Identifying Your Hip Pain from Running Many runners complain of hip pain when they run, especially when the run often or long-distance. With so much running in your system, how can you expect not to experience some problems? Your form breaks down as you grow tired. Your body doesn’t have enough time to recover. Your lower body isn’t used to the stress. There can be any number of reasons why your hips are giving you problems. Luckily, just like most problems with the body, modern medicine can help you identify the problem at the root. Once the problem is identified, you can know what to do to help it.
Deciding on a Diagnosis First, search your feelings for a dull ache on the outside of your hip. Do your muscles feel tight and hurt during or after the run? The diagnosis: bursitis. Bursitis is the overuse of the bursa. The bursa is a sack of fluid placed in the joints to counteract friction between bones. They appear in about 160 different places throughout the body. Causing it too much irritation will inflame it. Once it’s inflamed, you really start to feel it right where it sits. You can treat bursitis yourself. You should first protect it—which is a natural instinct of the body anyways. Then you should rest, ice, compress, and elevate it. Ice for 15-20 minutes at a time and place a cloth between the ice and your skin. Painkillers are a nice relief to provide as well. They are especially helpful if you have to continue being mobile for a part of your day. Second, if those symptoms aren’t ringing any bells, see if the pain is found in the inside of your hip. If it is and you find yourself training on concrete or asphalt, then you might have a stress fracture. Putting a lot of repeated mechanical stress on a bone can cause it to fracture. Concrete and asphalt are so hard that it’s easy to hurt yourself by running too much on them. Since a fracture of any kind can be painful and set wrong, it’s always best to get this officially diagnosed. Go to a physician for help diagnosing and fixing these injuries.
Getting a Doctor’s Opinion Dr. Hofmann is a hip replacement surgeon in Salt Lake City. Dr. Hofmann can help you identify and fix any bad stress fractures. They are preventable by training up slowly and running on soft surfaces as often as possible. Although these aren’t guaranteed to take care of the problem, they give health its best foot forward. Third, and this one’s weird, does the outside of your knee hurt? Do you do a lot of running on concrete and do you do the same routine? If you do, then chances are, you have an IT (Iliotibial) band problem. Although the pain manifests in your knee, it actually originates in the hip. The IT band connects the outside of your hip to the outside of your knee. When it gets too tight, that’s when the pain begins. It’s best treated with rest, ice, compression, and elevation. Reducing your activity helps. Rolling it out on a foam roller helps a lot too. This is usually an at home treatment. There are a number of reasons your hip could hurt when running. These are just three of the most common injuries.