The story we are told about our hips is often one of inevitable decline. We hear the term “wear and tear” and assume that, like the tread on a tyre, our joints simply wear out over time, with arthritis and hip replacements being an almost certain destination.
But this narrative is deeply misleading.
Hip degeneration is rarely a story of overuse. More often, it is a story of underuse, or more specifically, a lack of movement variety. The health of your hips is not predetermined by your age, but by how you use them every day.
Imagine a door hinge that is only ever opened a few inches. Over time, the parts of the hinge that never move will rust and seize up. You wouldn’t say the hinge is “worn out” from overuse. Rather, you’d recognise it has degraded from a lack of full movement.
Your hip joints are much the same. They are incredible ball-and-socket joints, designed for a huge, three-dimensional range of motion. Yet in our modern lives, we typically only use a tiny fraction of that capacity.
When we sit in chairs, our hips are held in a fixed position of flexion. When we walk on flat, predictable surfaces, they move in a repetitive, limited way.
This starves the joint. The cartilage that lines your hip socket has no direct blood supply. It gets its nutrition through a process of compression and release, like a sponge being squeezed and soaked. To be healthy, every part of the cartilage needs this loading.
When we only use a small portion of the joint’s range, only that small portion gets nourished. The rest is left to degrade, not from being worn away, but from being neglected.
How your hip joint is loaded is also critical. If your pelvis is tilted or your lower back is stiff—very common issues we see in the clinic—it changes the mechanics of how you walk and stand.
This forces the hip to move in a suboptimal pattern, concentrating pressure on one small area of the joint. This is the true cause of the “wear” pattern we call arthritis: uneven loading caused by poor alignment.
This is where a two-fold approach becomes so powerful. Chiropractic care is focused on restoring proper alignment and motion through your pelvis and spine. By ensuring the structures surrounding the hip are moving correctly, we help the hip joint sit and move in its socket as it was designed to.
This creates the foundation for you to then re-load the joint in a healthy way. By reintroducing varied, natural movements—like deep squats, sitting on the floor, or walking on uneven ground—you can begin to nourish all those neglected parts of the joint.
You have the power to change the future of your hips. It begins with moving them well, and moving them often, through their full, intended range.
Ready to improve your alignment and support your hips for the long term? Book your appointment with us today.
Ewell Chiropractic
9A Cheam Road, Ewell, Epsom KT17 1SP
Our practice is next to the central car park in the Ewell village if you travel by car. And just a 10-minute wander from both train stations in Ewell.
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