Hip hinge

What it is

Stand with your feet about hip width, knees soft rather than locked. Push your hips backwards, letting your torso tip forward as a consequence. Your shins stay close to vertical. Go as far as you can while your lower back keeps its normal shape, then drive your hips forward to stand up.

The distinction that matters: you are not bending forward, you are pushing your hips back. The forward tilt of the torso is what happens because the hips moved, not something you do.

A dowel or broom handle held along your back — touching the back of your head, the middle of your back, and your tailbone — is the traditional way to feel it. If all three stay in contact through the movement, your spine has not moved much and the hips have done the work.

What it demands

Enough hamstring length to let the pelvis rotate forward. This is the limiter for most people and it is why the movement feels like a stretch at first.

The ability to keep the spine roughly still while the hips move a long way. That separation is genuinely a skill, and it is the whole content of the movement.

Not much strength at all, unloaded. This is a pattern to learn, not a hard exercise.

What usually goes wrong

Squatting instead of hinging. The knees bend a lot, the hips drop rather than travel back, and the torso stays upright. This is the single most common error and it means the movement has become a squat.

Rounding the lower back. Once hamstring length runs out, the pelvis stops rotating and the spine starts. That is the point to stop, not the point to push through.

Locking the knees straight. A hinge is not a straight-leg toe touch. The knees stay softly bent throughout.

Looking up. Craning the neck to watch yourself in a mirror extends the neck at exactly the moment the rest of the spine should be neutral. Let your gaze follow your chest down.

Where it sits

This is one of the two foundational lower-body patterns, alongside the squat, and it is the one people learn worst. It is the shape of a deadlift, a kettlebell swing, a bent-over row, and of picking a bag off the floor — which means it is being performed several times a day whether or not it has been learned.

The single-leg Romanian deadlift is the same pattern on one leg, which adds a balance demand and roughly doubles the load on the working side. The glute bridge trains the same hip extension lying down, without the spinal control demand — useful if the standing version is not going well.