Modern life presents itself with a multitude of new stressors. In past columns I talked about dealing with our fight or flight response, poor diet and missing essential nutrients. For this column I wanted to focus on something a little more mechanical, and there are few muscles in the human body that cause as many problems as the hip flexors.
Before we can jump into the problems that the hip flexors cause we should know more about them. First off, the hip flexors are actually a complex of 3 muscles known as the psoas major, psoas minor, and the iliacus, or the iliopsoas when referring to all three. These three muscles are anchored to several parts of the low back and pelvis before attaching to the thigh bone. The main thing these muscles do is lift your thighs as you walk and stabilize the spine when you sit. The iliopsoas muscles are some of the largest in the body and have plenty of important things running around and even through them.
Now there are many different things that can start to cause issues with the iliopsoas muscles, but I will stick to the most common ones. The first, and probably the most common cause of iliopsoas dysfunction is lack of activity and sitting. When we sit, the muscles are in a shortened state and after a long period of time the muscles tighten. When we finally stand up, the muscles remain tight and cause dysfunction. A second cause is frequent exercise without proper stretching, runners run into iliopsoas problems because of the nature of running. When a person runs, the legs go through the same motion over and over again often thousands of times a day. If the runner doesn’t properly stretch out after the run, the iliopsoas will tighten into the rather limited range used to run. The third and perhaps less looked at cause is stress, yes going back to that fight or flight response. If we are stressed, our bodies go into fight or flight and this tightens our iliopsoas muscles up in preparation for running from that bear, or in a more modern circumstance, meeting with our new boss.
When there is dysfunction in the iliopsoas muscles, various symptoms will arise. The tightening of the muscle will actually cause a rotation of the pelvis forward, this leads to low back pain and changes in the natural spinal curvature right through the neck. Tight iliopsoas muscles also affect the surrounding nerves, this can lead to pain going into various parts of the legs, buttocks and groin area. The last and most controversial is the effect on the digestive system. Our intestines are extremely dense in nerve endings and a vast number of those nerves pass directly by the iliopsoas muscles, it is theorized that when these muscles are tight and irritated it will lead to digestive dysfunction.
So what do you do about tight iliopsoas muscles? Several things actually. The first is to stretch, stretch, stretch! Whether you spend your day sitting at a desk, or running marathons, stretching will help to calm the muscles and prevent rotation of the pelvis. The second thing is to strengthen the opposing muscles, these muscles consist of the gluteus muscles and the abdominal muscles. When the muscle strength is properly balanced the iliopsoas muscles will be forced to stay in a more lengthened state. The last thing is to bring your body out of that stressful state. Whether it be through meditation, mindful breathing or yoga, when you relax your mind, your body will follow suit.