Visited Darrell Hunink at Park Manor Physical Therapy again today for my bimonthly training & therapy. The main topic of today's session was how a tight Psoas could lead to limited external rotation of my leg at the hip.
A little background: For years I experienced lower back pain. The obvious thing to work is abs, but that often caused me even more pain. Then, through Darrell, I realized that I needed to strengthen the Multifidi around my spine before it could handle the stress of full-on Ab work. Once my Multifidi were in-shape I found that Oblique twists really helped eliminate my pain. Feeling great, I wanted to go further and I began shooting for press-handstand, which led me to serious Ab roll-ups and the Spinal Activation I now do in many of my classes. Then one day I got serious pain in both my Piraformis. It was only after I did extended abdominal-lengthening stretches - backwards over a workout ball - that the pain subsided. So, today's visit was to ask Darrell to explain WHY these two are related and HOW that relationship may have been playing out long before this incident occured.
Darrell explained that ab curls are concentric type exercises which shorten the abs. As they shorten, the tailbone get overly tucked. An overly-tucked tailbone pulls on the muscles & tendons around it and they pull back in an effort to stabilize the situation. Well, my piraformis couldn't handle it anymore and went into spasm. Only by using a prolonged eccentric stretch was I able to end the spasm.
My piraformis ... to be continued ...
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