All About Hip Health Circuits

When we talk about training, we’re always quick to jump to the big exercises and protocols that typically make up a training program. We only talk about all of the little support systems and ancillary parts of the body when they start become pain triggers, and then it’s conversations about work-arounds or the efficacy of chiropractic care.

I take a different approach in my programs and try to keep ahead of the problem by targeting different common issue points each week in training. Two common issue points are the hips and the knees, so i started implementing Hip Health Circuits into my programs to get a jump on the problem and keep my athletes moving well and pain free.

In this post I’ll explain what these hip health circuits are, how I design them, and then also how I build them into training programs for athletes.

What Are Hip Health Circuits

Hip Health Circuits are a combination of 3-5 exercises that I combine and program together into athletes’ programs in order to try and stay ahead of any potential hip or knee pain that would otherwise manifest. For the Odin’s Boys Strongman program there is a Hip Health Circuit built into every Max Effort Lower Day, and I run that circuit in 3-Week Waves like everything else in the program.

Designing A Hip Health Circuit

This rehab/prehab type work can seem tedious to athletes who are not currently experiencing pain in the parts of the body being worked, so I try to meet them half way to keep up adherance. That means keeping this work short, sweet, and highly effective. My goal in designing these Hip Health Circuits is to keep the total work time around 10 minutes with 3 highly effective exercises that the athletes can easily scale to meet their strength levels. That said, these exercises have to cover the basic functions of the hip so those functions need to be understood:

Hip Extension: I never include hip extension in my Hip Health Circuits because hip extension is what we’re most commonly training with the rest of the program. Whenever you squat, deadlift, or pick up an implement you are training hip extension. We want to train the other functions of the hip in order to balance out the overall workload on the hip.

Hip Flexion: Hip Flexion is the closing of the hips, or bringing the femur up to the torso. It’s important to note that to truly isolate hip flexion, you have to keep a steady and unmoving pelvis in the exercise. If the pelvis is rolling, then the distance between the rib cage and the top of the pelvis is changing and you could be training abs instead.

Internal Rotation: This is any movement where the top of the femur rolls in towards your midline. In more experienced athletes, an abundance of focus on external rotation to align the knees and activate the glutes can create a neglectful environment for the internal rotators. We have to remember that the internal and external rotators working in unison is what creates healthy movement, and both must be kept in balance.

External Rotation: This is any movement where the top of the femur rolls out away from your midline. When there isn’t enough strength to maintain good posture, the brain tends to default to internal rotation. That means that for people who may not have an athletic background that focused on technique, the external rotators are often week and in need of development.

Hip Abduction: Abduction is pushing the leg out away from the body’s midline. Exercises here can be tricky to perform correctly because it is easy to use a contraction in the core that draws the pelvis to the rib cage to lift the leg. You don’t want this because that requires shifting of the spine, and any shift of the spine under load can increase injury risk. You have to make sure that the pelvis is stationary when the leg moves to isolate hip abduction.

Hip Adduction: Adduction is the opposite, where we draw the leg back in towards the midline. This is easier to execute from a technical point of view but still requires focus because the body can often achieve adduction by other means. One of my favorite exercises for this is just an adduction slide, but if you’re not patient and focused you can just shift your body weight and cheat the movement.

Unless you’re going to do 5 exercises in the Hip Health Circuit, you can’t hit all directions at the same time. I try to make sure that I’m hitting at least three directions each week, and then change up the targeted movement from one wave to the next. You have to keep in mind that these functions are getting some attention with compound movements in your more conventional movement patters. We’re just adding volume over time to maintain balance in the musculature of the hip and prevent injuries.

Building Them Into Programs

With regard to training phases, I consider Hip Health Circuits to be much more general than specific. That means that we should see Hip Health Circuit volume more in earlier, off-season type blocks than we do during highly specific, competition blocks. I might have 2-3 Hip Health Circuits pre week in GPP and Hypertrophy phases of training while I may eliminate them altogether in Peaks and Tapers.

That said, for 80% of my atheltes’ training there is 1 Hip Health Circuit prescribed per week addressing 3 out of the 5 Hip Functions I detailed above. I try to customize them for my athletes based on the needs that I’m seeing in the video submissions and weaknesses I see in specific exercises, but whether or not it seems like they need this work there is almost always a Hip Health Circuit programmed into the week somewhere.

My go-to training split is a 4-day upper/lower split. That means two upper body days and two lower body days. For training weeks like this, I’ll incorporate the Hip Health Circuit into one of the lower days towards the end of a workout. Usually just before core work or any other problem-solving isolation exercises.

You have to understand that you’re using a lot of fatigue on these Hip Health Circuits, so squeezing them into workouts doesn’t have to take a lot of consideration. I have a couple of athletes running full-body undulating splits, and in those programs I just try to find a good place in the week where I can put it without adding a time burden to any one workout.

Want Examples?

If you’re still wondering what a Hip Health Circuit might look like, then click the button below. In exchange for your email you’ll get a PDF with 5 different hip health circuits that you can incoporate into your next workout. These are Hip Health Circuits that I’ve used in both my Odin’s Boys Subscription programming, and in custom programs for specific athletes. They will work for you, and give you an idea of how you might go about constructing your own in the future.