What a Hip Injury Taught Me About Mobility — And the Warning Most People Over 50 Are Ignoring
- Shane Kokas
- Jan 21, 2014
- 4 min read
In the summer of 2012, I hurt my left hip.
I still don't know exactly what caused the initial injury. The pain started as a nuisance — tightness in the glute and hamstring, nothing that stopped me from training or coaching.
I did what most people do: stretched it out, worked around it, kept moving. It improved enough that I stopped thinking about it.
That was the mistake.
At the end of that summer I was tubing on a lake with friends. The boat cut hard, the tube hit a dip, and I got launched — holding on far longer than was reasonable, mostly out of stubbornness, before finally letting go and getting dragged across the water.
I got back on the boat and noticed my left hip felt off.
Within ten days, what had been a manageable tightness had become something else entirely.
The pain started mimicking sciatica. I couldn't train my clients effectively. Then I couldn't get out of bed. A hip issue I'd been quietly managing for months had become an acute crisis — and the only difference between the two was one bad afternoon on a lake.
The pattern I've watched repeat for 15 years
I've told this story to clients more times than I can count, because the pattern it illustrates is one of the most common things I see in adults over 50.
Not the tubing part. The part before it.
A tightness that gets ignored. A range of motion that quietly shrinks. A movement pattern that compensates around a restriction until the compensation itself becomes the problem.
And then one day — a fall, an awkward step, a weekend of unusual activity — the system that was barely holding together stops holding together at all.
The hip that's been stiff for two years becomes the hip replacement.
The lower back that always "acts up" becomes the disc issue that takes six weeks to recover from.
The shoulder that catches on certain movements becomes the rotator cuff problem that ends a season of golf or paddling.
None of these are inevitable.
But almost all of them send warning signs long before the crisis — and those warning signs get dismissed as normal aging.
They're not.
Chronic tightness and progressive loss of range of motion are not things you have to accept. They're things you can address, consistently, before they become injuries.
What actually fixed my hip
After four weeks of chiropractic treatment — including active release therapy that was genuinely painful and absolutely worth it — my hip settled. I felt better.
But the session that made the biggest single difference happened by accident.
A colleague persuaded me into a 90-minute yoga class. I went reluctantly.
I did not enjoy it while it was happening. Two days later, my hip had more range of motion than it had in months.
My leg felt looser.
My lifts felt stronger.
The difference was significant enough that I couldn't ignore it.
What the yoga class did was force me through ranges of motion I had been avoiding — not deliberately, but because my body had quietly organized itself around the restriction. When that restriction was systematically addressed, the whole system moved better.
I don't practice yoga regularly.
I'm not suggesting you have to either. But the lesson I took from that class and from the injury that led to it — is that the body will compensate around whatever you don't address.
And compensation has a cost that eventually comes due.
What this means practically for adults over 50
Mobility work is not optional at this stage of life.
Not because aging makes your body fragile, but because the accumulated movement patterns of decades — desk work, driving, repeated daily postures, old injuries that healed imperfectly — create restrictions that strength training alone doesn't resolve.
The clients I work with in Edmonton who stay injury-free and train consistently over years share a few habits.
They warm up properly before every session, preparing tissue and joints for the demands ahead.
They cool down after every session, addressing the tightness that builds during training. They include regular foam rolling and stretching as maintenance — not as a response to pain, but as prevention of it.
And when something feels off, they don't wait to see if it resolves on its own.
They address it before it becomes the thing that sidelines them for six weeks.
That last one is the hardest habit to build, because the warning signs are easy to dismiss. The hip that's a bit stiff doesn't demand the same urgency as the hip that can't bear weight.
But in my experience, and in my own body — the time to address it is when it's still just a bit stiff.
Don't wait for your version of the tubing incident.
The three things I wish I'd done differently
I should have addressed the initial tightness as a problem, not a background condition. Chronic tightness is your body telling you something. It deserves a real response, not a workaround.
I should have had a regular mobility practice in place before the injury, not as a response to it. Foam rolling, targeted stretching, and structured warm-ups are maintenance, not treatment. The time to start them is before there's a problem.
I should have asked for help sooner. The chiropractic treatment worked. It would have worked four months earlier if I'd gone four months earlier, before the tubing incident compounded everything.
That last point applies to training as well.
If you're managing chronic tightness, a history of injury, or movement patterns you've been working around for years — working with someone who can assess how your body actually moves and build a program around what it actually needs is not a luxury.
It's the difference between managing a problem and solving it.
That's the work I do with every new client in Edmonton from the very first session.
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