Get your hip mobility right: How to fix uneven hip alignment
Summary
- Discover how to improve your hip mobility and alignment with straightforward exercises that can alleviate pain and enhance your posture.
- Learn the surprising role of your diaphragm and heart in pelvic health, and why small postural adjustments matter in your fitness journey
One of the key things that you should work on is your hip mobility and alignment, in order to improve your posture and getting rid of back pain. All these can be fixed with simple exercises, but where should you begin? The first thing you need to know that it is actually very difficult to stand on both feet with an equal amount of pressure. The human body, due to its alignment at the pelvic bone, usually tends to put more pressure on the right leg than the left. That is because the left hemipelvis is usually more externally rotated and the right one more internally rotated.
This is something that wasn’t taught in school despite being such an important part of postural anatomy. This imbalance is a natural adjustment the body makes not just for functional activities but for deeper reasons which relate to cardiac health and possibly the positioning of organs in the body. Which is all quite fascinating.
The human pelvis is important across all planes of movement: sagittal, frontal, and transverse. Which is why working on its general health and balance should be one of the top maintenance priorities. If you find yourself centering your mass on one leg, it is not a problem. But it is good practice to not tire one side out. This also happens because of how the right diaphragm is positioned in the body compared to the left one. Why this happens is a widely debated topic.
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“The classic teaching has been that the diaphragm is elevated in the right side because the liver is in the right side. Our group thought that it is timely to address this issue again and to elucidate the fact that it is the cardiac mass and not the liver that determines the posture of the hemidiaphragms," states a review of 65 cases titled What Dictates The Position Of The Diaphragm—The Heart Or The Liver? Published in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, the review debunks the classical teaching, saying that the positioning depends more on cardiac mass. “It is the cardiac mass that is responsible for the lower position of the corresponding hemidiaphragm. The popular hypothesis that the liver lifts its related hemidiaphragm is false," it concludes.
That said, the liver theory is still widely accepted among medical practitioners. In fitness terms though, unless you have a pelvic imbalance that is very evident, there is nothing to worry about. But it does make sense to not let this become a big muscular imbalance.
These are clear symptoms: pain radiating down the legs, a distinct difference in the shoulder alignment, hip tightness, excessive leaning to one side, and in extreme circumstances, a sharp pain while walking. An easy self-assessment is the mirror. Stand with equal weight distribution on both feet and see if one side of the body is higher than the other. Touch your toes and check if one side refuses to budge beyond a point while the other does. If left unattended, these issues could eventually lead to sacroiliac joint dysfunction, and pain in the lower back.
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Tone and Tighten is a really good YouTube channel to follow for these issues. One of their videos shows a simple exercise to mobilise the pelvis is to take a firm stick, or a golf club or anything solid and wedge it under one knee and over the thigh of the other leg, and push with the knee-side. Then switch. The next simple exercise is doing clamshells. Which is lying on the side of the body with the knees at 45 degrees and opening the knee up towards the ceiling.
In a very interesting Instagram reel posted by movement specialist Derya Anderson, she offers not a solution, but a better feeling with a “Band-Aid" trick. She says it is important to push the left side of the body over to the right to maintain balance and the muscle which does this is the gluteus maximus. “One reference point which is a cue for your body to move over to the left is the big toe on the right foot. Most of us bypass the right big toe. You can try when you’re walking if you can notice your left big toe hitting the ground but maybe your right big toe kind of isn’t really there," she says in the video.
She suggests applying a band-aid to the right big toe with the stubby side at the bottom of the toe and then trying to walk. This might help one recruit the right glute max better and is especially important if you’re a walker or a runner and could help right hip pain.
The other exercises to do these are easy to figure out once you know how your anatomy functions. Muscle recruitment and what that does to the body is a necessary part of any fitness journey. Lifting and growing muscles is surely one part of it, and so is stamina and flexibility and strength. These seemingly-small postural fixes are actually extremely important.
Pulasta Dhar is a football commentator, podcaster and writer.
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