Sep 26, 2025
A normal hip joint is made up of two bones: the hip bone and the femur. The placement of these bones allows various healthy hip movements such as abduction, adduction, flexion, and extension.
Understanding normal hip movement is necessary if you want to identify whether you’re experiencing a joint problem. Let’s look at more about normal hip joint movement and signs of a working joint.
What Are the Signs of a Healthy Hip?
A healthy hip joint should be pain-free and allow you to bear full weight on your legs. This means you must be able to maintain balance on your feet and walk without a limp.
Pain in your hip could indicate arthritis or other pathologies that are going to affect the way you walk and the way you exercise. It starts a chain of events and affects your performance significantly. Common symptoms of a hip problem include:
Pain in the groin, thighs, or buttock
Gait disturbances such as limping
Muscle imbalance on the weaker side leading to stiffening
As hip conditions progress especially arthritis, the stiffening of the hip joint worsens.
Healthy Hip Joint Movement: How Walking/Squatting Should Feel?
A healthy hip joint movement should feel stable whether you’re walking or squatting. There should be no pain when standing up after completing a squat or during walking. You must be able to take long strides without any gait disturbances.
If a gait disturbance is experienced, it indicates a problem with your hip joint. That’s because patients limp to adjust to the fact, they’re experiencing joint stiffness or pain.
The hip joint becomes stiffer because the soft tissue structures such as ligaments around the hip capsule and tendinous insertions of muscles to the hip become shortened. Gait disturbances are seen when patients shift their balance towards one side of the body in the hopes of reducing hip pain due to hip joint stiffness.
All Things Hip with Dr. Rodriguez & Dr. Pauyo from Pathway Surgery:
Common Misconceptions About Hip Joint Range of Motion
Let’s look at some common misconceptions people have about hip joint range of motion:
Surgery Cannot Restore Normal Hip Movement
The hip joint becomes stiffer because the soft tissue structures around the hip capsule and insertions of muscles to the hip become shortened. This is why the ball and socket joint gets stiffer.
As the structures shorten, you have to release some of those tissues often with surgery, and then once you've reversed the disease process such as with a hip replacement type surgery, you can gain a lot of that hip joint functionality back.Hip Problem Patients Are Diagnosed Only with X-Ray
X-ray is one of the diagnostic modalities for determining the cause of non-healthy hip joint movements. However, it is not the only method used for differentiating a healthy hip from an abnormal one.
First of all, you have to identify where the hip pain is coming from. It may come from inside your hip such as the labrum or other parts that can be corrected surgically. This identification is mainly done through the clinical examination of the patient by making them perform hip movements to detect when and where pain is felt.
There are some patients in which the injury is not clear. For example, such patients don’t fall into boxes such as presentation of a typical Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI), which is a labral tear.
To treat these patients, we could do injections of Lidocaine, which is an anesthetic that is injected inside the hip. Let’s say for example, you're going to the dentist for a cavity and it hurts. So the dentist numbs your gums with an injection and the pain goes away.
It’s the same thing with Lidocaine, we numb the inside of your hip and what's inside your hip is actually the cartilage and labrum. If the pain goes away, it tells you that the pain generator comes from inside the hip.
So that indicates a hip surgery in which the torn labrum and its underlying pathology are addressed. If the pathology is inside the hip, the outcomes will be favourable with hip arthroscopy labral repair.
However, if you get the injection inside your hip and the pain doesn't go away then you know the pain comes from outside the hip such as the muscles. Then we can get more diagnostic modalities or tailor physiotherapy to address the issue.Rotational Hip Joint Range of Motion Is Affected by Arthritic Injury
Simply if you think of yourself as a patient with hip problem your pain either comes from inside your hip or it comes from outside your hip. Outside the hip, your pain can from the ligaments or the muscles.
Meanwhile inside your hip, the pain can originate from the labrum, cartilage, or other parts. To determine arthritic pain, you have to dig a little deeper to find out the pain generator.
Nonarthritic injuries refer to more acute impact injuries such as when you see athletes being injured on the field with some kind of hip joint rotation. Typically, nonarthritic hip pain encompasses people that have an event and chronic pain.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Movement Does the Hip Joint Allow?
The hip joint allows various hip movements, including weight-bearing activities. These consist of hip flexion, extension (moving the thigh back or away from the front of your body), abduction (movement of the leg away from the midline of the body) and rotation (inward or outward turning of your leg).
What Is Hip Flexion Movement?
Lifting your thigh towards your torso is called hip joint flexion. It is a normal hip joint movement that every person must be able to perform without any pain.
How Is An Unhealthy Hip Detected?
An unhealthy hip can be diagnosed through various modalities, including patient’s clinical examination, X-ray, computed tomography (CT) scan, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Noticing No Signs Of Normal Hip Movement? Consult Pathway Surgery
A healthy hip joint should allow you to move your hip freely and without any pain. If you don’t notice these signs of healthy hip movement or experience chronic hip pain, consulting an orthopedic specialist would be good for you.
Pathway Surgery offers support to patients struggling with abnormal or limited hip joint movements. Contact us today to let our team help you understand your diagnosis and possible management.
