If you've spent any time on fitness Instagram in the last few years, you've seen the promises. Exercises to "fix" hip dips. Workouts to "fill them in." Before and afters suggesting that with the right glute program, you can reshape the curve between your hip and your thigh.
You can't. And the reason is worth understanding — because it changes what you should actually be focused on.
What hip dips actually are
Hip dips are the inward curve that appears on the outer side of the body, between the hip bone and the top of the thigh. They're determined almost entirely by the shape and angle of your pelvis, and the position of your greater trochanter — the bony prominence at the top of your femur.
That's bone structure. It doesn't change with exercise.
The amount of muscle and fat tissue in the area influences how pronounced they look, but the underlying shape is skeletal. No amount of lateral raises, clamshells, or hip abduction work is going to alter the angle of your pelvis or the position of your femur.
This isn't a pessimistic take. It's anatomy.
Why the fitness industry keeps selling the fix
Hip dips became a highly searched aesthetic concern around 2019 and have sustained significant search volume since. Where there's search volume, there's content. Where there's content promising a fix, there's engagement — because people want the fix to exist.
The exercises being recommended are real exercises. They do work the glutes and hip abductors. But they're being sold as a solution to a structural feature they cannot change, and that's a meaningful distinction.
If you've done three months of dedicated glute work and your hip dips look exactly the same, you didn't fail the program. The program failed the claim.
What the biomechanics conversation actually looks like
Here's what is worth paying attention to in the hip dip conversation: the structural features that create visible hip dips — pelvic width, femoral angle, how the hip sits in the socket — are the same features that influence how your hips function under load.
People with certain pelvic structures are more prone to hip impingement. Others are more likely to develop compensation patterns in gait. The shape of your pelvis is directly relevant to how your body moves, how load travels through your hips and lower back, and what kinds of dysfunction you're predisposed to.
This is the conversation that's almost entirely absent from the hip dip content online. Not whether you can change the appearance — you largely can't — but what your hip structure means for how you move, and whether your current movement patterns are working with that structure or against it.
What's actually worth assessing
If you have hip dips and you're also dealing with hip pain, lower back pain, knee tracking issues, or IT band problems — those things are related. Not because hip dips cause pain directly, but because the same structural features influence both how you look and how your hips function.
The questions worth asking are whether your hips are actually moving through their full range of motion, whether your gait is loading your hips the way it should be, and whether there are compensation patterns developing because your body is working around a restriction rather than through it.
Those are biomechanical questions. They have biomechanical answers.
What this means practically
If you're training for aesthetics and frustrated that your hip dips haven't changed — you can stop directing effort at something that isn't going to move. Strong, well-functioning hips look different to weak, dysfunctional ones. Training for actual hip function will change the surrounding tissue and improve how you carry yourself in ways that a targeted hip dip program never will.
And if you're dealing with pain or recurring injury in the hip, glute, or lower back region alongside the cosmetic concern — that's worth getting properly assessed.
Because the structure that creates the dip is the same structure your movement patterns are being built around, and if those patterns are compensatory, they'll keep producing symptoms regardless of how many glute exercises you add.
What this looks like at Functional Patterns Brisbane
At FP Brisbane, hip assessment starts with how the hip actually moves — through gait, through loaded patterns, through rotation. Not what it looks like, but what it's doing. If there are compensations present, we identify where they're coming from and build a corrective sequence that addresses the pattern producing them.
Your hip structure is yours. How it functions is something you have direct influence over.