Free online courseHip Assessment

Course Description

Build confidence in clinical hip assessment with a focused, practical learning experience designed for physiotherapy practice. This free online course guides you through how to observe movement quality, interpret key signs, and choose appropriate tests when someone presents with hip pain, stiffness, or functional limitation. By strengthening your assessment process, you can reduce guesswork, document findings more clearly, and communicate clinical reasoning with greater precision.

You will start by refining observation skills through gait cycle concepts and gait analysis, learning what to look for during stance and swing and how deviations can point toward underlying impairments. From there, the course connects movement observation to hands-on examination, helping you understand why active and passive range of motion matter, what each approach reveals, and how to recognize meaningful restrictions in the hip joint.

Strength and control are essential to function, so you will also work through resisted isometric testing to differentiate pain-limited performance from true weakness and to relate findings to likely involved tissues. Joint play assessment adds another layer, supporting your ability to identify mobility impairments and link them to patient-reported symptoms. Functional screens such as single leg stance help translate isolated findings into real-world stability demands, including hip abductor control and interpretations related to a positive Trendelenburg presentation.

The course then brings together widely used special tests that support clinical decision-making for common flexibility restrictions and contractures, including rectus femoris, iliopsoas, iliotibial band, piriformis, and hamstrings. You will learn the intent behind each test, what constitutes a positive result, and how end-feel and symptom behavior can guide interpretation. Additional modules address functional leg length differences, hip joint provocation patterns, and screening approaches that can help you identify when a presentation may involve labral pathology, osteoarthritis patterns, or red-flag considerations such as a positive sign of the buttock.

By the end, you will have a clearer, more structured approach to hip assessment that improves consistency from one patient to the next. This course supports students, new clinicians, and experienced practitioners who want a streamlined refresher—so you can move from observation to targeted testing with a rationale you can explain and defend.