Hip Pain and Mobility for Baseball Players

Hip Anatomy

Hip injuries are often overlooked in baseball players. Understandably, more focus is placed on the upper extremity, particularly the shoulder and elbow as that is where many injuries occur. A study by Mlynerak and Coleman showed that 5.5% of baseball injuries involved the hip or groin in Major and Minor League Baseball. “Arm care” has been a hot topic lately with significant energy and focus put on developing exercises to prevent arm injuries, but the same attention is not paid to the hips. Also, a hip injury can manifest itself into an arm injury due to a disruption in the kinematic sequence, as I addressed in a previous blog.

Before we get too far into the specifics of hip injuries and how they relate to baseball, it is important to review some anatomy. The most common hip injury in baseball is some combination of femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) and a labral tear (I wrote about FAI here if you are interested). A brief reminder about what the hip joint looks like:

Takuma-sa, de: Hellerhoff, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The femur is the long bone in your upper l