Hip Mobility Exercises: Internal and External Rotation in Yoga

What are the best hip mobility exercises in yoga? To effectively mobilize all the parts of the hips, it’s important to understand the basics of internal and external rotation.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how we can open the hips in the transverse (horizontal) plane. If you missed the sagittal and coronal planes, please check out part I  and part II of this series. Remember that the transverse plane is all about rotation, so we’ll be looking at the internal and external rotation of the hips.

The Hip Rotator Muscles

Rotation is definitely the most complex of the hip movements. It involves stretching mainly the external rotator muscles: gluteus maximus, and the front parts of gluteus medius and minimus; and the deep external rotator muscles: piriformis, obturator internus, obturator externus, gemellus superior, gemellus inferior, and quadratus femoris.

There are a lot of muscles, so just call them the hip external rotators and deep external rotators if that helps! These muscles connect from the back and outsides of your pelvis to the big bony bump on the top and outside of your thighbone (femur). See the external rotators below.

Just as we focus more on mobilizing the hip flexors and adductors in the other planes, in the transverse plane, we do more to mobilize the external rotator muscles than the internal rotator muscles: tensor fascia latae (TFL), some adductors, gluteus medius and minimus (anterior fibers).

Hip Mobility Exercises for the External Rotators With External Rotation

Mobilizing the external rotators can be a little confusing. We’ll need to break our “use-the-opposite-motion-of-a-muscle-to-stretch-it” rule. Hip mobilizing exercises with rotation often involve flexing the hips first. Hip flexion is then combined with different degrees of adduction, abduction, and/or external rotation to stretch the external rotator muscles.

The reason is that flexion changes the angle of pull of some of these muscles. Most of these poses will involve some variation of Ardha Raja Kapotasana (Half-Pigeon Pose) or Eka Pada Utkatasana (Figure 4 Pose) leg as in the poses below.

Mobilizing the hips with external rotation will help you access poses such as Eka Pada Galavasana (Flying Pigeon Pose) (photo above right).

And don’t forget your Half Pigeon variations…