"I've started having hip pain...

and it came out of nowhere!" I'm overhearing this conversation right now in the cafe I'm sitting in, and I'm sad to say it's such a common refrain that I already knew how the story was going to go. And sure enough, this person proceeded to (loudly) describe how his osteopath had been treating him and it felt better afterwards but then still kept hurting, how it wasn't improving and the osteopath had recommended x-rays, how he'd seen a doctor for x-rays and been told it was 'early signs of osteoarthritis' and given exactly zero advice about how to proceed with this information. He regaled his friends with the research he'd done on how arthritis was caused by inflammation, and that he'd learned that the causes of inflammation includes basically everything in his diet, exclusively. The moral of the story was that they needed to go on this trip "before his joints gave out and he wouldn't be able to keep hiking."

It saddens me when I hear people talking about their mid-30s as the time they're forced to stop being active due to chance of injury. Especially when the amount of activity they're talking about is something as low-impact as a hiking trip! When it works optimally, the human body is designed to keep walking forever. Literally, for days even without feeding it. It's an incredibly efficient energy system when it's finely tuned. Getting it tuned and keeping it that way is the problem of course: because it requires synchronising sense, motor control, breathing, reflexes and vision across state and time on an unconscious level. This is the kind of place that a Postural Restoration (PRI) perspective can be really helpful.

PRI has pointed out that a large percentage of humans are wearing out or wearing down their right hips early because of an inability to unload and shift to the left leg on a motor planning, neurological level. People are standing on their left legs, without unconsciously 'leaving' the right hip. Worn out right hips and right knees are the common complaint, but unstable and pinching left hips and knees are not far behind them. There's a multitude of reasons this pattern starts to happen, the strongest one in my opinion being a childhood and adolescence spent sitting in schools: without strong sense from the feet, the unconscious will take advantage of the asymmetrical organs to stay upright. Stacking the right lung (which has no heart in it so can be easily compressed) directly onto the liver (which is dense and supportive) over the right hip becomes a useful strategy that gets used so much the body forgets there's another option, and it adapts movement and breathing to start from this non-neutral position.

What's the solution? Get out of the pattern and get back to using both hips in an alternating fashion! The first step is to work on full exhales, because having too much air in the lungs will lock patterns down and make them impossible to change. Remembering how to congruently push off the right leg back to neutral is next, before ensuring all the muscles come online to bring the left hip into a 'loaded' state and then push back to the right hip again. Finally, a reminder of how to effectively alternate between the hips seals the deal and serves as the anchor for resiliency far into the future.

That sounds a lot better to me than just resigning oneself to no more hiking trips after 40...