Embody Change Structural Integration

 

Newsletter - September 2009

Low Back Stiffness, Common Causes and a Remedy

In talking with clients and friends recently about their busy summers, I‘ve heard tales of both activity and inactivity. Some did significant uphill hiking this summer. Others traveled far by vehicle, but spent too much time folded into an airplane seat or tolerating long hours in the car. A few have been doing lots of biking. And alas, some have been stuck at home or in the office riveted to their computers. Interestingly all these types of activity (and inactivity) tend to shorten the hip flexors, and therefore they can all lead to a stiff or painful low back.

 

Biking and hiking shorten the hip flexors through repetitive strengthening, which may not be accompanied by complementary lengthening. On a bike your hip is never fully extended, even when your knee is straightened. In hiking up hills, you are cultivating strength in your hip flexors, but you might forget to cultivate length in the days following a major outing.


In either case, after much hip-flexing and psoas-shortening, when you stand upright or lie down flat, your psoas will be more strongly pulling forward on your lumber spine. A tight upper psoas will put more demand on the spinal erectors during standing and other upright activity, which will increase compression in the lumbar spine. Compression generally causes cranky nerves. If your lower psoas fibers are tight, this tends to produce a more “sway-backed” posture in standing and may lead you to tighten your piriformis or gluts in order to find stability, in turn leading to problems in the posterior hips and legs. Lying face up on the floor, you may notice that your lumbar spine has a bigger than usual lumbar curve, and try as you might, you cannot fully relax your back into the floor. If lying face up in bed for long portions of the night, the pull of your psoas on your low back may leave you with a cranky stiffness in the morning. Lying on your side at night with the hips flexed may be more comfortable, but it will be doubly hard to straighten up in the morning.


Prolonged sitting in cars, airplanes, or office chairs keeps the hip flexors shortened. When sitting upright without back support, you are engaging your psoas to create that upright posture. If you are resting against the back of your chair, your psoas may not be active, but it is still shortened. If you are driving and your foot is on the gas pedal or brake constantly, you will be engaging just your right psoas slightly for a very long period of time. Without regular stretching, this can exaggerate the common pattern of a “torqued” pelvis, where one hip is tilted more anteriorly than the other.

 

Whether activity or inactivity is shortening your hip flexors, if you don’t take regular breaks to really stretch, lengthen and open up the front of the hip (or if you haven’t learned how to achieve a really effective stretch for this area), then minor adhesion and glueyness among the muscles, nerves, and tendons will accumulate. This accumulating adhesiveness between the structural components in your anterior hip will make it harder and harder to find an effective stretch on your own.

 

The solution? Start making time to stretch regularly, after hiking and biking, and throughout the day when you spend long periods sitting. Take up yoga class or renew your at-home yoga practice. Read the following article in this issue, Fine-tuning Your Lunge Stretch. Write, call, or visit me to ask for additional pointers, if you want more guidance than this article can provide. Or come in for a tune-up, so that together we can work to lengthen your psoas and open areas that have become tight or restricted.  

 

If you have been in discomfort for a while, it is likely not just your hip flexors that could use some release. You’ve probably been compensating for that hip flexor tightness long enough that other areas of your body have also shortened, and you may be slipping into a less efficient, more compressed postural pattern which requires more energy to maintain. Don’t let it go on too long. Your whole body will thank you for doing something to change this pattern!


Ahh, Relief!! Fine-tuning Your Lunge Stretch

Okay, many people have learned to do a lunge stretch, either in yoga class, at the gym, or in my office, however there are some tricks to making this stretch especially effective for your body. Let’s take things in sequence.

 

Initially, you may want to do this stretch standing near a couch, table or wall, something you can touch with one hand to help you find balance. First, find a stance with one leg forward and the other leg back. For stability, pretend your feet are attached to skis, and your skis are wide apart. This is a wide stance. (A narrow stance would be with your feet lined up one behind the other, as if you were on a balance beam). The length of your stance is determined by how far back you place your rear foot. Choose a stance that is a bit shorter than you think you need.

 

Next check your front knee, it should be bent and your knee should be directly above your ankle, not beyond your toes. For this stretch, your back foot should have your heel lifted off the floor. (In yoga, you will often put your heel down and your toes facing out to the side. This is different.) Look at your back foot, and orient it so that all your toes point forward. Achieve this by swinging your heel laterally. You should be rising up from the ball of your back foot. If you have the urge to deepen your front knee bend (which could send your  knee out beyond your foot), instead skootch the foot of your back leg a little further back. Now find a springiness and strength in this longer stance.

 

Next turn your attention to your low belly and your tailbone. Keeping your front knee over your ankle, put your hand on your low belly and help move it backward, as you tuck your tailbone downward and lift your spine upright. This should create some stretch sensation in the front of your back leg, up high near the crease where your leg meets your body. This juncture is where your psoas dives deep into the upper inner thigh muscles to attach to your inner thigh bone. Straighten your back knee a bit to enhance this sensation. If you’ve already created a lot of stretch sensation here, just hang out and breathe (or shorten your stance a bit if the stretch is too strong). If you want a deeper stretch with more sensation, lengthen your stride by skootching your rear foot backward. Give good attention to your low belly and tailbone, re-tucking your tailbone down as necessary.

 

For extra benefit, once you have found some good stretch sensation, do one of two things. First, if your right leg is back, try reaching up high with your right hand looking up beyond your fingers, feeling length along that whole side of your body. (Reach up with your left hand if your left leg is back.) This gets your diaphragm and waist muscles involved.  Your next option is to be sure the toes of your back leg are still pointing inward, and then try bending your upper body sideways, away from the leg that is being stretched. (If your right leg is back, bend your upper body to the left, opening up the side of your right waist.) This will target your quadratus lumborum (a deep low back muscle) and iliacus.

 

I am hoping that these tips for fine-tuning your lunge stretch will remind you of what you already know, or perhaps this article will help you to get new benefit out of a stretch you've tried before little result. The trick to making this work is in building the stretch through subtle changes of positioning. If you can’t seem to get enough satisfaction from this stretch, and you’ve also tried forward-bending stretches and side-bending stretches, then let’s schedule an appointment. It might be time for further assessment and some overdue hands-on work, including a few “back stripes!” (Returning clients know what satisfaction a good "back stripe" can offer.)

 

Happy stretching!



© Kirstin Schumaker 2009