Perimenopause Symptoms: Overcome Your Joint Pain With Chiropractic Care

If you experience troublesome pain in your hips from perimenopause, contact a chiropractor for care. Perimenopause is the beginning stage of menopause and can create numerous problems, such as pain and weakness in your hip joints.  Because perimenopause symptoms are expected to happen, you may think that there's nothing you can do about your hip pain. Your chiropractor can. Your chiropractor may actually offer a number of treatments designed to strengthen your hips. 

What's Perimenopause and How Does It Affect Your Hip Joints?

Although it's not completely understood how hormones affect your joints, a number of sources think that a change in estrogen during perimenopause may be the cause. Hormones regulate a number of body functions, including the health and stability of your bones, joints, and muscles.

Estrogen, the most important hormone for women, decreases dramatically during perimenopause and plateaus during menopause. The decrease in estrogen may trigger inflammation and discomfort in the tissues between your hip joints.

Since the hip bones support your spine, back and abdomen, carrying or supporting the weight of your upper body can be painful on them when you lose estrogen. The muscles and tendons attached to the hip bones may become inflamed, swollen and stiff as well.

Chiropractic care may be an option that you can take to improve the health of your hip joints.

How Can a Chiropractor Alleviate Your Hip Joint Pain?

Your chiropractor can restore some or most of the strength and stability in your hip joints with hip flexor exercises. Hip flexor muscles give you the ability to bend, move and stretch your hips. The muscles can tighten up when they experience inflammation and pain in the hip joints. If you don't loosen up the muscles, you can develop poor posture, back pain, and leg pain.

Until you see your chiropractor, you can try this simple hip exercise at home. This is what you do:

• Stand with your feet placed hip distanced apart
• Bend your legs slightly at the knees to avoid placing stress on them
• Place your hands on your hips and relax your shoulders — you want to avoid placing tension in your back, neck, and shoulders
• Tighten your abdominal muscles to balance your body
• Lift your left or right leg to the side of your body as far as you feel comfortable, then lower it
• Repeat the exercise with the other leg 

You can perform this exercise every day for the best results. You can strive for 3-5 minutes each session to avoid overstressing your hip joints. However, you shouldn't avoid seeing your chiropractor for professional treatment, even if you feel better after doing the exercises above.

If you have concerns about perimenopause and hip joint pain, consult with your chiropractor. Getting treatment is crucial to finding pain relief. For more information, contact a professional like those at Vanderloo Chiropractic.