Gym-Goer, 24, Snaps Her Hip Attempting Booty-Boosting Exercise: ‘Like Someone Had Taken a Chainsaw to My Leg’

Mar. 15, 2025

Kristina Schmidt, 24, ended up on crutches doing an exercise she saw online.Photo:Kennedy News/@growwithkuri

Kennedy News/@growwithkuri

A fitness influencer, 24, suffered a debilitating injury while doing an exercise that’s meant to increase the size of the glutes and thighs — and now, she’s warning others about getting proper guidance for exercises at the gym.

As Kristina Schmidt shared in a TikTok outlining her injury, she wanted to “enter my glutes era,” so she started doing the hip thrust in January 2023. The Malibu native, who was studying at Hokkaido University in Japan at the time, explains that it’s something of a meme in the online gym community, which shares images of peoplelying across a benchandhip thrustingin the air with a weighted barbell across the pelvis.

She never had a coach or professional gym guidance, she said. “I just saw people doing the hip thrust online. I never saw people talking about what to do if you’re more quad dominant, like I am,” Schmidt tells Kennedy News and Media viaThe Daily Mail,

Kristina Schmidt demonstrates a hip thrust at the gym — which ended up significantly injuring her hip.Kennedy News/@growwithkuri

“‘It was more of a one-size-fits-all approach, like, “If you want big glutes then you should do this,” she told the outlet, which reports that she quickly worked her way up to 308 lbs.

But as Schmidt shared online, a month after starting the exercise, “randomly, I’d get this sharp shooting pain” in her right hip — but it wasn’t alarming enough to make her seek medical care. “I was suspicious at the time but it wasn’t something where I was like, ‘Oh crap, I need to see a doctor.’ It was more like, ‘I can deal with this if I just rest a bit more.’ ”

That all changed in March, she explained, when “things began escalating.” The pain was “constant, like something was grinding in my hip,” she said in anotherTikTok. “I just kind of gaslit myself into thinking, ‘It could be worse. Don’t complain about it.’ ”

But it did get worse, she shared, during a getaway with friends to Kansai where sightseeing and a night dancing was “so excruciatingly painful … I couldn’t physically stand on my right leg anymore.” Upon returning to Tokyo, when Schmidt stepped out of the car, “I screamed so loud.”

Kristina Schmidt ended up on crutches after doing a workout she saw online.Kennedy News/@growwithkuri

“It was like someone had taken a chainsaw to my leg and was trying to rip it off.”

When she finally went for an MRI, the test showed multiple injuries: Schmidt had a stress fracture in her right hip, cracks in the bones in the hip joint and neck of her femur, and asThe Daily Mailadds, “The space between my hip bone and femur shrank so much that my bones were grinding on each other,” she said.

Schmidt underwent surgery — but developedsepsis, a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body responds to an infection improperly.

“I needed surgery to clean out the joint, and after that I was on crutches and still could not walk for weeks,” she said, adding that she was put on antibiotics for months.

Kristina Schmidt underwent surgery after injuring her hip doing an exercise she saw online.Kennedy News/@growwithkuri

She’s now urging people to get proper guidance before trying a workout they saw on social media. “You have to be quite careful about what you see online now. Just because it works for one person, doesn’t mean it works for everyone,” she said. “Having guidance from someone who is certified and who knows what they’re doing is really important.”

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source: people.com