Every year, as the weather improves, we start seeing more running-related injuries coming into our office. One area, in particular, is anterior hip pain (or front of the hip pain) from running. This could be because your hip flexor muscles are not strong enough to take the work you’re asking them to perform when running.

If you look up information on this, you’ll see a lot about stretching your hip flexors because they may be tight, but often, just stretching the hip flexors doesn’t completely fix the problem. You can have tight hip flexors and still have them also be weak. The exercise below helps address improving hip flexor strength.

The goal of the exercise is when you straighten your leg out, the hip that is bent (or flexed) does not move at all. Your hip flexor muscles have to work to keep that bent leg in the same place. It get’s pretty tiring quickly!

Give this exercise a shot. Start with performing 3 sets of 10 reps and go slowly to make it harder. Remember that you’ll probably have to back off on your running distance as well to fully recover. Especially while you're doing some strength training with this exercise.