At this point in my story, we are at probably at about a year and a half after the initial injury. This is when I decide I want to weight train seriously. 

I made this decision for two reasons:

1. My husband Scott (boyfriend at the time) was making fun of me at the gym, out of love of course. He said something along the lines of, “You never really push yourself and keep using the same weight without progressing.” 
2. I wanted a nicer butt….I mean, I don’t support making aesthetics your number one goal but I’m just being honest guys. This was before I went all yogi so I still had some serious self love work to do but we’ll save that for a different day. 

So this is where my mind was at in this point in my life and is what made me want to weight train. The decision really had nothing to do with my hip. When I started this fitness journey, I honestly didn’t know how I was going to do it because my hip pain was still constantly flaring up and I was scared that lifting heavier weights would irritate my hip. But I figured I might as well try and told myself that I would progress and push my weights (to prove Scott wrong lol) but I would do it slowly. I want to emphasize that again, I increased the weights I was lifting but I progressed SLOWLY. 

In my weight lifting routine, I trained total body but because my my goal as I said before was to have a nicer butt…I did lots of glute work. By lots of glute work I want to make sure you understand that I was still training in a smart fashion because overtraining is a real thing. You can over do it. I was weight training lower body and glutes 2-3 times per week. When I say glutes I mean both the gluteus maximus (the main glute muscle that most of us think of) AND the gluteus medius (outer hip muscle). Much of my glute training was also compound exercises which really works the total lower body. 

On my lower body days, I would do glute activation exercises still to warm-up but then I would legit weight lift. Improving your glute activation before you lift weights is important but guys at this point I had been working on my activation for like a year, my glute activation was fine but the actually strength was lacking. 

Prior to this point when I would “weight lift,” I kind of just went through the motions on the machines and Scott was right, I didn’t really push myself. I changed this and started to slowly progress the amount of weight I was using. I didn’t push through pain because I do not recommend that but I pushed my muscles to be challenged. I finally even got the courage to use the squat rack to squat and deadlift. 

And guess what? After a few months of training, one day I took a step back and realized I hadn’t had a flare of my hip pain or nerve pain in a while. And yes, I liked how my booty was looking but that was nothing compared to the joy I felt at not experiencing flares of my hip pain. 

What’s crazy is since I am a physical therapist, I knew all along that glute strengthening is helpful in many cases of hip impingement, but I guess my glutes needed to be a lot stronger than I was allowing. 

I don’t know exactly how long it was before I was back to my normal but I would say I think I noticed the first changes in like 3 months and maybe around 6 months I felt that my hip was no longer limiting me.  

I was able to go back to practicing vinyasa yoga and I found that I was able to actually go into poses that I hadn’t been able to do in 2 years. And I’m sure you’d love to know, my hip was no longer limiting me with sex either.