8 Warning Signs of Hip Arthritis You Shouldn’t Ignore

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Here are the top eight signs and symptoms that you have hip joint arthritis.

[00:00:05]Number one is pain right here in the front of the hip, right where the thigh meets your body and it folds on the front side. That's the most common place where people feel pain from a hip joint problem. So, if you have hip arthritis, that's where it begins to become painful.

[00:00:22]Number [snorts] two is being on your feet too long causes that pain in the front of the hip to come on. Now, for some people it happens after an hour or two of being on their feet. As it gets worse, it might happen after 30 minutes.

[00:00:35]For some people, even just a few minutes on their feet and it begins to hurt on the front of their hip. You feel like you need to sit down. You feel like you need to get off your feet. People tend to feel most comfortable sitting in a recliner with their hips slightly bent because even lying down on your back can feel uncomfortable. And if you turn onto your side, that can also be uncomfortable for the hip joint. Which leads me to point number three. Symptom number three is having pain in the hip at rest. If you're just sitting around or you're lying in bed or you're just having a meal, you're not doing anything active, you're doing something maybe with your hands or with your head, and your hip joint starts to hurt, that's a sign that you are beginning to have hip arthritis. And it's because the inside of the joint where the cartilage is, it's irritated and it's just throbbing and hurting whenever you're just at rest. Just like if you had a cut on your skin, it's going to go through a healing process and while it's going through that healing process, it's not healed yet, it is healing, then it's going to potentially hurt, ache, or throb. Similar processes happen on the inside of the hip joint with the cartilage, and so at rest it'll hurt.

[00:01:43]Number four is pain at night. It may be pain going to bed, like when you first lie down to try to go to sleep, or it may wake you up in the middle of the night.

[00:01:52]If you're having worse symptoms and it's hurting you throughout the day, it's hurting you as you're on your feet, it tends to feel worse and worse as the day goes on and by the time it's time to go to bed, time to sleep and and end the day, it might be very irritated and not let you sleep at night. It's another sign that hip arthritis is progressing in your body. Then the next one, number five, is stiffness in the morning, hip stiffness. When you go to get up out of bed in the morning, you take your first steps, it may feel like your hip doesn't want to move normally again. Sometimes there's pain associated with it, but usually there's definitely stiffness involved where you don't feel like your hip moves the same way as the other hip and you feel like you have to limp or hobble as you go to the bathroom or to the kitchen or wherever you first go in the mornings. This can also happen, the stiffness, if you've been sitting for a long time, like if you go to a movie theater or if you've just been sitting at home for a while and then you get up to move, it may feel like your hip needs a moment to loosen up and free up.

[00:02:48]As this gets worse, it may grow from only being stiff for a minute or two to maybe 5, 10, and maybe even 30 minutes or longer. Some people even have an hours worth of stiffness that they feel like they have to move through and loosen up in order to begin to move their hip normally again. Number six is a loss of motion in the hip joint. If that stiffness is there for a long time, you've been having pain on a consistent basis throughout the day and at night as well, then you can begin to get changes in the inside of the joint on the surfaces of the ball and the surfaces of the socket that begin to limit your motion. And so you won't be able to pick up your knee as high as you can or move your leg outwards or even just normal motions like walking, getting in and out of cars, getting in and out of a bathtub, like getting your foot over the a tub edge. Those kinds of activities can become challenging because you lose your hip range of motion.

[00:03:41]One of the most common difficulties that I hear people say is I can't reach my feet to put on socks and shoes or to take take care of your toenails, to clip your nails. Washing your feet is another one. Those activities are necessary for your daily life, and so you need to be able to reach your feet. And so, if you're losing some hip motion, not good.

[00:04:00]That's definitely a sign that your hip arthritis is becoming more moderate or even severe. Number seven, this is probably the worst symptom on this list here. I've got one more though. Joint locking. This happens when that the surfaces on the inside of the joint get really different, they change a lot, and they get abnormal, the joint can actually lock in the way that this looks and feels for people is they'll usually be getting up out of a chair, getting out of a car, or they they change directions or change their their position somehow kind of suddenly, and then their hip just freezes, and their their hip will stay in the in the same position, and it's painful. They they usually hold on to things, they can't move, and they have to kind of move and shift around, move their leg around a certain way, and then it'll free up, and then they can begin to move again.

[00:04:46]This is a sign that the mechanics inside the ball and socket joint have altered, and they're no longer congruent, they're no longer smooth on each other. The the ball isn't perfectly round, and the socket isn't round in a in a concave way, convex on concave. So, it doesn't move normally, and it gets stuck on itself, and you have to kind of figure out how to loosen it to get it to begin to move in a way that works for you. If it's at this point, then your arthritis in your hip joint is definitely more severe, and you have to be careful. Some people will live with this for a while, but as it begins to worsen, as it continues to worsen, they'll begin to have hip joint locking that happens on a daily basis, and then even on a frequent basis every day, like several times a day, maybe even every hour. If it's in that situation, it may be time for you to consider having a hip joint replacement. But, if you're not there yet, there's chances that you can improve naturally and avoid a hip replacement surgery.

[00:05:40]Now, number eight, this is the obvious one, but I wanted to put it in here because some people haven't gotten to this this yet. It's going to go get an x-ray at the doctor's office.

[00:05:49]If your hip pain is so bad that you finally decided to go to the doctor, usually you have hip arthritis. It's like the doctors know it coming in.

[00:05:57]They'll say, "Oh, they have hip pain."

[00:05:59]They'll look at your age because it tends to affect people that are 50 and up. And they'll they they point right to the front of the hip, then they'll go do the x-ray, and the doctor will show you your x-ray on the on the white box or on the computer or the monitor, and they'll say, "Yep, you have decreased joint space, and the bones are looking different on this hip versus your other hip. This looks like the beginning stages or maybe even the the intermediate or or later stages of hip arthritis." So, the x-ray is kind of a definitive sign that you have hip arthritis. And of course, the doctor will tell you at that point. Like I said earlier, if you're not getting any locking and if you don't have any big losses of motion, it's okay to have some losses of motion, but if they're not long-standing, like you've had them for many months, and if they're not massive, like if you if as long as you have roughly 90% of your hip joint mobility compared to your normal side, then you should have an excellent chance at healing your hip arthritis naturally and avoiding having a hip replacement surgery. I've got a program [snorts] that can help guide you through all the steps to help your hip arthritis. It's called the Hip Arthritis Recovery Program, and you can learn more about it through a link down in the description here. This program is 100% online, and it's on demand, so you can access it anytime you want as long as you have an internet connection.

[00:07:13]It's my treatment approach for hip arthritis packaged into over 30 videos, and you can just watch them one at a time, and you can figure out what exercises you need to be doing and exactly when, and you need to be changing it because some exercises might be beneficial early on, but they're not very helpful later on. You need to be doing different exercises. And if you do those harder exercises early on, it can make you worse. So, you it timing is really important, and this program guides you through all of that. This is what we use to help people avoid hip surgery every day here in my clinic.

[00:07:43]We've also got tons of videos here on YouTube. I put them in a playlist for you called the hip arthritis help playlist. Go check that out in the description below if you want to learn more. Please share this with somebody you think needs to hear this. Give us a thumbs up if you thought this list was helpful for you, and don't forget to drop a comment down here. Let us know if we ever helped you out before. If you have any questions, we love to get back to our comments. And please subscribe to our channel. We've actually seen in our statistics that very few of you guys watching are subscribed to our channel, which means that you're going to miss out on new videos that we post. If you hit that notification bell and you're subscribed to our channel, then you'll be notified every time we release a new video so that you don't miss out on any of the helpful information that we're giving out for free here on YouTube.

[00:08:24]Thanks so much for watching, guys, and I hope to see you in the next video.

[00:08:27]Bye-bye.

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