"Hip pointers" can be a very painful injury. A "hip pointer" is a bruise to the muscles on the outside of your pelvis which get squashed between a hard object (such as the boards) and your strong pelvic bones. When the muscles are bruised with this type of injury, it can have a lot of bleeding into the muscle which is the source of your pain.

The bleeding and swelling in this muscle group, which are the hip abductors (which allow you to lift your leg away from your body), can make it very difficult for your crossover leg when skating as well as for your trailing leg when you abduct it away from your body.

Unfortunately, your breezers did not have the appropriate padding over this area to prevent you from having this injury. What we commonly see in our athletes is that the breezers sometimes can be twisted out of the way as part of the check and your hip bone is exposed when you hit against the dasher or boards.

The treatment for your hip pointer depends upon the amount of symptoms that you have. If someone has significant pain after this injury, we recommend that an x-ray be obtained to make sure that there isn't a fracture of the pelvic bones in this area (the iliac crest). While these fractures occur rarely, it does occasionally happen in younger hockey players.

For the vast majority of injuries, the main focus of treatment is to try to minimize the swelling which can occur in the first few hours to days after this injury. It's important to do this to try to decrease the swelling and bleeding which will occur in the tissues.

The best way to try to minimize swelling is to put ice over the outside of the hip directly over the area of swelling. This should be done up to maximum of 20 minutes every hour. It's important to put some type of cold compression device over the injured area to try to decrease the bleeding in the tissues. The ice works by causing the blood vessels to decrease in size so that there will be less bleeding into the tissues where it was injured.

We recommend that athletes be placed on crutches until they can walk without a limp. While they frequently argue with us that they may be able to tough it out and limp around with this type of injury, we do know that an athlete will get better quicker if they progressively increase the weightbearing on the injured side with crutches.

We initially go from partial weightbearing with 2 crutches to full weightbearing with both crutches. We then recommend the use of 1 crutch (which should always be under the opposite arm) and then graduate to walking without a crutch when you can walk without a limp.

Pain medicines can be very helpful initially after your injury. We try to stick to acetaminophen or acetaminophen with codeine for this injury.

In general, we try to avoid aspirin or any of the anti-inflammatory medications because they tend to thin the blood and can make the bleeding increase in the initial first days after the injury.

Once the bleeding and swelling are under control, we initiate the rehabilitation program. Your athletic trainer or physical therapist may choose to use ultrasound and warm packs once the swelling has stopped as part of the treatment to encourage new blood vessels to grow into the damaged tissue and decrease the swelling. In addition, they will work with you to work on hip abduction exercises to regain the strength in your pelvic muscles.

Since the hip abductor muscles are such important muscles for an ice hockey player, it's important to gain your full strength prior to getting back to competition.

While a hip pointer can be a very painful injury, once properly treated and rehabilitated, it generally has no long-term problems. The vast majority of these injuries only need to be ice and rest until your symptoms resolve.