The Hip Hinge

The Hip Hinge

The hip hinge is a movement that targets your posterior chain muscles, such as your glutes, hamstrings, and back extensors. During this movement, all the motion is happening at the hip while your spine stays neutral.

Hinging at the hip is crucial for maintaining back health by avoiding bending at the spine when picking things up or “bending over”.

Although it is a very important movement, due to our lifestyles and common bad posture, its easily overlooked and sometimes it can be a challenge to relearn how properly bend at the hip.

These next exercises are a good starting point and exercises you can as part of your warm-up routine. The idea is to repeat them and understand them enough so that the motion becomes natural.

Kneeling 3-point touch hip hinge

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Starting on your knees, you are going to place the dowel behind your back, making sure it is in contact with the back of your head, your upper back, and your sacrum (right above your glutes) at all times. (Look at the first picture for location of 3 points).

You are then going to proceed to push your hips back towards your heels or wall behind you, but making sure you maintain the 3 points of contact throughout the whole movement and then stand back up. Notice, that if there is any bending at the spine, the dowel will come off one of those contact points. We want to avoid that!

Kneeling kettlebell/dumbbell behind the back hip hinge

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For this exercise, you also want to be on your knees. This eliminates the lower portion of your legs (from knee down), that way you can start by focusing only on the hips.

Keeping your shoulders back (squeeze your shoulder blades together but don’t overdo it), you want to use your butt to push the kettlebell behind you towards your heels (essentially pushing your hips back)

You can then stand up and repeat both exercises on your feet. Now you will get the lower portion of your legs involved, creating muscle and neural adaptations so that later on it is natural and it translates well to deadlifts and any movement that requires you to bend at the hip.

Standing 3-point touch hip hinge

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For this exercise you want to focus on the same thing as the kneeling 3-point touch hinge performed above and follow the same instructions. Keeping the 3 points of contact (back of the head, upper back and sacrum) as you push your butt back and hinge at the hip. Notice how to bottom of your leg (from knee down) stays pretty much vertical as you push your hips back.

Standing kettlebell behind the back hip hinge

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As mentioned above, you are going to focus on the same things as you did when performing the kneeling version (pushing the kettlebell back with your butt). Again, notice how the lower part of your leg stays pretty much vertical.

In both standing versions of the exercises, you are going to feel more of a stretch on your hamstrings; this is a good sign you are doing it right!

You can do 2 sets of 10 reps of each exercise as part of your warm up, especially on days when you are working your lower body. Work through these exercises until you feel comfortable with the motion. Once you are comfortable, you can just do the standing versions of both. This is a great way to progress into a proper Deadlift.

Laura Hobson