http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/778/ How to Stop Groin Pain and Related Symptoms of Psoas Muscle Dysfunction Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/how-to-stop-groin-pain-and-related-symptoms-of-psoas-muscle-dysfunction-lawrence-gold/
This is exercise #2 of a two-exercise set — not part of the program, Free Your Psoas. It works best, as a refresher, with preparation from doing that program.
Efforts to release psoas muscles without integrating control of those muscles with the rest of your movement and balancing actions leads to partial and temporary results.
The reason: Your whole way of moving has been used to the psoas muscles being tight. You’ve got involuntary movement habits. Those movement habits call the newly released psoas muscles back into the movement pattern the fits the rest of your movements.
So, it’s “helpful” to integrate your psoas movements with the rest of your movements. There’s a program for that, called Free Your Psoas: An Integrated Program for Freeing and Coordinating the Central Movers and Stabilizers of the Body.
There’s also an advanced, superior agility version for athletes at http://somatics.com/page7-psoas_elite…. However, if you have clinical symptoms, you should do the basic program, first.
How to Release Your Psoas Muscles without Stretching, Exercise 2
Clinical Somatic Education | a New Discipline in the Field of Health Care
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/770/ How to Free the Psoas Muscles without Stretching, part 2 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/how-to-free-the-psoas-muscles-without-stretching-part-2-lawrence-gold/
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/698/ 5: Psoas Pain, Correcting the Underlying Cause | 2016-10-3 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/5-psoas-pain-correcting-the-underlying-cause-2016-10-3-lawrence-gold/
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/690/ 1: The Psoas Muscles Video Article | Introduction 2016-9-28 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/1-the-psoas-muscles-video-article-introduction-2016-9-28-lawrence-gold/
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http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/552/ How to Free and Integrate Your Psoas Muscles | INTRODUCTION Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/how-to-free-and-integrate-your-psoas-muscles-introduction-lawrence-gold/
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/550/ How to Free and Integrate Tight Psoas Muscles without Stretching, exercise 1 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/how-to-free-and-integrate-tight-psoas-muscles-without-stretching-exercise-1-lawrence-gold/
See where your psoas muscles are. Understand the obviousness of what they do. Learn what to do to release them.
Efforts to release psoas muscles without integrating control of those muscles with the rest of your movement and balancing actions leads to partial and temporary results.
The reason: Your whole way of moving has been used to the psoas muscles being tight. You’ve got involuntary movement habits. Those movement habits call the newly released psoas muscles back into the movement pattern the fits the rest of your movements.
So, it’s “helpful” to integrate your psoas movements with the rest of your movements. There’s a program for that, called Free Your Psoas: An Integrated Program for Freeing and Coordinating the Central Movers and Stabilizers of the Body. Preview it, here:
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/544/ How to Release Your Psoas Muscles without Stretching, part 1 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/how-to-release-your-psoas-muscles-without-stretching-part-1-lawrence-gold/
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/542/ How to Release Your Psoas Muscles without Stretching, Exercise 2 | The Dolphin Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/how-to-release-your-psoas-muscles-without-stretching-exercise-2-the-dolphin-lawrence-gold/
The
psoas muscles are easy to understand when you consider the basic
movements in which they are involved: sitting, standing, and walking --
and how those movements are controlled: muscle/movement memory. This
article explains healthy and unhealthy psoas functioning and how to get
them healthy.
To understand your psoas muscles means to know what to do when they are unhealthy (too tight).
Such an understanding points the direction to healthy psoas muscle function.
What Your Psoas Muscles Do
In
healthy function, your psoas muscles maintain your uprightness in
sitting, your spinal alignment and balanced equilibrium when standing,
and your efficiency of movement bending, twisting, walking and running.
Your psoas muscles are core stabilizers that lend balance to movement.
Tight
psoas muscles show up as groin pain, deep pelvic pain, and as a deep
belly ache. Postural effects include a butt that sticks out in back and a
protruding belly, as pelvic position shifts top-forward. In movement,
the legs are restricted, in walking, in their freedom to move backward;
tight hamstrings often develop to compensate for the extra drag.
Awkwardness and poor balance result. Chronic constipation also develops,
in some people, due to the effect of an overactive psoas on the
neighboring nerve plexus that regulates intestinal activity.
To Free Tight Psoas Muscles
Three basic approaches exist. One is much more effective than the others.
stretching
massage/manipulation
movement training
First basic understanding: Muscle/movement memory runs the show.
If
your psoas muscles are tight, your muscle/movement memory keeps them
that way. Muscle/movement memory comes from a deeper level of the
nervous system than voluntary movement does; it's conditioning.
Because
muscle/movement memory develops by conditioning, stretching and
manipulation produce, at best, temporary and partial results. You can't
stretch or manipulate away conditioning; you can't stretch or manipulate
away muscle/movement memory. The pattern of remembered movement and
tension quickly returns. That understanding explains your experience
with therapy for tight psoas muscles.
Since muscle/movement memory
runs the show, you need an approach that re-conditions muscle/movement
memory -- and that's where movement education comes in.
Movement
education isn't "knowing how to move" or "maintaining good posture".
It's developing new patterns of coordination by actions that reach the
depth at which movement/memory lives -- the kind of movement memory
involved in riding a bicycle, for example. How did you learn to ride a
bicycle (or swim, for that matter)? Practice: development of new
patterns of movement until they become habitual.
That development
of new control and new movement involves not just freeing muscles, but
also integrating them into movement patterns with other movers and
stabilizers of the body. Movement training also involves awakening our
ability to sense the actions of our muscles in movement and balance.
Without the integration step, your psoas muscles are likely to revert to
their tight state. I'll say more, as we go on.
Understanding how
psoas muscles play in movement simplifies our approach to setting things
right. Having made such a statement, I will, of course support it. But
first, I have to lay some groundwork.
"PSOAS" OR "ILIOPSOAS"?
The
psoas muscles share a common tendon and end-point with the iliacus
muscles, which line the inside of the pelvis, so the combination is
called, the "iliopsoas" muscle. For brevity, I use the term, "psoas
muscle".
CORE MUSCLES
The psoas muscles are our deepest core muscles.
When
people speak of the "core", they usually mean the muscles of the
abdominal wall. But how is that the "core"? The core of anything, such
as the Earth or an apple, is its centermost part. The psoas is a core
muscle (as are the diaphragm, quadratus lumborum, iliacus and other
muscles closest to bone); the abdominal muscles are "sleeve", outside
the core.
HOW CORE FUNCTIONS
The
psoas muscles, being most centrally located as the deepest muscles in
the body, help control the shape of the spine. By controlling the shape
of the spine, they control our balance -- how the centers of gravity of
our major segments - head, thorax (or chest), abdomen and legs - line
up.
Tight psoas muscles distort the spinal curves, shorten the
spine, change pelvic balance and cause ungainly (chunky, heavy, labored,
awkward) movement. To the degree that the spinal curves are distorted,
our alignment is distorted and to that degree, we are out of balance and
our movement is un-economical/wasteful of effort.
COORDINATED MUSCLE/MOVEMENT MEMORY
Muscles
never work alone; they always work in concert with other muscles. What
any muscle does affects our entire balance. Other muscles have to
compensate for those effects on balance by tightening or relaxing. Your
brain controls these entire patterns of movement and compensation with
memories of movement ("muscle/movement memory").
Because your
nervous system and muscular system cooperate as a whole, to try to
change the movement and tension behavior of tight psoas muscles without
changing the larger movement pattern of which they are a part is to work
against the rest of the system and its (our) memory of how movements go
and feel. That's why methods of muscle manipulation (e.g., massage,
myofascial release, stretching) produce changes that are either
temporary or slow in coming - and why psoas release by manipulation is
painful: it works directly on sore, contracted psoas muscles against the
conditioning of the entire movement system.
ACTIVITY AND REST: COORDINATION AND MUSCLE TONE
The
term, "tone", refers to the level of muscle tension: complete rest
means zero muscle tone; complete activation means maximum muscle tone.
Some people believe that the higher the tone, the better; others believe
that complete relaxation is better. As you will see, where tone is
concerned, it's neither; better-integrated is better, and
better-integrated means more freedom to adjust accurately to changing
conditions -- freedom and balance.
Your brain coordinates the
movements and tone of muscles; tone changes as position changes in
movement. That's what is meant by "supple." Supple psoas muscles have
the sensation of spaciousness, support, freedom and length at your body
core. The term rolfers use is, "open core." When psoas muscles do their
job of stabilizing the spine, they relieve the abdominal wall muscles of
some of that task; your abdominal muscles have the sensation of
relaxation and free breathing. The term rolfers use is, "free sleeve."
Healthy psoas functioning gives the experience of "open core, free
sleeve." Open core/free sleeve is the feeling of trunk/spine length,
flexibility and stability.
HEALTHY FUNCTION
"Healthy",
in this sense means, "getting the intended result with the least
effort." Where movement is concerned, the word, "graceful", applies.
Graceful movement is economical movement; awkward movement is
uneconomical or ungainly movement. Graceful movement conserves effort;
ungainly movement wastes effort. For movement to be economical, it must
be well-balanced and well-coordinated -- a matter of integration.
Psoas muscles help regulate our changes of position as we move from rest into activity and from activity into rest
by changes in their tone. They help maintain our balance and stability
in those positions. They are central to movements from lying to sitting,
from sitting to standing, and from standing to walking and running. If
their tone is too high, they interfere with balance and stability as we
move into different positions; their tone is almost never too low, and
if so, usually indicates either neurological damage or a need to learn
basic control.
With changes of position, the activity level of your psoas muscles changes, as follows.
From Lying Down to Sittingto Standing to Walking and Running
At rest or in repose, your psoas muscles have no job to do and should be at rest -- which means relaxed and comfortable.
Your psoas muscles connect your legs to your trunk. When you move from lying to sitting, they move your pelvis and
provide a sufficiently stable core as you move to the upright position.
Overly tight psoas muscles create groin pain or deep low back
(lumbopelvic) pain when changing position from lying to sitting. You may
have the experience of a groin pull or of muscles seizing up in your
pelvis.
When Sitting - Your psoas muscles connect your
groin to your pelvis and low back and stabilize your balance in the
front-to-back direction; your brain adjuststheir tone for the right
amount of front-to-back stability under the pull of gravity.
From Sitting to Standing
- As you move from sitting to upright standing, your psoas muscles must
relax and lengthen to permit you to stand fully upright.
Overly tight psoas muscles, which connect your groin to your spine, prevent you from coming to a fully erect, balanced stand.
When Standing - Your psoas muscles' well-regulated tone is low enough to allow you to stand at your full stature, with minimal lumbar curve and high enough to
stabilize your core. Through your psoas muscles, your brain adjusts
your spinal curves (and balance) as you bend forward, lean back, move
side-to-side, and twist and turn.
Overly tight psoas muscles don't
lengthen enough as you stand straight; they pull from your groin to
your low back, causing lumbopelvic or lumbosacral pain, a "pubes back"
position, and excessive lower back curve. Your belly protrudes and your
butt sticks out.
From Standing to Walking - As you step
into walking, you first shift your weight onto one foot to free the
other leg to come forward; the psoas muscles on the standing side relax
and those on the walking side tighten to help you step forward. In
healthy walking, your psoas muscles freely alternate, side-to-side,
between higher and lower tone as you walk or run.
Overly tight
psoas muscles shorten your stride and require your hamstrings and
gluteus medius muscles to work harder to bring your "standing" leg back
as you step forward. You end up with tight hamstrings and tight gluteus
medius muscles (hip pain in back).
You can't make a lasting change
in one without changing the other because your brain maintains habitual
patterns of movement among muscles (pattern of coordination); to change
one, you have to reorganize the entire pattern. That kind of change
doesn't occur "by deciding to move differently" or by stretching; when
you're walking, you can't conveniently put that kind of attention into
your movements; you have to make it automatic, and there's a process for
that, mentioned below.
SUMMARY
Efforts to free the
psoas muscles without also improving their coordination with the rest of
the musculature produce only partial and temporary improvements.
That
means that "psoas release" techniques, "psoas stretches", and psoas
strengthening approaches need movement education (which involves
brain-muscle training) to produce a stable shift to healthy psoas
functioning.
Economical movement (least effort, good result) and
easy balance are the goal -- attributes you can develop by movement
training that first frees the psoas muscles and then integrates them
into economical movement patterns. First free, then integrate.
Then,
it's a brain-level training process that changes the brain's sense of
movement and coordination and results in healthy, integrated movement.
The name for that training process is, "clinical somatic education."
Tuck and Slide -- a somatic education exercise to free the psoas and neighboring groin muscles | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNIm0kAgdSA from Free Your Psoas: Enhanced Agility for Athletes
ONCE YOU HAVE RELEASED YOUR PSOAS MUSCLES:
Releasing muscles, by whatever means, is just the start.
Integration is necessary for a satisfactory outcome to any approach to
freeing muscles. This exercise prepares you for other exercises that
integrate and coordinate the psoas muscles with other stabilizing
muscles of the body.
The Psoas Muscles and Breathing
There is a center of breathing — at the region of the diaphragm/solar plexus.
Common breathing instructions would have you breathe into the belly. While this instruction is appropriate for people who are “chest breathers”, as a compensatory instruction, it’s not the final word.
Abdominal breathing instructions liken the diaphragm to a piston that, as it draws out of the chest cavity, produces a suction — inhalation. However, this view is incomplete and actually leads to restriction of the chest, as people overcompensate, breathing into the belly, which, though better than breathing with the chest (so-called, “deep” breathing, which is actually shallow breathing), is less than optimal and has side effects on posture.
Those side effects include tension patterns that disturb balance and movement, including walking.
Walking is the “psoas connection”; the psoas muscles initiate walking movements. The tendons of the iliopsoas muscles “interleave” with those of the diaphragm at the high end of the lumbar spine; movements of one affect movements of the other. So improper breathing from outside the center of breathing causes us to initiate movement from a location other than our central core, contributing to tension and awkwardness (that can be recognized as awkward only in contrast to the feelings of well-integrated movement, which people typically do not have, and which this exercise provides).
In optimal breathing, we expand more like balloons, with the center of breathing being the expansion point and with the breath producing sensations at least to the floor of the pelvis and into the head.
The exercise taught here teaches you how to find that central location and then, after a bit of practice leaves you breathing naturally into and from the center of breathing without any special effort to do so.
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Recent articles about "sitting injuries" highlight the possible consequences of sitting for too long. To that, I add, "sitting at a high level of concentration with minimal movement." The combination sets up a pattern of tension involving the psoas muscles, hip joint flexors (near the front pockets of your trousers), and the low back muscles. This entry clarifies the "why" of such sitting injuries and how to avoid them.
In the '90s, I became aware of a fanciful seating alternative called 'The Nada-chair".
It consisted of two loops, about thigh length, attached at opposite sides of a back-pad. The loops went about ones knees, the back-pad behind your sacrum/low back. The pull on the loops by your knees pulled the back-pad against you, creating a secure support for your back. All you needed to do was stay balanced.
Free Your Psoas
The ilio-psoas muscles perform a similar function, although attached at your groins, not at your knees. The part that pulls on your back like the back-pad (but on the inside), we call the psoas muscles; the part that pulls on your pelvis from the inside, we call the iliacus muscles. Together, they share a tendon at your groin, and so we call them the iliopsoas muscles. They span the distances between your groin on each side and your low back and between your groin and your inner pelvis on both sides. Their pull on your low back is like the pull on the back-pad, only along more of your back as high as your diaphragm; their pull on your pelvis on both inside surfaces pulls the pelvis top-forward, adding to the support of your back.
In that way, your iliopsoas muscles are like the Nada-chair. When you are sitting in a chair, your iliopsoas muscles shorten to hold you up, especially if you are sit perched on the edge of your chair (as so many do), but those muscles shorten also in those who slouch back in their chairs and hunch forward.
Tight Hamstrings: a Big Deal
When your hamstrings get tight, as happens when you get into -- and work in -- a high-stress-state too often and for too long, your hamstrings pull on your sitbones (deep to the creases of the buttocks). In the sitting position, tight hamstrings pull your bottom out from under you, forward; they cause you to sit too much on your "pockets" (tailbone). Tight hamstrings are one reason people slouch back in their chairs.
To sit erect, under that condition, people with tight hamstrings
must tighten their hip joint flexors and psoas muscles to counteract
the pull, to bring themselves forward and lift themselves up.
Then,
the same high stress state tightens the back muscles, as part of a
pattern of nervous tension. Eventually, the back muscles tire and the
person slumps.
Please see this article and the embedded instructional video to free tight hamstrings.
So, in closing
If you spend too much time in your chair, particularly at attention at a high level of stress, with minimal movement, in either position, you have successfully followed the formula for creating tight, short iliopsoas muscles. Congratulations.
Not only that, but muscles under tension formed this way and maintained by habit are the first to tighten under stress and the last to let go when the stress is over. That's one explanation for why people mysteriously tighten up into pain some time after an injury.
We become how we live. We get more and more familiar with being certain ways, more and more ready to be those ways, more and more set in the muscular tension set of those ways, our attitudes and our remembered reactions to everything that's happened to us in our lives. It all builds up as our "set" -- as in "set in our ways" -- a pattern of muscular tension as well as a psychological state.
Sit for too many hours all the time, your Nada-chair muscles get set at a shortened length. You can never really stand up all the way. If tension accumulates, those muscles may become too tight even when lying down and you won't be able to sleep on your stomach. The same thing happens with your hamstrings and your back, only it's your knees and back that get affected, until you develop groin pain, deep pelvic pain, a deep belly-ache, and possibly sacro-iliac pain.
Then, your massage therapist gets his or her elbow ready. Are you ready?
There is an alternative.
You can do something to change your postural set (which comes from muscle/movement memory) -- besides "trying to have good posture", which doesn't work very well, you may have noticed.
If you take these steps, you'll end the pain, be able to stand up and walk comfortably, at last.
If you don't, you may just stay in the condition you're in, which brought you to this page. PRACTICAL
Lawrence Gold is a clinical somatic educator with clients from around the world, in practice since 1990 and with two years' on-staff at a hospital rehabilitation center. His specialty is restoring comfort to people with chronic injuries. Learn more about Lawrence and his practice, here.
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http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/770/ How to Free the Psoas Muscles without Stretching, part 2 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/how-to-free-the-psoas-muscles-without-stretching-part-2-lawrence-gold/
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http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/690/ 1: The Psoas Muscles Video Article | Introduction 2016-9-28 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/1-the-psoas-muscles-video-article-introduction-2016-9-28-lawrence-gold/
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http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/552/ How to Free and Integrate Your Psoas Muscles | INTRODUCTION Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/how-to-free-and-integrate-your-psoas-muscles-introduction-lawrence-gold/
http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/550/ How to Free and Integrate Tight Psoas Muscles without Stretching, exercise 1 Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/how-to-free-and-integrate-tight-psoas-muscles-without-stretching-exercise-1-lawrence-gold/
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http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/lawrencegold.wordpress.com/370/ Free Your Psoas | Locating the Center of Breathing, INSTRUCTION Lawrence Gold https://lawrencegold.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/free-your-psoas-locating-the-center-of-breathing-instruction-lawrence-gold/
