Get Hip about Flexors
Stretching hip flexors can relieve the tension built up from
daily sitting and ease all-too-common lower back pain.
By Julie Gudmestad
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Too much sitting: You probably know it can contribute to serious health problems like obesity and osteoporosis. But did you know it also contributes significantly to back woes, including lower back pain in yoga poses? Fortunately, you can use your yoga practice to offset the effects of a sedentary lifestyle, relieve associated back pain, and set the stage for safe practice of intermediate poses like backbends.
The connection between a sedentary lifestyle and lower back discomfort in yoga poses is the hip flexor muscles across the front of the hips. If left unstretched, shortened hip flexors affect the position of the pelvis, which in turn affects the position and movement of the lower back.
Several muscles cross the front of the hip and create hip flexion, pulling the thigh and trunk toward each other, but probably the most important is the iliopsoas. It is actually composed of two muscles, the iliacus and the psoas, which lie deep in the back of the abdomen. If you looked at the front of a body with the internal organs removed, you would see the psoas lying alongside the spine, attached to the sides of the lumbar vertebrae. The iliacus originates on the inner bowl of the pelvis. Both muscles cross the floor of the pelvis, emerge at the outer edges of the pubic bones, and finally insert on the inner upper femur (thighbone). Because the muscles are buried so deep, we can't see or touch them, so it's easy to understand why there is much confusion about their location and action.
If you are standing, the hip flexors lift your leg when you step up on a stool. If you are lying flat on your back, the hip flexors can either lift your leg or lift your torso into a sit-up. In yoga, Navasana (Boat Pose) is especially good at strengthening the iliopsoas because it demands that the muscle isometrically contract to hold up the weight of the legs and torso.
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