The Surprising Way to Strengthen Your Hip Joint, According to Experts

When it comes to our bodies, our hips are some of the biggest influencers. It connects our upper body to our lower body, making it crucial for our overall stability and alignment. So when our hips aren’t working right, we can end up with all kinds of problems, like low back pain or knee issues, says physical therapist Lauren Glisic, DPT, CSCS, of Athletic Lab Physical Therapy and Performance Training in Santa Monica, California. 

“There's a huge connection between hip weakness and all of these other injuries,” she says. On the flip side, if we learn how to strengthen the ball and socket joint of the hip, we’ll feel sturdier and more comfortable anytime we’re walking, running, squatting down, climbing stairs, or just moving about our day-to-day life. 

Not sure how to strengthen your hip joint, though? Well, you’ve come to the right place. We asked experts like Dr. Glisic to break down what you need to know about hip strength, including the best ways to shore up those babies to become as strong and healthy as possible. 

What makes the ball and socket joint of the hip unique?

Our bodies have two ball-and-socket joints: the shoulders and the hips. For most of us, the hips are far more stable since the socket is generally much deeper (unless you’re born with something like hip dysplasia). There are also several strong ligaments and muscles like the glutes that provide extra stability, Dr. Glisic says. “It's very, very hard to dislocate your hip,” she adds. 

That said, there’s still a lot more motion going on in the hip joint than, say, the knee. Meredith Witte, MSEP, CSCS, a functional strength coach and yoga instructor with a master’s in exercise physiology, points out that unlike other joints, the hip facilitates movement of our thigh bone in multiple directions—the legs rotate in and out, they reach forward and back as well as out to the sides and in toward the middle. 

“We have so many muscles that contribute to moving the hip joint,” Witte says. Although the glutes are the biggest ones, we’ve also got hip flexors like the iliopsoas, the piriformis and tensor fasciae latae which help us both rotate and stabilize the area, adductors to bring our legs together, and more. For well-rounded strength in the hips, we need to put them all to work. 

Why it’s so hard to strengthen the hips

Weak glutes are super common, thanks to all the time that most of us spend sitting at our desks and in our cars each day. Dr. Glisic explains that in this seated position, the glutes are overstretched while the hip flexors are shortened—and both end up weak.

Even when we’re not in a chair all day, few of us actually mobilize our hips in the ways that humans evolved to use them. “If you think [about] hunter-gatherer societies, they’re building fires, hunting, and gathering their food, moving the hips in all different ways. Even when they're resting, they're getting down onto the floor and sitting in various positions,” Witte says. “We just don't do that today.” 

Dr. Glisic adds that sometimes, other muscles like our quads or lower back take over, so the hips don’t end up getting activated even when we should be engaging them. “For a lot of people, it's a neuromuscular coordination issue—they don’t know how to fire their hips,” she says. “They haven't made that mind-muscle connection.”

Signs that you need to strengthen your hips

Hip weakness can sometimes be tricky to pin down. Although it might lead to symptoms like knee pain, hip popping, or plantar fasciitis, it’s hard to definitively blame those injuries on a lack of strength in the hips, Dr. Glisic says, since so many other factors can come into play. 

That said, there are some movement patterns that signal weak hips. “If, when you're squatting, you notice your knees diving in, or when you're running, your foot is crossing the midline, those kinds of things can be indicative of glute weakness,” Dr. Glisic says. 

Witte adds that weakness sometimes manifests as achiness or tightness in the hips. “Most people immediately feel like, ‘Well, I need to stretch more,’” she says. “But oftentimes, actually, building strength in deeper ranges of motion can be the ticket to mitigating some of those achy pain signals.”

The best ways to strengthen your hip joint 

The good news? There are several exercises you can take advantage of to build stronger hips 

Dr. Glisic recommends starting with moves that isolate the stabilizer muscles, like banded clamshells, monster walks, and standing fire hydrants so that you can really feel the right areas firing up. Then, move on to more compound movements like split squats, deadlifts, lunges, step-ups, and hip thrusts that build functional strength for the kinds of movements we use in daily life. 

Because the ball and socket joint lets the legs move in so many directions, Witte recommends being intentional about hitting them all—mix it up between lateral lunges, reverse lunges, and curtsy lunges, for instance. “Really play with moving through different planes of motion,” she says.

Yes, that all might sound like a lot. But you don’t need to pull out your whole arsenal of hip exercises every time you work out. Witte simply suggests doing three sets of one or two hip-focused moves a couple times a week. Just be sure to target the hips from different angles—maybe you do step ups on Tuesdays and deadlifts on Fridays, she recommends.

The key is quality over quantity. Namely, don’t be afraid to reach for heavy weights. The glute max in particular is the largest muscle in the body, so it needs a pretty big stimulus to get stronger, Witte points out. Go slow and steady to maximize time under tension, and try to feel the muscles contracting through the full range of motion. By the last one or two reps of a set, you should feel like you’re barely able to make it to the end. “Muscular failure is the number one thing that contributes to helping build muscle,” Witte says. 

One note on timing: When you’re doing heavier lifts, get them done earlier in your workouts, “right after a warm-up, while your muscles are still fresh,” Witte says. More targeted stability work like clamshells can wait until later in your session.      

Once you know how to strengthen the ball and socket joint in the hip, and start doing some of these exercises consistently, Dr. Glisic says the muscles around the hips will start to get stronger in about eight to 12 weeks. How will you be able to tell? “You will likely feel so much more comfortable in your body,” Witte says, “finding more ease with movement throughout the day, less achiness, and just the strength to be able to do stuff—to climb stairs, to pick up heavy things, [not] being held back by how your hips feel.”