Your tight hips aren’t tight. 3 muscles around the hip joint have shut down and stretching makes it worse. What if your hips aren’t actually tight? What if they’re just doing the job of every muscle around them that stopped working? When the gluteus medius goes dormant from years of sitting, the hip joint itself tries to create stability by locking down range of motion. Your hip flexors, shortened from being jammed at 90 degrees all day, pull the pelvis forward and create even more compression. And the deep external rotators that are supposed to keep the femoral head centered in the socket lose their coordination entirely. The result feels like tightness. But it’s actually a compensation pattern, and stretching it without addressing the root cause can make the instability worse. This reel breaks down the difference between true hip tightness and a compensation pattern, then gives you three exercises that retrain the muscles around the hip to do their job: the 90/90 hip switch with a ...