it's common to encounter advice that says you should avoid certain sports and activities if you have femoral acetabular impingement, hip arthritis, hip labral tears, or some other hip diagnosis.

They say that because the bone shapes are the problem, doing anything that aggravates your hip pain is doing permanent damage to your hips.

Of course, if you have looked deeply into the research, you know that the bone shapes are NOT the problem, and the surgeries to "fix" FAI fail with spectacular regularity.

You also know that labral tears don't correlate with pain. And neither does arthritis!

If you use exercise to fix your hip pain, there comes a point when you want to return to your old activities/sports.

While certain sports and activities "can" aggravate hip pain, abstaining from activities you love is a recipe for depression and misery.

Yes, the activities you love were part of how you ended up in hip pain. But that's only because you didn't know how to train your body to maintain adequate balance from the repetitive patterns of your activities.

So we 100% encourage you to get back to the activities you love. Just make sure you do it at a gradual pace.

Do NOT try to do your favorite sport at 110% effort. This is almost guaranteed to put you back in pain.

Instead, reintroduce your activities at 50-60% length and/or intensity. This gives you the chance to observe how certain activities affect your muscles. Most sports are asymmetrical in some way, and all of them have specific repetitive motions that will lead to imbalances. Your job is to just observe what imbalances show up and then use your newfound knowledge of exercises to restore balance.

This approach will allow you to return to your activities while also understanding how to maintain your movement ability for the long run. 💪