Part 2 of 10

The Hip Flexor or Ilio-psoas muscle is used by our bodies to raise the upper portion of our leg towards our torsos. We use it a lot for walking, running etc. so you can imagine with all this use it has a tendency to shorten. But this is not the whole story. Since the majority of us spend a large part of the day sitting, it is in fact this position that shortens the muscle the most. In the seated position the muscle is kept in its shortened state for long periods. Our bodies are amazing at adapting to our demands and when the muscle is kept in this shortened position the body responds by assuming, incorrectly, that this muscle doesn’t need to be so long.

Direct Influence on the Back

Why is this so bad for our backs? Well for starters we need to look at the position of the Hip Flexor muscles. They join from our upper thigh bone through our pelvis and straight onto the lower portion of our spines. This muscle therefore has a direct influence on our backs. As the Hip Flexor is now shortened from all the sitting you do, when you come to stand one of two things could happen:

1. you could be stuck in the seated position and be bent over double, or 2. you can stand up straight but the short muscle now pulls directly on your spine causing all the small back muscles to tighten up to fight against it. In turn this can create back pain and even pull your spine out of its natural line. Ouch.

So hopefully you can now understand the importance of stretching this muscle and why you may have a stiff back after long periods of sitting. The solution is firstly not sit for long periods without getting up and moving around. The second is to perform the following stretch at least twice a day. Before the stretch these are the stretch rules you must follow:

1. Pain should never be part of stretching.

2. Use a scale of 1-10; 1 being nothing and 10 being agony. You need to stretch to a 6 or 7. This should feel as if it is pulling right in the middle of the muscle and nowhere near your bones. It should feel like a strong pull and not painful or sharp.

3. When taking your body into any stretch, once you have done it, just hold it there. Do not force it any further and definitely don’t bounce ( By “bounce” I mean short regular movements trying to force your muscle to stretch further than it wants to. You can damage the muscle by doing this.).

4. Breathe! Your muscles won’t be able to relax properly if you are holding your breath. Use nice deep yoga-style breathing, take in a lung-full and let the air out nice and slowly right to the end.

5. It is better to get the technique correct than concerning yourself about how far you stretch. Bad technique could result in you receiving no benefits from the stretching or worse still an injury. And that is the kind of irony we don’t like.

6. Try and do stretches first thing in the morning and last thing at night. The more you can do the better, but morning and evening is fine as a minimum.

Stretch 2

For this stretch all you will need is yourself, maybe a full length mirror to check your technique and a stretch mat or carpet to protect your knees. Whilst standing take a large step forwards and lower yourself down, use a hip-level rail for support if you need to, so that your back knee is on the ground beneath you and slightly back and your front leg is 90 degrees at the knee joint in front of you, as in the picture. Through this whole stretch you must make sure that your torso is completely upright (vertical) you will have a tendency to want to lean forwards, don’t. Slowly, keeping your front foot and rear knee still, move your body forwards so that the rear knee is left further back than before. And your front knee will move forwards. Doing this correctly will create a small pull right at the top of your leg that you are kneeling on (see red mark on diagram). Get this to a point where the stretch will feel like a 6 to 7 out of 10. Hold this stretch for 45 seconds to 1 minute then repeat on the other leg by changing whichever leg you have forwards.

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This entry was Posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 1:27 am and is filed under Bad Backs, Stretching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.