Top 5 Reasons For Hip Pain After A Hip Labrum Repair Surgery

In this video, I’m going to tell you the top five reasons for hip pain after having a hip labrum repair surgery, this information is especially important for people that have had a hip labrum repair surgery. And I’m not talking about if you’ve just had it like within the past couple of months, usually two to three months, because at that point, you’re just trying to get your motion back, you’re just trying to get normal activities like getting up and down from chairs from toilets.

In that bed, those things are the most important things to worry about. But let’s say it’s been more than that time more than a few months, more than six months, maybe it’s even been a year or more since your hip labrum repair surgery. That’s what I’m talking about in this video. Why are you still having hip pain if you’ve already had a hip labrum repair surgery, and you’ve gone through all the rehab for it other physical therapy or the rehabilitation?

Well, let’s get right into it. Number one is you’ve probably been exercising the wrong muscles. Now right after having a hip labrum repair, you’re going to go through physical therapy, most likely, sometimes you don’t your surgeon for whatever reason, might not recommend going through physical therapy. But if you go to physical therapy, you’re probably going to end up doing a variety of different hip exercises, knee exercises, and probably core exercises.

Some of these exercises are super important to do right after the surgery, so that you can get all your motion back. But eventually, those exercises need to change. And if you keep doing the same exercises that you were doing in physical therapy to rehabilitate your normal, everyday motions in your hip, it may actually be hurting you, you may actually be working the wrong muscles, one of the most important exercises that you need to stop doing because it’s very commonly done is hip flexor exercises.

So those are exercises where you’re either sitting in a chair like this, and you’re picking up your knees just like this. And the intent is to work out the muscles on the front of the hip. Or there’s other versions when you lie down on your back. And they call these straight leg raises where you’re picking up your leg just like this.

Those exercises, of course, work the front of the hip, but what you need to understand about a hip labrum injury, the labrum is right on the edge of the socket of the hip joint here. And if you’re picking up your leg and working out the muscles in this direction, the muscles that are on the front of the hip tend to get stronger, which actually pulls the ball forward on the socket and pinches your labrum.

In the long run initially, right after surgery, you need to get that muscle active and working. But after it’s active and working, you actually need to stop exercising it and start working on other muscles in the area. That brings me to the second reason for hip pain after hip labrum repair surgery. You need to be working out your glute muscles.

Oftentimes in physical therapy right after having this this kind of a surgery, glute muscles are kind of addressed but not really. And sometimes what ends up happening is people have the intensive exercise in their glutes. Maybe the therapist or the therapy clinic is giving the patient glute exercises.

But I would ask you this question, did you actually feel your glute muscles work because it is really easy to compensate on a glute exercise with your hamstring muscles down in the bottom of behind your thigh. And also with your back muscles up here and completely miss working out your glute muscles, even though you’re doing a glute exercise if you do not feel your glute muscles working during that exercise, or if they’re not working the most, because maybe you do three glute muscles, but you also feel your hamstrings, you also feel your back muscles are just one of the two, then you’re not focusing on your glute muscles.

And it’s actually feeding into a problem here leading to that pain in the hip joint usually right in the front of the hip after having the hip labrum repair. So what you got to do then is figure out the glute exercises that you’ve already done. We’ve got tons here on this channel and make your glute muscles work better for you. You’ve got to be doing glute exercises that actually target the glute muscles. So this is good because you don’t have to rely on a specialist.

You don’t have to necessarily go into a physical therapy clinic. If you can get your butt muscles to tighten up and work and even fatigue retire out. Then you’re effectively working your glutes. It should feel fine on your hip. It should not increase your hip pain. And it should even be improving your hip pain as time goes on as you get stronger in these glute muscles. You should feel like the hip pain on the front of your hip is gradually improving it’s gradually going away.

The third reason for hip pains after having a hip labrum repair is getting back on your feet too soon. Oftentimes, sir surgeons, the doctors that are doing the hip labrum repairs will tell their patients Oh, you’ll be back up and walking within, within days within weeks, and they’ll give the recommendation. As a specialist physical therapist, what I have seen is whatever the surgeon tells you just triple the timeframe.

If they say, oh, you’ll be back to normal in a month or in two months, you’re looking at three to six months, you’ll be back to normal in four months or so. Give it a year, you got probably 12 months before you feel like you’re normal again. Now, you’ll probably be up and walking real soon, within days after the surgery, you’re going to be able, you’re going to have to go to the bathroom, you’re going to have to leave the hospital go home and do all the things you have to do.

But are you really 100%? At that point? No. And when you go to your follow up appointments with your surgeon, they’re going to ask you questions like, are you walking? Are you doing this? Are you there in their mind, they’re thinking Are you meeting the expected progression after having a hip labrum repair surgery, and if you’re not, it leaves you as a patient feeling like you’re behind?

And what we find in physical therapy is that the cartilage because the hip labrum is made out of cartilage, it’s one of the slowest healing tissues in the body, it just doesn’t respond like a muscle or a tendon wood, it heals much slower. And the hip labrum cartilage specifically, is a weight bearing structure. So if you’ve had a surgical repair to that labrum, standing on it is kind of tensioning.

It it’s bothering it every single time. So be okay with having pain when you stand. And just saying I’m going to take it easy, you don’t want to be aggravating your hip from standing and walking, basically, because that’s going to slow down your recovery, you’re going to continue to irritate your hip labrum.

It’s very much just like if you if you got a cut on your skin, and it’s healing you got a scab that’s formed over it. And you know, you’ve probably had many cuts in the past, you know that if you just give it its time, if you baby it, if you leave it alone, it will heal on its own, the stab will eventually fall off. And you’ll get a nice scar under there.

And you’ll be back to normal back to doing what you need to do without having to worry about in re injuring yourself. While the same thing is happening on the inside of your body in that hip labrum, you don’t exactly get a scab, but you do get scar tissue that develops at the incision site that’s necessary for the cartilage to heal and you want that to happen.

But you don’t want to be constantly over irritating it just like if you press on a scab, it could be a little tender and painful. But you’re not going to undo everything, you’re not going to stop the healing process. Unless you peel off that scab. If you bump it too hard, or you start picking at the scab, and it starts to bleed while you’re reentering the area and you need to give it time to heal, you need to baby it.

Same thing with your cartilage inside your hip with your labrum. You can’t be walking on it. If you’re constantly aggravating it, a little bit of pain might happen. And that’s okay. But if it’s enough aggravation that you feel pain going into that night, the next morning, you know, you overdid it, it’s maybe even a few days that You’ve overdone it, that’s too much.

What I would recommend is if you start to do some walking, you’re trying to progress yourself trying to do some exercises to help your hip and you feel a little bit of hip pain. It’s okay as long as by the end of the day, it goes away and especially the next morning because maybe you do have some pain going to bed. But by the next morning, you should wake up back to baseline back to where you were before you did that activity.

If you’re not, you overdid it. And you don’t want to be doing more activity than what you did the day before. Without letting your hip heal first. Reason number four, it’s related to the third reason which is doing too much too soon. It’s walking too much. A lot of people say well get to walking your therapist might say gets a walk in your surgeon might say you need to be walking, everybody pushes walking on people that have had hip labrum repairs.

And the reality of it is if you think back to everything we’ve just talked about, you’ve been using your hip flexors too much you’ve been strengthening them. You’ve been doing marching exercises, straight leg raise exercises, you haven’t really targeted your glutes. You thought you’ve been doing glute exercises, the therapist told you these are good exercises, but you missed them.

You really didn’t fire your glutes, you didn’t fatiguing your glute muscles. And then on top of that you’re pushing yourself to be on your feet more, but it’s kind of hurting you. Well, walking doesn’t make any sense then don’t do it. Because in walking, you need to be using your glutes properly. You need to not be using your hip flexors too much the front of your hips, and you might already be over tensioning over pressurizing your labrum. So walking is a bad idea.

In most cases, if you’re having hip pain after you had a hip labrum repair. Now if you feel fantastic, you’ve rehabbed really well, you feel like you’re already back to normal and you’re If you’re walking and you’re walking more, go for it, you’re probably in a good situation, you don’t need to worry about it. But if you’re having pain in the front of your hip, and you’re still trying to walk, you’re walking through it.

Not a good idea. Now, some tips here, so that you can try to see if you can walk, get on a walker or get on a cane, get on some device that helps you to offload your leg. Now, I have had youngsters here in my clinic, like people in their 30s, and 40s, and even their 50s, that they still feel young, they still feel fit, they still they may have had a very fit history, they’ve been exercising their whole life and they got this hip labrum tear that they then went and had this hip labrum repair for the surgery.

And in their minds are thinking I need to get back to running I have stairs in my house, I need to go up and down the stairs, my bedrooms upstairs. And the stairs are bothersome for my hips. So I need to be active, I need to take care of the laundry and do all my chores around the house have to walk the dog, take care kids, whatever it might be those people, you might need to get the cane out. Even though it makes you feel old.

Just get the cane now because if you can take a simple 10 20% of pressure off your hip by leaning on that cane when you walk, it may make all the difference in allowing your hip to fully heal so that you don’t have hip pain. And at the same time buying you more time on your feet buying you more walking time more tolerance, walking, without aggravating your hip to where you’re having pain the next day. And for days after that. So make sure you don’t walk too much.

It makes sure that if you need a walk that you offload it, and be okay with taking as long as you have I’ve had a patient recently here in the clinic, who was in his 30s and was going back to his doctor, his hip surgeon who did the hip labrum repair. And the doctor was kind of making fun of them telling him you’re not you’re using a cane, come on, get off the cane.

And I was reassuring him here in the clinic that no, when you get off the cane you lasts about an hour or two and then you’re in hip pain again, get on the cane because when you’re on the cane, you can last a lot longer. So using the cane is perfectly fine. Everybody heals a little bit different whether you’re 30, or 50, or 80, or 90.

The older people sometimes heal faster than the younger people. It’s it could be many factors, diet, age genetics, but what you have to look at is just yourself. As long as you feel like you’re making progress, you’re doing the right things and keep going. If you feel like you’re not making progress, you’re still having pain in the front of your hip, you need to change what you’re doing. And you might even bust out that cane or decrease the amount of walking that you’re doing.

Reason number five, exercise some people they say okay, I’m not going to walk as much. But let me do exercise like get on the bike, get on the elliptical, go do some easy weights. In the gym, I was already doing some weights with a physical therapist, let me replicate that in the gym and start exercising. But if your exercise leaves you more painful and it may not be right away, you may feel like you got a good workout.

Getting on the bike, elliptical or going to the gym or whatever it is you’re doing for exercise that might give you a false sense of improvement or a false sense of, of you’re doing the right thing because you feel good after the exercise. But then later on that day, or even the next day, your hips hurting more. And people don’t always connect that it was your workout, it was the way you worked out or the fact that you’re doing too much when you work out.

Those things influence it, which actually understand is cartilage is not a well innervated structure doesn’t have a lot of nerve endings going into it compared to other things like muscle skin, or the body parts. So it doesn’t always give you that instant feedback that you’re hurting yourself in the moments. There’s also other things at play here like muscle imbalances, which you could be working into when you’re exercising, that may not give you pain right away.

But later on when you’re doing nothing when you’re just sitting around. That’s when you might feel the pain because the way the muscles pull the hip joint it can compress it then. So what I recommend you do is really tone down your exercise, it’s good to exercise, you need to exercise especially if you’ve had a hip labrum repair. And even if you’re having some hip pain, you might just need to look at reducing some variable of your exercise like the intensity.

Bring down the weights don’t go so fast. If you’re on a cardio machine, lower the resistance on the bike or the elliptical. If you’re working with an angle on the elliptical if you’re on a treadmill trying to walk but he talks about walking. Some people go to town on the treadmill a bump it up to read before they’re running, they’re at 4.5 and still trying to walk when they really should be getting into a jog.

They have the incline going up those variables you need to remove from the equation, get that treadmill flat get that elliptical flat, lower the resistance lower the speed and work on your form and technique because here’s the most important part of this video.

What led you to tear your hip labrum in the first place was likely a muscle imbalance, you’ve probably been an overall active person, maybe even quite fit, maybe, maybe you’re a runner or some version of an athlete, you did some sport, you probably worked yourself into a muscle imbalance, the common muscle imbalances, your use your hip flexors, too much, maybe your hamstrings as well.

And you don’t have enough glute strength to optimize the forces in your hip joints. And that ball and socket joint has not been tracking properly for years decades likely. And it’s just rub the heck out of your labrum and torn it. That root muscle imbalance has probably never been addressed in you. And even though you’ve had a hip labrum repair surgery, you still have your muscle imbalance.

And physical therapy right after having a hip labrum repair surgery does not address that because they’re focused on getting you to move just getting up out of bed getting in and out of the car off the up and down from the toilet. Never mind fixing a muscle imbalance, it’s not priority at that time.

Now that you’re aways out from your hip labrum repair surgery, you need to focus on fixing that imbalance. And it’s usually coming from the glutes people don’t have enough glute strength.

What I often find in my hip labrum repair patients surgeries is they don’t have a but they’re kind of flat in their muscles or they, they don’t feel like they can turn on their glutes very well, they can’t clench them very well, they can independently squeeze side to side in their butt muscles. Because they have never really practice good control.

So walking is flawed to begin with, they can’t use their glute muscles properly when walking. So stop walking, going to go do weights in the gym, you can’t use your glutes effectively when you’re supposed to, you’re going to compensate. And people have this, this drive to I got to go work out and they get this false feedback of oh, I got a good workout my quads feel it, my hamstrings heal it.

But it’s the wrong muscle groups a false sense of security, you’re not working the right muscle groups to fix the root problem of your hip issue, what led to the hip tear in the first place the hip labrum tear in the first place. So you’re having hip pain on the front of your hip because of that root problem that was never addressed.

That root problem is what sets up things like hip arthritis, and it’s what leads people into getting hip replacements later on in life. You don’t want to end up in those situations. So what I highly encourage you to do is go fix that imbalance. We’ve got tons of information about it here on our channel, go down into the description below. And you’ll find links to playlists on hip arthritis and other problems.

Go workout your glutes you’ve got I got a link video down there that starts you off on the right glute exercises to do you this problem often affects knee pain too. So in case you’re having knee pain in addition to your hip pain, they’re probably related they’re probably not separate problems, and it usually comes back to that glute strength. Hey, If this video was helpful for you drop a comment below. Let us know if it helped you out and tell us more about your situation if this video was spot on for you. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll catch you in the next video. Bye