Back Pain?

If you’re dealing with low back pain and feeling tightness in your hip flexors, stretching the hip flexors (psoas) is not the best approach, especially if you struggle to pull your anterior ribs toward your hips.

The Psoas muscle is your primary hip flexor, it enables you to bend down to tie your shoe laces and lets you lift up your knee so that you can walk, climb the stairs and run.

Many people experience stiffness in their hips or have lower back pain, and the poor old psoas muscle gets most of the blame. The fact is it couldn’t be further from the truth. Your psoas, because of its many connections to the lumbar spine, the diaphragm,the pelvis and the femur (upper leg bone) and even the pubic area means that it has a lot of tasks to perform.

As a neuromuscular therapist, I often watch people attempt to stretch their hip flexors, and I want to go over and stop them.. Isolating the hip flexors, particularly the psoas, is incredibly challenging. Loading or stretching the psoas is a complex endeavor.

When you try to target this muscle, you’re inevitably impacting other muscles as well, and many of these may not respond to the stress you’re applying. This is largely due to the anterior femoral nerves, which branch out to significant thigh muscles and their sensory fibres cover an extensive  area that includes the abdomen, thigh, groin, and even areas like the scrotum and labia.

It’s essential to remember that the psoas muscles develop around lumbar nerves (early development stages) that are deeply embedded within their tissue. Furthermore, the fascia surrounding the psoas extends to the kidneys and the quadratus lumborum  (deep lower back muscles) which is why movements involving hip flexion can often intensify kidney pain or lower back discomfort. .

(Picture by Ray Long)

REMEMBER:

• When the body is under stress, it prioritizes stability over mobility, making it neurologically impossible to effectively stretch.
• The psoas is connected to the lumbar spinal segments.
• At the top, it’s linked to the diaphragm through the medial arcuate ligament.
• The medial fibers of the psoas connect into the crura, or “legs,” of the diaphragm.
• Your autonomic nervous system runs deep and medial to the psoas!
• Bloodflow and nerve innervation is the most important factor in muscle health.

FACTS:

The psoas/diaphragm connection means that every breath you take involves both of these muscles working together to maintain anterior spinal stability.

The psoas major also teams up with another hip flexor and external rotator called iliacus. Although they share an insertion on the femur, (upper leg bone) they have different nerve innervations. The iliacus does not connect to the lumbar spine and is not involved in stability.

The psoas major attaches to the intervertebral discs, from just below the last thoracic vertebrae down to the fifth lumbar vertebrae, just missing the lumbosacral disc, an area prone to herniation, often seen in those with tight diaphragms.

SOLUTION:

If your hips are tight from an anterior pelvic tilt, stretching the psoas is not the solution. Instead, wake up your diaphragm and open up your rib cage to allow the diaphragm to move freely. Then stabilise your spine and focus on hip mobility exercises.

Connect with me if you have a question.

Reconnect Your Mind With Your Movement.

Bev