Rebuild Your Hips in 90 Days

When I was 28 years old, my body was a mess.

I was still a professional hockey player, but my hips were in so much pain and so restricted that when we assessed my internal rotation, I literally had negative degrees of range of motion. I could not get my hip past neutral.

My lower back and SI joint were constantly compensating.

Moving like an athlete no longer felt effortless.

And eventually, I found myself sitting across from a hip specialist being told something no 28-year-old athlete wants to hear — that if things continued this way, a hip replacement was almost certainly in my near future:

At that point, it was easy to believe my hips were simply too far gone.

That maybe all the years of hockey had finally caught up with me.

That this was structural. Permanent. Something I would have to manage until eventually somebody surgically replaced the joint.

Except… that’s not what happened.

I want to be careful here.

I’m not telling you surgery is never necessary.

I’m not telling you mobility training can change every structural hip condition.

And I’m definitely not telling you to ignore the advice of a qualified medical professional.

What I’m telling you is what my own experience taught me: I had dramatically underestimated how adaptable my body still was.

For years, I thought I needed someone to make my hips feel better. Stretch them. Treat them. Release them. Mobilize them.

What I eventually learned was that my body needed something else too: a reason to adapt.

When I started giving my hips the appropriate training stimulus consistently… they began adapting.

This isn’t every hip exercise I’ve ever learned crammed into one program. That’s not the point.

It’s a structured starting progression built around what I now believe is an effective, realistic dosage for someone beginning a focused hip rebuilding process.

Because more isn’t automatically better.

The goal is to provide enough consistent stimulus to create adaptation while still allowing the work to fit into your life and the rest of your training.

If you’re currently playing hockey, you can fit two sessions around practices, games and strength work.

If your competitive career is over, you can fit it around lifting, golf, men’s league, work and family.

And if you’ve barely trained your mobility in years, it’s an approachable place to begin.

The goal isn’t to do as much mobility as possible. It’s to consistently deliver the right stimulus.

I don’t want to sell it that way.

I can’t tell you exactly how your hips will change in 90 days.

Everyone starts from a different place. Different anatomy. Different training history. Different injuries. Different restrictions.

And if you’re dealing with significant pain or a diagnosed hip condition, you should work with an appropriate healthcare professional.

But I can tell you what I wish somebody had given me:

A clear starting point

A strategic progression designed to rebuild my hip’s ability to be a hip

Direction on the amount of volume needed to create change when it’s targeted

An understanding of why I was doing the work

Here’s what I will say: if you follow this program to a T, change is inevitable.

Do the work. Follow the fully coached sessions exactly how they’re delivered. Train at end range, strength train at end range, do the PAILs, RAILs and lift-offs on the days they’re programmed.

If you do that, it is inevitable that the ranges of motion we’re training will improve. That’s simply what happens.

If your hips are already decent, they’ll get better. If your hips are a mess, you’ll start with far less range — and you’ll likely see even bigger change. And if you’ve never trained with techniques like this before, the change tends to be the most drastic of all.

So instead of spending years collecting exercises… start with a plan.

If you fix the way your body functions, you move better as a human being. And when you move better as a human being, you perform better as an athlete. It’s that direct.

It’s the lowest-hanging fruit I find with clients. We look at where they’re limited, we fix it, and we send them back on the ice with a stick in their hands. And almost every time I hear the same thing:

That’s how you should be able to play hockey throughout your entire career.

The problem is the traditional training model never taught us this. In my era it was simply: work harder than everybody else. And working hard is still a prerequisite — but now we know you also have to work smart.

Everybody is in the gym lifting. Almost nobody is in their living room building strength in their hips or rebuilding stiff ankles. Not passive stretching — actual work that compounds.

That’s the difference. Stretching leaves you tight again the next morning, reliving the same process. Training your joints moves the line. Every session you plug in pushes it further, and it builds on the session before it.

Of course it did. We made their body move better as a human — so everything they do as an athlete became easier.

Better movement raises your ceiling for skill development, and it lets you express the skill you already have at a much higher level. If you want to make a guy a better skater, assess his hips. If his hips don’t work, fix his hips and put him back on the ice. He will be a better skater.

This is where the ego has to go. If you’re already a high-end athlete and you find something you’re bad at, that should be the most exciting discovery available to you — because it’s something you can fix that translates straight into your sport.

That’s one of the most amazing parts of what we do.