pretty warm so
that you'll be ready for the screwdriver exercise. Now what you'll need for this is ideally if you
have a rotating chair, like I've got this stool right here and it rotates, and computer chair
works pretty well too. It's okay if it has a backrest on it. And if you don't have a rotating
chair, there's a modification that I can show you that I'm sure you'll have the equipment
for a chair and a pillow will work just fine. I'm going to just raise this tool the way
and all you got to do for that screwdriver is, you know, kneel onto the rotating chair.
And you can hold on to something for balance, I feel pretty comfortable right here. But
if you feel like you need to hold on to a table a counter a piece of furniture, you know,
like a couch or something, then do so. So that you're not going to tip over, you're going to put
some weight through this leg through your knee. And then what you're focusing on here is rotating
in and out and specifically when you rotate outwards with your legs, so the front of your
thigh goes that direction, your foot goes that direction, you need to tighten the butt muscle.
So, you're just getting a better position here. All right, there we go. So, you're tightening up
right here. Tighten up, tight up when I go out, squeeze, squeeze a butt, muscle squeeze. Another term I've heard for the exercise is a
ratchet, kind of like a ratchet tool, screwdriver, the idea is that you're twisting back and forth.
And you have to squeeze a butt muscle this will not be as effective. If you don't squeeze the butt
muscle because you're turning on the muscle that shoves the ball in the right position in the
socket to alleviate the pressures that are causing the bone-on-bone hip joint problem. T
hat arthritis inside the hip joint wears down the cartilage inside the hip joint. And
that's what sets up the bone-on-bone situation. And it's not long entire surface of cartilage
that's gone. Usually, it's usually just a spot. And there's a lot of pressure inside the joint.
If you can offload the pressure by getting the buttock muscles to work, then you can, there's
a good chance that you can alleviate the pain and get back to normal activities.
But you've got to begin to activate the glutes, you've got to
depressurize the hip joint, and you've got to get lots of repetitive
movement. That's why this exercise. Now what I would do for this is time yourself
go for two to three minutes. If you want to go even more than that, even better, as long as
your glutes can tolerate it, and you're okay being in this position, you know, as long as
you're balanced, and then you can go for it. But after two to three minutes, if you feel
like you need to stop then you can do so you want to do the other side. If you want to
the other side, then you can do that as well. Now good frequency for this exercise
would be to do them five times a day. In total, they'll take you anywhere from 10
to 20 minutes depending on how fast you go. And if there's any of these exercises that
bother your hip, then you should leave it out so that you don't aggravate your hip, and
potentially be in a situation where you can't do anything because it just hurts to move
in any direction. You want to do exercises that make you feel good in your hip if you've
got a bone-on-bone hip arthritis situation. Now let's talk about what to do next. If you've
been doing these exercises for several days, maybe even several weeks for some people, they
might even take months of doing this exercise this exercise routine, so that you can get the
hip joint flare down enough to tolerate the next level. If you're moving on to the next level.
A good milestone or landmark to judge that you've surpassed these exercises would be if you can
tolerate standing and walking for 20 minutes or more without flaring up your hip joint. If you can
take 20 minutes’ worth of steps are being on your feet and your hip isn't biting you or isn't sore,
achy or you're not paying for it the next day. And that's a great position to be in.
That's a great sign that your cartilage has healed enough for you to tolerate weight
bearing through it. The pressures in the in the hip joint have begun to normalize and
you're benefiting from these exercises. If you're in that position that you need to move
on to the next step. If you're looking for those exercises, subscribe to our channel.
We've got tons of videos coming your way and we've got some in the past as well go check
out our playlists. You'll find more strengthening exercises that you can do if you subscribe to
our channel. I hope this video was helpful. Give us a thumbs up and please subscribe so you
don't miss out. Have a wonderful day. Bye-Bye
