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Crystal clear starry nights and cooler temps...
Autumn in New England is beautiful,
but it can also demand more strength and dexterity from your muscles and joints.
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This is a long one folks,
It's a little information heavy, but it's well worth the time.

Why Your Psoas Muscle
Is The Most Vital Muscle in Your Body...

Written by Christiane Northrup, M.D.


The psoas muscle (pronounced SO-as) may be the most important muscle in your body. Without this essential muscle group you wouldn’t even be able to get out of the bed in the morning!

In fact, whether you run, bike, dance, practice yoga, or just hang out on your couch, your psoas muscles are involved. That’s because your psoas muscles are the primary connectors between your torso and your legs.  They affect your posture and help to stabilize your spine.

The psoas muscles are made of both slow and fast twitching muscles. Because they are major flexors, weak psoas muscles can cause many of the surrounding muscles to compensate and become overused. That is why a tight or overstretched psoas muscle could be the cause of many or your aches and pains, including low back and pelvic pain.

The types of movement which can strain your psoas muscles include standing and twisting from your waist without moving your feet (think old fashioned calisthenics), or any movement that causes your leg to externally rotate while extended, such as Ballet-style leg lifts (or battement), and even doing too many sit ups (your psoas muscles complete the last half of a sit up).

Structurally, your psoas muscles are the deepest muscles in your core.  They attach from your 12th thoracic vertebrae to your 5 lumbar vertebrae, through your pelvis and then finally attach to your femurs. In fact, they are the only muscles that connect your spine to your legs.

Your psoas muscles allow you to bend your hips and legs towards your chest, for example when you are going up stairs.  They also help to move your leg forward when you walk or run.

Your psoas muscles are the muscles that flex your trunk forward when bend over to pick up something from the floor. They also stabilize your trunk and spine during movement and sitting.

The psoas muscles support your internal organs and work like hydraulic pumps allowing blood and lymph to be pushed in and out of your cells.

psoas-muscle-cross-section_277585796

Your psoas muscles are vital not only to your structural well-being, but also to your psychological well-being because of their connection to your breath.

Here’s why: There are two tendons for the diaphragm (called the crura) that extend down and connect to the spine alongside where the psoas muscles attach. One of the ligaments (the medial arcuate) wraps around the top of each psoas. Also, the diaphragm and the psoas muscles are connected through fascia that also connects the other hip muscles.

These connections between the psoas muscle and the diaphragm literally connect your ability to walk and breathe, and also how you respond to fear and excitement. That’s because, when you are startled or under stress, your psoas contracts.

In other words, your psoas has a direct influence on your fight or flight response!

During prolonged periods of stress, your psoas is constantly contracted.  The same contraction occurs when you:

  • sit for long periods of time
  • engage in excessive running or walking
  • sleep in the fetal position
  • do a lot of sit-ups

All of these activities compress the front of your hip and shorten your psoas muscle. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should automatically stretch your psoas if you have pain in the front of your hip joint.

In fact, depending on your situation, stretching your psoas may actually do more harm than good! The key is to know whether your psoas is short and tight and thus in need of stretching, or if it’s weak and overstretched and in need of strengthening. 

7 Ways to Tell if You Have a Psoas Muscle Imbalance

When you have a tight (or short) psoas muscle, you may experience pain in your lower back or in your hips, especially when lifting your legs. This is caused by the muscle compressing the discs in the lumbar region of your back.

Stretching your muscles and releasing the tension on the psoas is the best way to prevent this from happening. It takes time and daily attention to keep your psoas muscles relaxed, stretched, and strong.  

And, while most people with psoas issues have tight psoas muscles, there are some people whose psoas muscles can be overstretched.  In this case, if you stretch your psoas and it is already overstretched, you will cause more problems. 

Your body will tell you what your psoas ultimately needs.  Here are 7 ways to tell if you have a psoas muscle imbalance:

  1. Leg length discrepancy. A tight psoas muscle can cause your pelvis to rotate forward.  This, in turn, can cause an internal rotation of your leg on the affected side. The opposite leg will rotate externally in an effort to counter-balance. This will make the affected leg longer so that every time you take a step, it drives your leg up into your hip socket.  This can lead to functional leg length discrepancy.
  2. Knee and low back pain. If you experience knee or low back pain with no apparent cause, it may be coming from your psoas muscles. When your femur is in essence locked into your hip socket due to a tight psoas muscle, rotation in the joint can’t occur.  This can cause your knee and low back torque.
  3. Postural problems. When your psoas is too short or tight, it can pull your pelvis into an anterior tilt, compressing the spine and pulling your back into hyperlordosis or “duck butt.”If your psoas is overstretched or weak, it can flatten the natural curve of your lumbar spine creating a “flat butt.” This misalignment is characterized by tight hamstrings pulling down on the sitting bones, which causes the sacrum to lose its natural curve and results in a flattened lumbar spine. This can lead to low-back injury, especially at the intervertebral discs.  You may also feel pain at the front of your hip. Finally, it is possible for your psoas muscles to be both tight and overstretched. In this case, your pelvis is pulled forward in front of your center of gravity, causing your back to curve (swayback) and your head to poke forward.
  4. Difficulty moving your bowels. A tight psoas muscle can contribute to or even cause constipation. A large network of lumbar nerves and blood vessels passes through and around the psoas muscles. Tightness in the psoas muscles can impede blood flow and nerve impulses to the pelvic organs and legs. 
    In addition, when the psoas is tight your torso shortens decreasing the space for your internal organs. This affects food absorption and elimination.  As such it can contribute to constipation, as well as sexual dysfunction.
  5. Menstrual Cramps. An imbalance in your psoas muscles can be partially responsible for menstrual cramps as it puts added pressure in your reproductive organs.
  6. Chest breathing. A tight psoas muscle can create a thrusting forward of the ribcage.  This causes shallow, chest breathing, which limits the amount of oxygen taken in and encourages over usage of your neck muscles.
  7. Feeling exhausted. Your psoas muscles create a muscular shelf that your kidneys and adrenals rest on. As you breathe properly your diaphragm moves and your psoas muscles gently massage these organs, stimulating blood circulation. But, when the psoas muscles become imbalanced, so do your kidneys and adrenal glands, causing physical and emotional exhaustion.
    In fact, according to Liz Koch, author of The Psoas Book, “The psoas is so intimately involved in such basic physical and emotional reactions, that a chronically tightened psoas continually signals your body that you’re in danger, eventually exhausting the adrenal glands and depleting the immune system.”

9 Tips for Keeping Your Psoas Muscles Happy and Healthy

Exercise, sitting in your favorite chair, wearing shoes, and even unhealed physical and emotional injuries can cause an imbalance in your psoas muscles. Getting things back in balance will give you a greater range of motion and relief from pain.  Plus, you feel more grounded and relaxed!

Here are some tips for getting things back in balance:

  1. Avoid sitting for extended periods. If you must sit for work or other reasons, sit with good posture and be sure your hips are level or slightly higher than your knees. It’s a good idea to put a towel folded lengthwise under your hips when sitting. This tilts the pelvis in a way that lengthens the hamstrings and relaxes the psoas muscles. Avoid bucket seats and chairs without support for your low back. Try to get up and move around every hour. 
  2. Add support to your car seat. Use a rolled up towel underneath your sit bones and/ or behind your lumbar spine to keep the psoas and hip sockets released. If you are traveling long distances, stop every 3 hours to stretch and walk around for 10 minutes.
  3. Lay off extreme exercise routines. I don’t mean completely or forever.  But, if you are a power walker, distance runner or sprinter, or even if you do a lot of sit-ups, you may want to alternate your workouts.
  4. Try Resistance Flexibility exercises. Resistance Flexibility exercises can do wonders for your fascia. To strengthen your psoas, lay on your back with your hips abutting the wall next to a door frame. Raise one leg straight so that it is against the wall. (Your other leg will extend through the doorway.) Bend your extended leg and using your hands to slow down the movement and create resistance, bring your bent knee toward the chest. Do this while also pressing your raised leg into the wall. Then reverse the motion of your bent leg. As you straighten it, continue to create resistance using your hands to push your leg out as your leg resists. 
  5. Get a professional massage. Getting a massage from a seasoned practitioner can help relieve a tight psoas muscle. Understand that this work is not the most comfortable, but can be of great benefit. In fact, getting myofascial release on a regular basis helps to keep your psoas, and all of your muscles, fluid. Assisted stretching (as with a Resistance Flexibility trainer) and yoga are also excellent ways to restore balance to your psoas.
  6. Take constructive rest. The Constructive Rest Position (CRP) can relieve low back, pelvic and hip tension while it allows your entire body to come into neutral. Lay on your back with your knees bent and your feet on the floor hip-width apart and parallel to each other. 
    Place your heels a comfortable distance from your buttocks – or about 16 inches away. Do not push your low back into the floor or tuck your pelvis. Rest your arms over your belly. Let gravity do the work. Doing this for 10 to 20 minutes every day will release tension in your psoas muscles and help to reestablish the neuro-biological rhythms that calm and refresh.
  7. Pay attention to your pelvis!  The length of the psoas determines whether or not your pelvis is free to move. To tell whether your psoas muscles are tight or overstretched, stand sideways by a mirror (or even better, have a friend take a photo of you from the side). Note the position of your pelvis. If you were to draw a line along your pelvis from back to front, that line should be pretty straight. If the line tilts downward, your pelvis is anteriorly rotated or moving toward the front of your body. This means that your psoas muscles may be short and tight. If the line runs upward, your pelvis is posteriorly tilted toward the back of your body. This means that your psoas muscles may be overstretched and weak.
  8. Release stress and past traumas. We store stress in our bodies. Tension in the hips is common and it’s usually not just caused by lifestyle, age and physical events, such as injuries or accidents, but also due to mental stress and unhealed traumas. Releasing stress daily can help keep your psoas healthy. Take a leisurely walk. Soak in a bath with Epson salts. Acknowledge your emotions, express and release them. Divine Love is a great way to heal from past traumas. Finally, get out and do something pleasurable every day!
  9. Read The Psoas Book. If you want to learn more about your psoas muscles, read The Psoas Book by Liz Koch. Koch believes that our fast-paced modern lifestyle — including car seats, constrictive clothing, shoes that throw our posture out of alignment, and more — chronically triggers the psoas as it “literally embodies our deepest urge for survival, and more profoundly, our elemental desire to flourish.” You can also visit her website, www.coreawareness.com

Use Pandiculation To Heal Your Psoas and All of Your Muscles

Pandiculation, or active stretching, is a somatic movement that is typically associated with yawning, especially when you first wake up in the morning. But, it is so much more than that. Pandiculation is actually your nervous system’s wake-up call. In fact, it has been called “nature’s reset button” because it prepares your sensory-motor system for movement. And, pandiculation is critical to the proper functioning of your entire musculoskeletal system.

If you have ever seen a cat or dog move when they first wake up you have probably noticed how they arch their backs up, then drop their bellies while they lengthen their legs. We sometimes call this a “cat-cow” stretch in yoga. But, your dog or cat is pandiculating. Humans pandiculate automatically when waking or after we have been sedentary for a while. Even fetuses have been seen pandiculating in the womb – it’s that deeply ingrained in our nervous systems.

Gentle somatic movement patterns that incorporate pandiculation can retrain your brain and muscles so the result is that your muscles move more easily. Pandiculation works by sending biofeedback to your brain informing it of the level of contraction in your muscles. When done regularly, pandiculation can help prevent chronic muscle tension, restore proper muscle function and even lengthen short, overly-tight muscles.

Preventing muscle tension is critical to maintaining healthy posture and movement. The best part is, you can learn how to do somatic movements at home to help ease the pain of tight muscles, including your psoas muscles.

There are three steps to a pandiculation:

  1. Flex. Gently contract the tense muscles. So, let’s say you have tight trapezius muscles and a sore neck and shoulders. You could contract your trapezius muscles and lift your shoulders to your ears.
  2. Extend. Slowly lengthen the muscles you have contracted. In the case of your shoulders, you start to slowly pull them down and away from your ears. Do this in a controlled manner.
  3. Relax. Completely relax the muscles. When you relax the muscles you just contracted and lengthened, your brain integrates the new feedback. This helps your brain to remember that those muscles don’t have to stay stuck.

Start with contracting and releasing one muscle at a time. Then you can progress to a small group of muscles and eventually move to larger movements involving many muscles and even your whole body.

Pandiculation Works for Every Body

Everyone can practice pandiculation. Here’s one pandiculation that you can do every morning when you wake up:

  1. Gently squeeze your fingers into your hand.
  2. Tighten your arms and legs and pull them inward toward your body.
  3. Slowly reach your arms overhead toward your headboard. (You will probably start to yawn at this point, due to what is known as Stretch-Yawn Syndrome.)
  4. Lengthen one leg at a time down toward the foot of your bed.
  5. Gently twist and bend as you are flexing and extending.
  6. Completely relax all your muscles.

Some exercise forms, such as yoga and resistance flexibility, actually incorporate pandiculation. You can find specific pandiculation movement patterns online or look for a somatic movement class or workshop. It’s easy to perform pandiculation in as little as 5 minutes at home. Or, you can do it 40-50 times per day – just like your dog or cat does!

 

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How the Psoas Moves You

 

The psoas is not like many of the familiar surface muscles. You can't see it, and most people can't flex or release it on demand as you might a quad or bicep. It is a deep muscle, involved in complex moves and communications through the core and lower part of the body.


The psoas is traditionally considered a hip flexor. Hip flexors are muscles that bring the trunk and leg closer together. It is also a posture stabilizing muscle and assists in straightening the lumbar (lower) spine. Finally, in actions where one side contracts and not the other, the psoas aids side-bending. It is important to note that the psoas muscle works by eccentric contraction, lengthening along the front spine rather than shortening on exertion.

Since the psoas is a muscle of flexion, exercises that incorporate those kinds of moves are said to strengthen it. When the leg is in a fixed position, the psoas helps flex the torso. Pilates roll-up would be an example of such a move. When the torso is fixed, the psoas helps bring the thigh to the torso, as in Pilates knee folds exercise. However, the psoas muscles are tight and overworked in many people—a situation often leading to back pain, particularly low back pain in the area where the psoas has so many attachments.


Psoas Stretches

Poor habits of posture and muscle alignment, and sometimes over-training, create conditions where the psoas is required to stabilize you constantly. It is unable to return to a neutral position from which it could respond with flexibility to the shifts of the spine, pelvis, and leg. Lunge exercises are the most popular exercises to stretch the psoas. However, exacting alignment is required, or lunges are of little use with regard to the psoas.

 

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