Hip Exercises for Pain: The Full Sheet, and How to Use It

These exercises are built to stretch, strengthen and stabilise the structures supporting your hip. Stay inside your pain limits and avoid overstretching while things are sore. Muscle ache after a session is normal and expected; joint pain that hangs around for more than a few days means stopping and getting advice.

If you have had a hip replacement, remember the following rules:

• Keep hip bend under 90 degrees.
• Keep the knee and toes from rolling inwards.
• Avoid twisting the body as you sit down or stand up.
• Keep the legs and feet uncrossed.

The dosage instruction is short and worth following exactly. Staying active matters, and the exercises that suit you are meant to be done daily. Aim for 5-10 repetitions of each, two to three times a day. Build up gradually rather than starting at full volume, and keep going once the hip settles, because that is what stops the symptoms returning.

Two details in that paragraph do most of the work. The first is "suitable for you": eleven exercises done badly in one sitting is worse than four done properly, and the four that matter most are usually the ones you find hardest rather than the ones that feel pleasant. The second is "carry on even when your hip is better". Strength gained over eight weeks is lost over a similar period once the exercises stop, which is the single most common reason a hip that improved in the spring is sore again by autumn.

Expect muscle ache the day after, and expect it to settle within 24 hours. Joint pain that lasts more than a few days means the load needs reducing rather than the programme abandoning.

This is not a filler recommendation while you wait for something more definitive. NICE guideline NG226 on osteoarthritis, published in 2022, names therapeutic exercise and weight management as the core treatments, offered to everyone with the condition alongside information and support. Everything else, including medication and referral for joint replacement, is layered on top of that rather than in place of it.

NG226 also makes two points that surprise people. It advises that exercise is offered even when it causes some discomfort at first, with the expectation that symptoms improve over weeks to months. And it recommends against acupuncture, dry needling and electrotherapy for osteoarthritis, which is a useful filter if you are weighing up what to spend money on.

Manual therapy has a defined place: NG226 supports considering it alongside therapeutic exercise for hip and knee osteoarthritis, and there is not enough evidence to recommend it on its own. In practice that means hands-on treatment is worth having when it makes the exercise possible, rather than as the treatment itself.

This set is built for hip pain arising from the joint itself, most often osteoarthritis. Several common problems in the same area behave differently:

• Pain on the outside of the hip, tender to lie on. That is usually gluteal tendinopathy rather than the joint. Exercise 3 above helps, but the deep stretches that pull the leg across the body make it worse by compressing the tendon.
• Pain in the groin that catches and clicks. Worth assessing for hip impingement or a labral problem, particularly in younger and more active people. Our article on a clicking hip covers what the noise does and does not mean.
• Pain that runs from the back into the buttock and down the leg. The hip is often innocent here and the lumbar spine is the source.
• Night pain that does not vary with position, or pain with fever or unexplained weight loss. These need medical assessment rather than an exercise sheet.

Getting seen for hip pain in East Sussex now runs through the East Sussex MSK Community Partnership, which took over the county's musculoskeletal pathway in December 2024 and accepts self-referral for physiotherapy without a GP appointment first. That route costs nothing and is the sensible starting point for many people. What it involves is a wait, and a programme that looks a lot like the sheet above.

What an assessment adds is the sorting the sheet cannot do. Hip pain that is actually gluteal tendinopathy, or lumbar spine referral, or a hip that needs a graded return to loaded strength rather than eleven bodyweight exercises, all present as "hip pain" and all respond to different work. In the Uckfield clinic, the most common correction is dose rather than diagnosis: people arrive doing all eleven exercises at a level that stopped challenging them weeks ago, which is why progress stalled.

If you are not sure whether your hip pain is the joint or something referred to it, booking an assessment is the step that tells you which of these you are dealing with.

Should hip exercises hurt?
Some discomfort during and shortly after is expected and acceptable. Joint pain that lasts more than a few days means reducing the reps or the range rather than stopping.

How long before hip exercises help?
Most people notice a change over six to twelve weeks of daily work. Strength gains build slowly and fade at a similar rate once you stop.

Can I do these after a hip replacement?
Follow the four precautions listed at the top of this page and whatever your surgical team specified, which takes priority. Our guide to hip replacement rehab covers the staged programme after surgery.

Do I need all eleven?
No. Four to six done properly and progressed over time beat eleven done once. Pick the ones that challenge you.

Is walking enough on its own?
Walking is excellent for the joint and does not build the hip abductor and quadriceps strength these exercises target. Most people need both.