The Program That Fixed My Hips

"Pain comes from the brain, not the hips"

TL;DR: Last year, I had an onset of hip pain and, after much searching online, found a “movement coach” named Maks Reznik who had suffered debilitating hip pain and found a way out. I purchased his online coaching program, and it’s cured 99% of my ailment after just 8 weeks (and 80% after just 2 weeks). This post explains how I got into my hip pain predicament, how I found Maks’ program, what the program does, and why it seems to work.

Disclaimer: This post is in no way sponsored; I am just wanting to share something interesting and useful that happened to me, on the off chance that someone reading this is in the same place I was 3 months ago.

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Lots of people deal with hip pain, and there seems to be endless treatments—pain medication, physical therapy, chiropractic, yoga, massage therapy, and even joint replacement surgery. I recently dove into this world after experiencing hip pain that I associated with someone 20 years older than me.

After trying yoga, crawling/animal movements, specialized hip exercises, and chiropractic, I was still experiencing a high level of pain: I couldn’t lift my foot onto a bench to tie my shoe without experiencing substantial pain in my right upper leg.

What happened?

About a year ago, I was doing a knees over toes split squat when I felt a sudden sharp pain down the front of my right leg in the quadriceps area. I didn’t think much of it, but I stopped doing intense leg exercises. Around this same time, I was also getting into toe spacers to try and improve my lower body function.

Around May 2024, I noticed a herniation in the peroneal area [outside part] of my right leg, just above the ankle, and it was painful to put my right foot into dorsiflexion.¹ This made activities like driving nearly impossible—so I learned to drive with my left foot instead.

Eventually, things got bad enough that I went to see an orthopedist in mid-June, who recommended a walking boot for a month or so. This turned out to be a very bad idea: a month later, I was no better off. I had spent those four weeks making unnatural movements when walking, and it did nothing to resolve things.

By August, I had been out of the boot for a while but was basically in the same place as before. I did get some helpful exercises from a physical therapist that took the lower leg pain down a bit, but the “retraining” of my body while wearing the boot went unaddressed.

Throughout the fall, I was experiencing pain in my right hip in certain positions. The pain got worse and seemed to spread to other positions. I kept trying to fight it by following different yoga or other videos aimed to improve hip range of motion, but nothing seemed to work. While I could still walk and run without much limitation, I was finding it painful to sit or stand for long periods.

What finally worked?

By December, I was getting desperate, and my mind started going to dark places. Being the hypochondriac that I am, I wondered if I needed to think about some sort of surgical intervention, or even a hip replacement.

Sometime in the fall, I had stumbled upon the Movement Maks YouTube channel by Maks Reznik. This led me to his Happy Hips program. Maks doesn’t appear to have any professional medical credentials, but I was attracted to his content because he’s actually been in a worse place than me but can now do any movement without difficulty.

I was initially reticent to put $300 down on a 4-month program, but I subscribed to his newsletter and eventually pulled the trigger when he offered a 50% holiday discount. Looking back, I’ve gotten way more than $300 of value, especially considering the fact that all of my orthopedic, physical therapy, and chiropractic attempts at solving the problem have totaled to a lot more than $300 and left me no better off. Not to mention that there is a psychological tax of chronically being worried about pain, and it can really add up over hours in the day and across many days.

What is the program?

Happy Hips gives you 20-25-minue exercises to do 6 days a week for 17 weeks that restore communication among the various muscle groups of the body—to align the body properly so that it can fix itself. It also gives you “pain education” lessons, highlighting the importance of psychology in the experiencing of pain. The combination of these is amazingly effective.

Movement exercises

The movement exercises are unlike anything else I’ve done. My expectation based on past experience was that it would involve stretching, but these movements are much more basic.

For example, the first movement you do is called a “supine reset” which involves you putting a strap around your legs just above the knees, lying on your back, and putting your feet up at a 90° angle—just sitting there for 5 minutes. Somehow, the tension on the legs combined with sitting there for a long enough period of time works to restore connection in a way that resolved my hip pain.

Another favorite movement of mine is called a “wall stork.” You stand against a wall, making sure everything is touching the wall from head to toe. Then you lift a leg up on a chair so that your knee is bent at a 90° angle and hold that position for 1-2 minutes. It’s an amazing workout for the hip flexors, and I love it so much I’ve even added a dumbbell for more resistance.

The program’s exercises take what I as an economist would call a “general equilibrium” approach to body movement. In other words, as Maks likes to frequently say, “nothing in the body works in isolation.” So, if I’m experiencing hip pain, it might be due to issues as far away as the ankle (ahem; see above) or the shoulder. As I found out by progressing through the program, I have weak ankles and shoulders that were likely contributing to my issues.

Everything else I’ve seen on YouTube is more focused on hip flexion, range of motion, etc. without recognizing the fact that things like weaknesses in ankles and shoulders can cause pain in other places of the body.

Psychology

The most mind-blowing thing about this program that I experienced was the idea that pain is psychological and not necessarily due to anatomical or physiological deficiencies.² In one of his videos, Maks even cited evidence along the lines that, if you were to find, say, 50 people in the population with torn labra, only 20 of them might tell you they had hip pain.

According to Maks:

Pain comes from the brain, not the hips. That means that if you did zero movement sessions in this program and put all of your time and energy fully committed to the brain work, you would be much more likely to feel better than if you did the opposite. What is the purpose of the brain work? To calm down the nervous system and convince the brain that there is more evidence of safety than danger in our daily experience. The exercises in this program help facilitate that goal: movement is used to make a difference in the brain, not the other way around. In other words, we don’t use brain work to improve movement, we use movement to improve our brains, which is what will finally get us out of chronic hip pain.

After doing this program and also after reading Healing Back Pain by John Sarno, I’m convinced of this idea.

Results

I started seeing positive results from Happy Hips almost immediately: after two weeks, I would say 80% of my pain had gone away. And after eight weeks, 99% had gone. I just started Week 12 and will see it through to the end, but I’m definitely satisfied to have found a “general equilibrium” solution to the general equilibrium problem of my hip pain. I’ll post a follow-up maybe in 6 months once I’ve finished the program for several months.

It can be difficult to find the time to devote to the program. Because it’s got a psychological dimension, it’s not something you can do while doing another activity (like watching TV or listening to music). I would say I probably end up missing one day a week, so if you were perfectly compliant, you might even see better results.

However, the program has given me more information about my body than just fixing my hip pain. As mentioned above, I’ve realized that I have weak ankles and shoulders, so now I know that I should be targeting these areas in my day-to-day exercising.

So, if you have any sort of hip pain that you just can’t shake, I definitely would recommend hitting up Maks and his program. The program could also be useful for pain in other parts of the body, although I’m still suffering from some low-grade tendonitis in my right arm, probably caused by the way I position my body when typing. If you know of any helpful information along those lines, I’d love to hear it!

1. Here’s an academic journal article illustrating my exact condition: https://www.arthroscopytechniques.org/article/S2212-6287(22)00313-9/fulltext

2. Here’s an academic journal article describing this approach to pain: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2016.01.001