What to do with the Psoas

The psoas muscle is one of the most important muscles in the body. It is often referred to as the "anatomical keystone" of the body. It helps with posture, balance and flexibility. It also directly affects how we move and how we feel. To maintain its strength and flexibility, it’s important to do a variety of exercises that target and stretch the psoas. Examples of exercises could include forward folds, splits, and hip flexions or extensions

Transcript

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APT: anterior pelvic tilt equals hip
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flexion, plus lumbar extension. That's the
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equation for an anterior pelvic tilt.
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So,
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we get up in the morning, sit down on the couch while drinking our coffee, go through all
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our emails, check facebook, if you're me linkedin, youtube, twitter, linkedin groups,
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youtube groups, get all of that stuff done. Check my yahoo mail, my BTC email, my
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google mail because we're just inundated with social media. So I've been sitting
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there for like a half an hour while I drink my smoothie, drink my coffee. I then
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get up, I walk around, right, I walk Dingo around a little bit. Come back, home, sit
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down, put all my stuff together for this course, once again only to get up, get in a
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cab. What do I do in a cab? Sit down. What position is that for my hips?
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Flexion, so every time I've sat down I've been in hip flexion. Then let's say I
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didn't do this course today, let's say it was class instead. What do you think I do
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in class? Let's pretend I am you today, because this is my normal day, is being you guys. I'm
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sitting, right? And of course by the time I get done with this course I'm going to
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want to get up and run around, right? Get myself out a hip flexion. No, I'm going to go home,
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get in the cab, sit down, in a hip flexed position, and relax
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because it's been such a long tiring day of being uber active, right? You guys are
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exhausted from being so active, I know. I've worked you out so hard today. So, how
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different is that from our clients? It's not, right? They really kind of do
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the same thing, only instead of in class they're at work. They have desk jobs, they're
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not personal trainers, they don't even get up and stand around most of the time,
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they just sit in a hip flexed position. Well what happens to a muscle that's
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been kept in a shortened position over and over and over again? It adaptively
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shortens. If you don't use it, you lose it. If you don't use the range of motion you have,
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you will lose the range of motion you have. There is this argument of, you need
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to activate, right? You need to use range of motion to get range of motion. So it's
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one of the big Gary Grey things. The problem is he's set up an argument of
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omission by saying, not explicitly saying, but not saying that you have to
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statically stretch to get that range of motion back first. The truth is
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he's very right, if you statically stretch, and then you don't use your new
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range of motion, you will lose it. However, if you don't have it, you can't move into
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it. So given the psoas's shortened position
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what do you think we should do for the hip flexors? Stretch them.
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You've got to stretch them. And, in fact, if you ask me, you've got to statically stretch them.
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There's only one way to increase the length of fascia, and that's to get around
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the hypertenicity, the over activity caused when we stretch a muscle, because
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initially when you stretch a muscle does the muscle relax or does it get more tense?
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It gets more tense. So then you're just pulling against muscle. When you
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initially stretch a muscle, you pull a muscle into a lengthened position, does it
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get relaxed or does it get more tense? It tenses up a little bit. And then if you
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hold it, then what happens, then it relaxes. Once it relaxes then you can
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affect the connective tissue, if you can affect the connective tissue you can
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lengthen it and it'll start lengthening out. If it's adaptively shortened, it is
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in a shortened position like this psoas, that's what you have to do. Now, the truth
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of the matter is though, I mean you already knew that I didn't have to explain that to you.
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You know the psoas major is tight. Like, whatever, Brent, I've got this.
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Stretch my psoas. What do we see most trainers do with the psoas? Work it. Why?
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They beat the hell out of the psoas because they think they're working abs. You want
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to give yourself a challenge, and we might actually do this, there's an assignment
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in the core section, try to come up with a core routine that doesn't use hip
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flexion as a joint action. Seriously, I don't think we need short
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and strong psoas. It's no wonder people come in with anterior pelvic
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tilts. Like, yeah, I have low back pain, you know what
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my doctor said, he said strengthen my abs. So I'll go strengthen my abs.
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The first thing they do is sit ups. Which is what joint action? Hip flexion.
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Then they go over the roman chair. Hip flexion. And then go over and
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do these. Then they go wow, I really feel that in my low back. Well that worked. Is that going
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to help our problem any? No, probably not. So psoas, stretch or strengthen? Stretch.
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I'm not saying you can never do hip flexion work ever again. But you should
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probably get your hip flexors back to optimal extensibility, then you could