Front of Hip Pain: Is Your Hip or Your Hamstring the Problem?

A common complaint among athletes, dancers, gymnasts, construction workers, or anyone else on their feet for long periods of time is a sudden achiness noted at the front of one hip. It’s not necessarily painful, but it aches and seems to get more noticeable as time goes on. Sitting for long periods of time makes it worse, and some positions feel hard to maintain while sleeping at night.

This pain location can be due to a few things, but one possibility is a condition known as Functional Femoroacetabular Impingement, or FAI. This condition occurs when the head of your femur bone incorrectly rubs against its socket in your pelvis.

There are two kinds of FAI. The first is structural, where you have a change in shape of one or both of the bones involved. This change in shape means the bones don’t fit together and glide as they should, which leads to friction and pain. More commonly, FAI can be functional. This means that an imbalance of muscles in your lower body have contributed to poor hip alignment. When you live your live with chronically tight hip flexor muscles, and chronically week hip extensor muscles, it can decrease the space the femur head has to move within its socket and lead to the same experience of symptoms without any bone malformations or changes.

To fix a functional FAI, you want to work on your hip flexor flexibility, as well as your extensor strength.

To stretch your hip flexors:

Kneel on one knee with the other foot forward, forming a 90-degree angle. Keep your torso upright, gently press your hips forward until you feel a stretch in the front of your hip. Hold for 20–30 seconds, switch sides, and repeat. Avoid arching your lower back.

To strengthen your extensors:

Strengthen glutes and hamstrings with bridges, hip thrusts, and squats. For bridges, lie on your back, bend knees, lift hips until aligned with shoulders. Hip thrusts add weight for challenge. Squats engage both muscle groups. Deadlifts also build strength, focus on controlled movement and proper form to avoid injury.