Hip mobility testthree positions, at home, scored
Three positions: a squat you hold for thirty seconds, a hip flexor check on the edge of a bed, and a seated rotation compared left against right. Two of them are scored on the app’s own anchors and roll into your Hips reading. The third is not scored, and the page says why.
Nothing here is new arithmetic. This is the same Hips station the Range Score averages, taken in one sitting instead of two — so a reading you make here travels on to the composite exactly as it would have done from the separate pages.
How to take the three positions
Warm up first. Five minutes of walking, or twenty easy sit-to-stands from a chair. A cold hip reads lower than the same hip half an hour later, and a test taken cold one time and warm the next is two different tests. Stop at a stretch, never at sharp pain.
1 · The squat hold
Feet about shoulder width, toes turned out as much as they want to be, and squat as low as you can go without pain. Settle there and count thirty seconds. Watch two things: how deep you got, and whether the bottom was somewhere you could rest or somewhere you were holding on. Hold a doorframe if you need it for safety, but read the depth you reach without pulling on it.
2 · The hip flexor check
Sit on the edge of a firm bed or bench with your backside right at the edge. Lie back, pull one knee firmly to your chest with both arms, and let the other leg hang. Press the small of your back into the bed. Now look at the hanging thigh against the edge of the bed: above the line, level with it, or below it. Do one side, then the other, and name them the same way every time.
If your lower back arches off the bed the reading flatters you, because the pelvis has tipped forward to give the hip room it does not have. Hug the other knee harder and read the thigh from a flat back — the honest reading is the one you took that way, not the better one you took without.
3 · The rotation compare
Sit on a chair or the edge of the bed with both feet flat and the knees a fist apart. Keeping the knee where it is, swing one foot outward, away from the midline, as far as it will go without the knee travelling with it or the hip lifting off the seat. That is internal rotation at the hip. Note roughly how far the foot travelled, in hand-widths. Do the other side the same way.
This one has no score, here or in the app. What it produces is a comparison between your own two hips, which is a more honest thing to read than a number would be.
No reading yet. Answer the squat or at least one side of the hip flexor check and the Hips station has something to average. Nothing is filled in for a position you skipped — unmeasured stays unmeasured, here and in the app.
Not taken. Answer both hips in position 3 and the difference between them is stated here. One side on its own is not a comparison, and there is no score to give you instead.
This comparison is not scored and it does not enter the Range Score. It also does not travel: the two readings above live in this page’s address only, so copy the address if you want to keep them.
Why the rotation has no score
Because nobody has an anchor set for it that a person can apply to themselves, and writing one would be inventing a number. Every other figure on this site is the app’s own, taken out of the same table the product scores a real test with; the one exception on the site is scored on its authors’ published rubric. There is no third category, and a hip rotation band we made up for the web would have been one.
The measurement itself is also harder than it looks. Prather and colleagues had two blinded examiners — physiotherapists and physicians — measure hip range in 28 asymptomatic adults, and reported in PM&R in 2010 how well they agreed with each other. Internal rotation held up: 0.75 lying on the back, 0.79 lying face down, on a scale where 1 is perfect agreement. External rotation on the back came back at 0.18 and abduction at 0.34 — the two worst measures in the study. That is trained examiners with a goniometer, in a clinic.
So this page asks about internal rotation and leaves external rotation alone, and it reports the one thing a rough self-measure can carry honestly: whether your two hips did the same thing. Comparing you to yourself removes almost everything that varies between people, which is why a side difference is worth more here than a number would have been.
What limits what
The squat sees four joints and cannot separate them. Ankles, knees, hips and lower back are all in it. If your heels lift, the ankle is the cheapest thing to rule in or out, and it has a test of its own that reads in centimetres rather than in bands — Macrum and colleagues showed in the Journal of Sport Rehabilitation in 2012 that restricting ankle dorsiflexion changes squat mechanics measurably, so the ankle is not a footnote here.
The hip flexor check sees the front of the hip, and your lower back. The reason the protocol insists on a flat back is that the pelvis will happily tip to buy the hip range it does not have, and the reading goes up while nothing about the hip has changed.
The rotation sees bone as much as tissue. Frank and colleagues reported in Arthroscopy in 2015 that cam morphology — extra bone at the junction of the femoral head and neck, which limits rotation — shows up on imaging in roughly a third of people with no symptoms whatever. That is a ceiling, not a plateau, and it is not something a stretch moves. It is also not a diagnosis of anything: an imaging finding in somebody who feels nothing is a finding, and the Warwick Agreement on hip impingement is explicit that the syndrome needs symptoms, signs and imaging together, not imaging alone.
And a screen is not a forecast. Movement screens predict injury poorly — Moran and colleagues pooled the literature in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2017 and found composite screen scores did not predict who got hurt. This page tells you where your hips are today. It does not tell you what is going to happen to them.
0 of 5 tests taken. Every link here carries what you have already measured, so the readings travel with you from one instrument to the next.
Nothing on this site is stored and nothing is sent. Your readings live in the address bar and nowhere else, so a link is a survey and closing the tab loses it. Copy the address if you want to keep it, or take the same tests in Limber, where a reading is kept on the phone and measured against the one before it.
Stop at a stretch, never at sharp pain. Mild stretch — four to six out of ten — is the target in all three positions. A hard pinch at the front of the hip crease at the end of the range is not a stretch and pushing further into it is not the answer: ease out and leave that position unread.
See a clinician rather than a web page if the hip catches, clicks painfully, locks or gives way, if pain runs into the groin or down the leg, if there is numbness or weakness, or if the pain followed a fall or an injury. This test does not diagnose anything and Limber does not treat anything.
What is the doorway hip mobility test?
More than one test travels under that name, which is the first problem with it. The common version has you lie on your back in an open doorway with one leg up the frame and the other flat through the opening — the raised leg reads hamstring length and the flat leg reads hip extension, roughly, at the same time. It is a reasonable thing to feel and a poor thing to measure: a doorframe gives you no reference line, the two legs are being read against different things, and nothing about the setup repeats from one house to the next. This page uses a bench edge for the hip flexor check instead, because the edge is a straight line you can judge a thigh against, and the same edge gives the same answer in three weeks.
Is this the hip mobility test for squats?
The first position is exactly that: squat as low as you can, hold it for thirty seconds, and read which of four bands you reached. What it cannot tell you is which joint stopped you, because a squat sees ankles, knees, hips and lower back at once. The ankle is the most common answer and the cheapest to check — Macrum and colleagues showed in the Journal of Sport Rehabilitation in 2012 that restricting ankle dorsiflexion changes squat mechanics measurably — so if your heels lift, take the knee-to-wall test before you decide your hips are the problem.
What about the hip tests that go round on social media?
Most of them are versions of the three positions on this page: a deep squat, a hip flexor check on an edge, and a seated or lying rotation. The protocols are old and reasonable; what gets added on the way past is the interpretation, and that is where they go wrong. A screen that says a position means you will get hurt is claiming something screens have not managed to do: Moran and colleagues pooled the movement-screen literature in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2017 and found composite screen scores did not predict later injury. Take the position, write the number down, and leave the prophecy out.
Why is my hip internal rotation so much worse on one side?
Usually because your two hips are shaped differently, and a side difference in rotation is one of the most common findings in people with no symptoms at all. Frank and colleagues reported in Arthroscopy in 2015 that cam morphology — a bump at the head-neck junction that limits rotation — shows up on imaging in around a third of people who feel nothing. Bone shape is not something a stretch changes. That is why this page compares your two sides and never scores the rotation: the comparison is information, and a number would be a claim.
What is a good hip mobility score?
A full squat with the heels down reads 70 on this scale and a comfortable resting squat reads 90; a hip flexor thigh that lies level with the bench reads 60 and one that hangs below it reads 90. The Hips reading you get is the app's own roll-up of those two. It is Limber's anchor set and not a population percentile — it is built so the distance between two of your own readings means something, not so you can rank against strangers. There is no pass mark here and there is no failure.
Do tight hips mean I should stretch more?
Sometimes, and sometimes the opposite. A stretch felt as a long pull at the back or the front of the hip is a length question and responds to work. A hard pinch at the front of the hip crease at the end of the range is usually not a length question at all — it is more likely to be contact inside the joint, and stretching harder into it is the wrong answer. Pain in the groin that catches or clicks, pain that wakes you, or a hip that gives way is a question for a clinician who can examine you, not for a score.
Hip flexor length on each side, read against the bench line — the Thomas test, simplified so you can take it alone.
Deep Squat TestThe whole lower body as one screen — depth, heels and whether the bottom of the squat is somewhere you can rest.
Range ScoreThe composite. Whatever you have measured, rolled into one 0–100 reading and drawn as an elevation profile — with the ground you skipped left dashed.
Sitting-Rising TestGetting to the floor and back up without support — the published 10-point sitting-rising score. Not one of Limber's five tests, and not part of the Range Score.
- Prather H, Harris-Hayes M, Hunt DM, Steger-May K, Mathew V, Clohisy JC. Reliability and agreement of hip range of motion and provocative physical examination tests in asymptomatic volunteers. PM&R 2010;2(10):888–95. doi:10.1016/j.pmrj.2010.05.005
- Frank JM, Harris JD, Erickson BJ, Slikker W 3rd, Bush-Joseph CA, Salata MJ et al. Prevalence of Femoroacetabular Impingement Imaging Findings in Asymptomatic Volunteers: A Systematic Review. Arthroscopy 2015;31(6):1199–204. doi:10.1016/j.arthro.2014.11.042
- Macrum E, Bell DR, Boling M, Lewek M, Padua D. Effect of limiting ankle-dorsiflexion range of motion on lower extremity kinematics and muscle-activation patterns during a squat. Journal of Sport Rehabilitation 2012;21(2):144–50. doi:10.1123/jsr.21.2.144
- Moran RW, Schneiders AG, Mason J, Sullivan SJ. Do Functional Movement Screen (FMS) composite scores predict subsequent injury? A systematic review with meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2017;51(23):1661–1669. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2016-096938
- Griffin DR, Dickenson EJ, O'Donnell J, Agricola R, Awan T, Beck M et al. The Warwick Agreement on femoroacetabular impingement syndrome (FAI syndrome): an international consensus statement. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2016;50(19):1169–76. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2016-096743
Each address was followed to the record it names before it was written down. Where a paper could not be resolved that way, the page names it in the prose and leaves it unlinked rather than guessing at an address.
One reading is a point. Two are a line.
This page scores one test. Limber runs five — toe touch, knee-to-wall, shoulder reach, hip flexor and deep squat — rolls them into a single 0–100 Range Score, cuts that first score as your datum, and measures every later reading from it. The two wall tests are read in centimetres, the per-side tests keep left and right apart, and areas you never tested stay drawn as untested rather than filled in with a guess.
It works offline and needs no account: your readings stay on the phone.
Limber is in build. There is no store listing yet, so there is no download button here — when there is one it will be a link, not a promise.
The squat and the hip flexor check are the app’s own tests on the app’s own anchors, and they roll into the Range Score. The rotation compare is neither — it has no number anywhere in the product, and this page did not invent one for it.
Where a scale would have been a guess, you get a comparison between your own two sides instead.
Where the scoring comes from.
The four squat bands and the three hip flexor bands are
range_math’s own anchors, with the app’s own button
strings on them. The roll-up into Hips is the same weighting the product uses:
half the Hips area each, and the hip flexor check alone for Hip flexors.
If a number moves in the app it moves here. Nothing on this page is a scale invented for the web.
The rest of the case