Hip pain during squats usually comes from one of a few sources: the joint itself is being pinched at the bottom of the movement, the surrounding muscles or tendons are irritated, or your squat form is forcing your hip into a position it can’t comfortably handle. The good news is that most causes are manageable with technique adjustments, and understanding what’s happening inside the joint helps you figure out which fix applies to you.
What Happens Inside Your Hip During a Squat
Your hip is a ball-and-socket joint. The ball (top of your thighbone) sits inside a cup-shaped socket in your pelvis. As you drop into a squat, the hip flexes deeply, and the ball rolls forward and upward into the front rim of that socket. In a healthy joint with good clearance, this is fine. But when something reduces the space between the ball and the rim, the soft tissues lining the socket get compressed or sheared with every rep.
This pinching typically happens at the front-top of the socket, right where the joint bears the most load during deep flexion. The deeper you squat, the more the ball presses into the rim. Adding internal rotation (knees caving inward) or keeping a narrow stance makes it worse because both movements further close the gap between bone surfaces.
Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI)
The most common structural cause of hip pain during squats is femoroacetabular impingement, often just called FAI. It comes in two forms. A cam deformity means the ball of your thighbone isn’t perfectly round. There’s a bump at the junction between the ball and the neck of the bone, and that bump jams into the socket rim during deep flexion. A pincer deformity means the socket itself extends too far over the ball, leaving less room for the joint to move before bone hits bone. Many people have a mix of both.
When the bump or the overhang makes contact with the socket rim, it creates shear forces that can damage the cartilage lining the socket from the outside in. Over time, this can also tear the labrum, a ring of tough cartilage that seals the rim of the socket. Activities like squatting, sitting for long periods, and driving all aggravate FAI symptoms because they push the hip into deep flexion.
Here’s the important context: FAI morphology is remarkably common in people who have zero pain. A systematic review of imaging studies found that 37% of asymptomatic volunteers had cam deformities on MRI, and among athletes that number jumped to nearly 55%. So having the bone shape alone doesn’t guarantee pain. It’s the combination of the shape, the activity demands, and whether cartilage or labral damage has developed that determines whether you feel anything.
Labral Tears
The labrum is a ring of fibrous cartilage that lines the edge of your hip socket, deepening the cup and helping seal the joint. When FAI or repetitive loading damages it, you may notice a clicking, catching, or locking sensation in the hip along with a deep ache in the groin or front of the hip. Some labral tears cause sharp pain at a specific point in the squat, usually near the bottom. Others produce a vague stiffness that limits how deep you can go comfortably.
Not all labral tears cause symptoms. Like FAI morphology, they show up frequently on MRI in people with no complaints at all. When they do cause pain, it tends to worsen with prolonged standing, walking, or any athletic movement that loads the hip at end range.
Muscle and Tendon Sources of Pain
Not all squat-related hip pain is a joint problem. The hip flexor tendons run directly over the front of the joint, and when they’re inflamed or tight, deep squatting compresses them against the bone. This often feels like a pinching sensation in the crease of your hip at the bottom of the squat. It’s especially common in people who sit most of the day and then load the hip under a barbell without adequate warm-up.
The deep external rotators on the back of the hip can also refer pain during squats, particularly if your form shifts your pelvis or forces excessive rotation. Weakness in the glutes, especially the gluteus medius that stabilizes your pelvis, can cause your knees to cave inward during the movement. That inward collapse increases internal rotation at the hip, which narrows the joint space and mimics impingement symptoms even in a structurally normal hip.
How Your Ankle Affects Your Hip
This is one of the most overlooked causes. If your ankles lack adequate flexibility to bend forward (dorsiflexion), your body compensates higher up the chain. Research on deep squat mechanics shows that limited ankle dorsiflexion is significantly correlated with increased pelvic tilt and altered hip angles during the squat. In practical terms, stiff ankles force your pelvis to tuck under at the bottom of the squat (the “butt wink”), which pushes your hip into deeper flexion than it would otherwise need and compresses the front of the joint.
A simple test: try squatting with small plates or a wedge under your heels. If your hip pain significantly decreases, limited ankle mobility is likely a contributor. Heel-elevated shoes designed for squatting address this directly.
Squat Modifications That Reduce Hip Pain
Small changes in stance and foot position can meaningfully change what’s happening at the hip joint. Rotating your feet outward about 30 degrees promotes external rotation at the hip, which opens up the front of the joint and protects against impingement. That same 30-degree toe-out has been shown to reduce harmful knee collapse by about 50%.
Stance width matters too. A wider stance (roughly 125% to 150% of shoulder width) shifts the squat into more of a hip-dominant pattern and increases gluteus maximus activation. For people with FAI, a wider stance with toes turned out generally provides more room for the thighbone to move without contacting the socket rim. Going beyond 150% of shoulder width, though, can increase stress on the knee in other ways.
Depth is the other major variable. If your pain consistently appears at the bottom of the squat, you may simply be going deeper than your hip anatomy allows. Not everyone’s bone structure supports a full-depth squat, and there is no rule that says you must squat below parallel. Squatting to the depth where you feel the first hint of pinching, then stopping just above that point, lets you train the movement without aggravating the joint.
Other Practical Adjustments
- Box squats: Sitting to a box at a controlled depth eliminates the uncertainty of how deep you’re going and removes the bounce at the bottom that often triggers pain.
- Tempo squats: Slowing the descent to three or four seconds gives you more control and awareness of where the pain starts.
- Goblet squats: Holding a weight in front of your chest naturally encourages a more upright torso and wider knee position, both of which open the hip joint.
Early Osteoarthritis
In adults over 40, hip pain during squats can be an early sign of osteoarthritis. About 9% of adults 45 and older have symptomatic hip osteoarthritis, and 27% show signs on X-ray. Men are more commonly affected before age 50, while women see higher rates after 50. Early-stage osteoarthritis often shows up as stiffness in the morning that loosens with movement, a gradual loss of range of motion, and a dull ache during or after loaded activities like squatting or climbing stairs.
Repetitive stress on a hip that already has a structural abnormality (like FAI) is a known pathway to earlier onset arthritis. That said, there’s no credible evidence that exercise and physical activity in general cause hip osteoarthritis in people with normal joint anatomy. The risk comes from heavy occupational loading or high-impact sports combined with a pre-existing joint issue.
How Hip Pain Gets Diagnosed
A clinician evaluating hip pain during squats will typically start with two physical tests. The FADIR test involves bringing your hip into full flexion, then rotating the knee inward and across your body. If this reproduces your typical hip or groin pain, it suggests impingement or labral involvement. This test is good at ruling FAI out: it catches about 80% of true cases, so a negative result is reassuring. It’s less precise at confirming FAI, though, because it also triggers pain from other sources.
The FABER test positions your hip in a figure-four shape (ankle on opposite knee, then letting the knee fall outward). Pain during this test points toward joint or labral pathology but is less sensitive, picking up roughly 54% of cases. Imaging with X-ray can reveal bone shape abnormalities, while MRI is needed to see labral tears and cartilage damage. But because these findings are so common in pain-free people, a diagnosis relies on matching your symptoms and exam findings to what the imaging shows, not imaging alone.
Signs That Need Prompt Attention
Most squat-related hip pain is mechanical and improves with technique changes, rest, or targeted rehab. But certain patterns warrant faster evaluation: sudden severe pain that stops you mid-rep (possible stress fracture or acute labral tear), hip pain accompanied by fever or feeling generally unwell (possible infection), pain that wakes you at night and isn’t related to how you’re lying, or hip pain with unexplained weight loss. These patterns suggest something beyond a biomechanical issue and need clinical workup.