• Posted July 23, 2026

Exercise Underwhelms As A Hip Arthritis Treatment, Review Concludes

Exercise doesn’t help improve pain from hip arthritis as much as doctors and physical therapists might hope, a new evidence review has concluded.

Exercises can relieve pain and improve function, but not enough that patients would notice these benefits in their everyday lives, according to a July 22 study in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

"Exercise is recommended as a primary treatment for hip osteoarthritis, and this review doesn't overturn that," said co-lead researcher Michelle Hall, an associate professor at the University of Sydney.

"But it does suggest we should be honest with patients that the average benefit may be modest, and that we need better-designed trials to understand who benefits most and from which type of exercise,” she said in a news release.

For the review, researchers analyzed results from 18 clinical trials involving nearly 1,400 people, ages 53 to 74. Exercise programs tested in the trials included strength training, aerobics and mind-body practices like yoga.

The review found that compared to no treatment or usual care, exercise likely reduces pain by around 7 points on a 100-point scale.

Unfortunately, it takes an improvement of at least 12 points for patients to notice a meaningful difference in their daily lives, researchers said.

Worse, these results might be inflated, given the design of the studies included in the review, researchers said. Participants self-reported their pain and function, and thus might have made exercise appear more effective than it truly is.

However, researchers noted that exercise does provide broad health benefits beyond pain relief and is unlikely to cause harm.

They concluded that larger, better-designed studies are needed to gain a clearer picture of the benefits that exercise can realistically deliver for hip arthritis.

“There just isn’t a huge body of evidence out there,” said co-lead researcher Belinda Lawford, a fellow in physiotherapy at the University of Melbourne.

“For some people struggling with hip pain, exercise can really be their only hope, but I also don’t want to give patients false hope,” Lawford said in a news release. “It’s important future research is done with larger, better-quality trials, examining what types of exercise work specifically for different people.”

More information

Kaiser Permanente has a list of exercises for hip arthritis.

SOURCE: Cochrane, news release, July 22, 2026