Stop Hip Pain While Kickboxing

Hi I’m Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy, in this video, I wanted to talk about front hip pain when you're kicking. A lot of these wonderfully fun gyms are popping up where they do kickboxing. It's a circuit and they’re a lot of fun and they're high intensity and they're absolutely super fun. They help you make friends ‘cause everybody works out at the same time. So you meet everybody that's in your class. Absolutely fabulous. But sometimes what happens is you get into those classes, it gets really intense then the front of your hip starts to hurt. This hip pain starts to slow down your workouts. Hip pain is very common, it's a hip flexor strain. What that means is the muscle that runs from the front of your hip bone down to your knee, ends up getting a little bit overworked. 

There can be a lot of kicking in those classes and if you're not icing at the end of your sessions, and if you're not stretching enough then that can lead to progressive soreness. Sometimes it's just the amount of work that's happening during workouts making it easier to strain the front of your hips. Typically we're right or left leg dominant, so you'll have one hip that is bothering you and the other one that's not. It's not necessarily because there's something weird about your body. It's just that we tend to kick more or harder with one side, then the other.

But this video, like where I sparked this from, was my client Frank. Frank contacted me, roughly three or four months ago because he was having hip pain in the front of his hip. He didn't really understand why. So as we're talking, he's telling me that he started kickboxing. I told him that I love kickboxing, but I asked him, “How did you get into kickboxing?” He told me the story. He went for his annual physical with his doctor and the doctor basically told him that he needed to, (it was a little abrupt and very harsh conversation) lose weight, watch what he ate.  Since his cholesterol, his blood pressure, his sugar levels are all elevated and his weight was becoming a problem for him.  And if he didn't fix it, they told him basically he was just waiting to have a stroke or a heart attack. He needed to do something now! And they were being rather aggressive. Frank took that news very much to heart because he has a wife and his kids. His head started spinning about what would happen to his family if one of those things happened to him.  He made this big resolution that he's going to lose all this weight and he's going to get super healthy. And just like he is in business and his work, he went all in. He joined a gym, he was going five days a week.

He lost a lot of weight very quickly and he was doing wonderful until the front of his hip started hurting. Then it was like everything came to a screeching halt because the pain went from being mildly achy at the end of the session to being where now he couldn't even walk.

Even if he got up from down from a chair, it was very, very painful. He wasn't finding any relief when he iced. He couldn't get any relief when he was stretching. He was really afraid that he was going to need to have some form of hip surgery.

Now on top of this, all he was trying to do is get healthy and how he thinks he's going to need to have hip surgery. When he went to the doctor he was mildly happy because the doctor told him, it's not arthritis, it's not anything. I'm going to give you some anti-inflammatories and I want you to go home and rest.  Well to Frank, that was horrible because if you rest at home, he's going to gain all the weight back. And all these other health complications are going to come back. He had done a good job of eliminating or reducing the risk of a heart attack or stroke. His heart rate was already lower.  His blood pressure was better. He looked at rest like it would take all those gains. He was completely deflated when he called me, he was just completely upset.

He thought that he should've been able to know that this injury was going to be a problem. As if he was gonna spontaneously know that he was going to injure himself, that somehow the injury was his fault. Basically, he was just battling with quite a few things. Because he was also worried what would happen if he wasn't able to work out. He was worried that he would gain all the weight back and his health would decline. 

It was very quickly that we discovered that Frank wasn’t just having fun doing kickboxing. The classes were all exciting and the people were wonderful. But it was really what kickboxing meant to him and what it meant to him in regards to his family.  This was his way of helping his family stay safe, that he was going to be around for a little bit longer and be able to do things with them while not being a burden.​

And so he came to me and he was really worried that he was going to have to have some from a hip surgery or do something dramatic with that. And so he was describing all the things he was doing. And like I said, he was icing it every day, which only somewhat calmed it down, but it didn't really do much. The same thing with stretching, he was like, “I've been stretching and stretching and stretching, and it's just not going away”. He's like, “I've taken a couple of weeks off and it doesn't hurt now, every time I walk, but if I go to do any kind of kicking motion it hurts. So do I have to just give up kickboxing?”

He came in for the evaluation where we were able to pinpoint exactly why that one hip was the problem and not both. We were able to create a program that specifically helped him get back to kickboxing. After a few weeks he stopped having pain when getting up and down from a chair and moving around just in his everyday life. Then he stopped having pain all together. We worked on making him stronger and he felt a lot more stable after that even on one foot while doing some dynamic motions. Then we got him back to a hundred percent where he was able to make it through a full class, with no pain at all. He knows exactly what he's supposed to do to keep all of that, how to cross train and do what he needs to make sure that he stays.

He went from being completely worried that he was going to possibly have to have some form of hip surgery or something. He sprained his hip. It was going to be long and dramatic. And now he is back to working out five days a week.

He is back on his diet plan and he is on his way to making all the progress that he wants to improve his health. If that is the type of care that you're looking for  feel free to ask to talk to a therapist, I'll leave the link for this form below. We can talk just to make sure that this is something that would work for you for your specific situation. If you want, I also have some free eBooks. I can put a couple of those down just so you can see what kind of tips and tricks that I have for you. I hope you're having a good day.

If you found this information helpful check out these blogs
what-should-i-do-to-avoid-a-hip-replacement.html
​how-can-you-stop-your-hip-from-popping-while-you-workout.html
​stop-hip-pain-while-running.html
​

If you're not quite ready to book an appointment yet, you might have some questions you would like answered first. Click below to request to speak with a PT first.

talk to a PT

You might still be looking to helpful tip on how to reduce your pain at home. I have 3 Free Ebooks available. Simply press this button, find the book that helps you,  fill out a quick form, then check your in box. 

Free Tips