Importance of Hip Strengthening When Treating Athletes with PFPS

The importance of hip strength in athletes' ability to control their knee alignment, especially gluteus medius and external rotators, are well documented. Hip muscle weakness has been liked to injuries such as ankle sprain, ACL sprain, etc. Patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) is another injury suffered by many athletes often leading to loss of practice time and competition. PFPS, however, can be caused by many causes including patella maltracking, patella instability, quad muscle weakness, hip muscle weakness, etc. And this condition is more prevalent in female athletes than in male athletes. It is very important when treating athletes with this condition to identify underlying causes and treating them instead of treating the symptoms, whether it is in the ankles, knees, or in the hips. One thing that we focus when rehabilitating athletes with PFPS is to make sure they have good hip strength and good control of their lower extremities. A study published a few years ago verifies this. In this study, they put athletes with PFPS into 2 groups with one being quad strengthening group and the other being hip strengthening group. After 4 weeks of exercises, the hip strengthening group improved in pain level significantly more than the quad strengthening group. This tells us how important it is to include hip strengthening in a rehab process. This does not mean that it is not important to do quad strengthening exercises because, in this study, the quad strengthening group also got better in pain level and in function. It is important to do both of quad and hip strengthening when treating athletes with PFPS. Some of the hip exercises that can be done easily are side-lying hip abduction, monster walk, clam shell, etc. And again, it is very important to find out what is causing PFPS and treating the causes instead of just treating the symptoms.

Monster walk exercise