stride

When students first meet with a Gokhale Method® teacher they are sometimes surprised to learn that one of the reasons for their back pain is a tight psoas muscle. What does this little-known muscle, embedded deep within our bodies, have to do with back pain? And what do we need to do to have it recede in the background and leave our backs alone?

Get to know your psoas muscle 

Psoas major (pronounced so-as) is a deep-lying muscle with a downwards trajectory through the abdomen. There can be some individual variation, but it usually originates from T12-L4, and it inserts at the lesser trochanter of the femur. Its main job is to contract and pull the thigh up—as in walking, running, and climbing, for example. 

The psoas muscle lifts your thigh—or pulls on your lower back, depending on how it’s used.

For those who are not offended by meat analogies, this muscle is the filet mignon, or the tenderloin—it is meant to be lean, juicy, malleable, and stretchy. But in modern industrial populations, the psoas is often somewhat dry, tough, and short. The shortened length and tightness of the muscle can wreak havoc on the spine as it pulls forward on the lumbar spine, causing compression, wear and tear, and pain.

How do I know if I have a tight psoas?

There are various signs and symptoms associated with a tight psoas, including:

• A pronounced sway in the lumbar area
• Pain when going from sitting to standing
• Back pain either caused or eased by walking
• A sore insertion point on the thigh
• Feeling stiff and unable to straighten up, or “vulnerable” in the lower back, especially first thing in the morning  

Why did my psoas get tight?

• Sitting for extended periods without movement breaks is one reason that our psoas adapts to a shorter length because the muscle then spends a long time at the shorter end of the range of what it can do. 
• The shortening effect of sitting is made more likely when we sit poorly with our pelvis tucked. A modern issue with sitting is that we have poorly designed furniture, such as bucket seats and deep sofas, which encourage us to tuck and slouch. 

Most modern furniture is designed for aesthetic appeal rather than to enable us to sit well. Image from: Pexels

• Back pain patients are often recommended to use a chair with built in lumbar support, or to add a lumbar cushion. The extra curvature then reinforces a habit of swaying the lower back, which in turn enables the psoas to remain short and tight.

Most backrests follow the S-shaped spine paradigm and are designed to give “lumbar support.” This creates exaggerated curvature and compression in the lumbar spine. (Google, n.d.)

• A tight psoas can also have a psychosomatic cause, as this muscle is deeply linked to both chronic stress and trauma responses in the body. We see this response even in babies in the Moro or startle reflex.

Restoring length in your psoas 

A common remedy for a tight psoas is a lunge or other psoas stretch. Though effective, the problem with this approach is that it is not possible to do enough stretching to make a sustainable difference to the length of this muscle. The stretch feels good, but the muscle quickly goes back to its short resting length. For some people, if they have been stretching aggressively and the attachments of the muscle are inflamed, stretching can cause additional pain and dysfunction.

Another common approach is to get a gifted practitioner to “release” your psoas. This very intense maneuver can also be effective, but has the same problem as the stretching approach—it provides temporary relief, but does not sustainably reset the resting length of the muscle when poor daily posture is shortening it.  

The only sustainable way I know of resetting a tight psoas is to recruit Nature’s solution for keeping this muscle healthy, which is to learn how to walk naturally/skillfully/effectively. 

Our natural gait pattern is evident in our young children, our ancestors, and villagers in non-industrialized parts of the world. It gives the psoas muscle both the engagement and stretch it needs in a gentle and consistent way.
(central painting: Fisher Girl, Winslow Homer, 1894. Museum at Amherst College, Petegorsky/Gipe.) 

Nature’s built-in solution to stretching your psoas

To describe the action of healthy walking, we use the term glidewalking. With this pattern, every step becomes a psoas stretch. Refinements in walking like learning to contract your glutes with every step and leaving your rear heel down for an extended time, augment the psoas stretch. If, however, you don’t know how to maintain a long, stable lumbar spine, these same improvements in gait can be counterproductive and pull your spine into additional sway.

Our PostureTracker™ wearable enables you to monitor and maintain your rib anchor and a healthy, stable spine as you walk (shown in green), naturally stretching your psoas. Here I am on the Alumni Live Chat in December last year, demonstrating.

PostureTracker™ will tell you (shown in red) if you forget your healthy posture cues! Notice that I have let my back sway severely at the end of my stride.

Advanced Glidewalking Course for Alumni

If you are an alumnus, you are encouraged to join me in our Advanced Glidewalking Course. This course is a comprehensive deep-dive to both revisit the basics of healthy, natural walking, refine its many components, and learn advanced techniques that are not included in our beginner courses. Your psoas will thank you! Six weekly lessons start Wednesday, February 28, 11 a.m. (PST), 8 p.m. (CET). You can sign up here.

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you are new to the Gokhale Method, get started by booking a consultation, online, or in person with one of our teachers to find out how the Gokhale Method can help you.

You can sign up below to join any one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .

Stretching is a common prescription to help with back pain. At https://www.healthoutcome.org, the world’s first crowdsourcing platform to rate medical interventions, stretching is the 6th most commonly used intervention, after physical therapy, NSAIDs, heat, rest, and cortisone injections. On a scale from 0-5, stretching (rated 2.6) is the 5th most highly rated intervention after Postural Modification (3.8), Yoga (3.1), Supplements (2.9), Weight Loss (2.8), and Meditation (2.7).

Back pain caused by tight muscles is common

The Gokhale Method considers stretching to be one of many essential pieces in solving most people’s back problems. Even though stretching alone cannot give an equivalent result to that of a well-crafted Postural Modification approach, it is a good thing, and if slightly tweaked, could give better satisfaction and results in less time. If done poorly, on the other hand, stretching can harm, rather than help you.

A few key concepts that can help your approach to stretching are:

1. Your hunter gatherer ancestors, with whom you share the vast majority of your genes, didn’t do stretches per se. In the course of their daily activities, their bodies were self-stretching, self-maintaining, and mostly, self-healing. It’s true our lifestyles are different from theirs, but this realization should provoke some enquiry about small modifications in our ways of moving that would enable us, too, to be as efficiently and effectively stretched out as our ancestors were.

This hunter gets a natural shoulder stretch from using a bow and arrow

2. Not every muscle in your body needs to be super flexible. Unless you’re a gymnast or yogi, some stiffness here and there is well-tolerated, and can be beneficial when there isn’t great strength to balance extreme flexibility.

3. Flexibility is very useful in the following muscles: hamstrings (allows pelvic anteversion and hip-hinging), psoas (allows a full length stride without a swayback), external hip rotators (allows deep hip-hinging), pecs and traps (allows normal shoulder alignment and prevents pathology in the shoulder, facilitates good range-of-motion for the arms), and calves (allows the heels to remain on the ground for an extended time in a stride).

Calf stretches can help achieve a healthy stride

4. The reason these flexibilities are useful is that they facilitate normal human movement, which also gives a clue on to how to keep these flexibilities: PERFORM NORMAL HUMAN MOVEMENT! Hip-hinge well, stride well, maintain shoulder alignment well while moving the arms extensively, etc., and you’ll be largely covered for flexibility.

Hip-hinging in the garden keeps hamstrings flexible

Actor Shemar Moore keeps his shoulders rolled back when playing on the beach with some spare children

5. If your day does not include enough movement, supplement with a few, well-chosen stretches. It’s extremely efficient to do several stretches simultaneously. It’s even more efficient if you combine this with strengthening several muscles simultaneously.

Stretching the psoas (enables a healthy stride) and pecs, while strengthening the quads

6. Yoga and dance are two approaches to exercise that are especially efficient and effective for satisfying stretch (and strengthening) needs. Most approaches to yoga and dance could use some tweaking to “do no harm” and do more good, but it’s hard to match the possibilities with these traditional, multi-faceted, tried and true practices.

Dance is excellent for increasing flexibility - and strength

7. Distinguish between flexibility of your muscles and laxity in your ligaments. This is a big one, folks! Flexibility in appropriate muscles is terrific; laxity in your ligaments is not! Ligaments are a type of connective tissue that connect bones and cartilage in your joints and provide stability to the skeleton. Overstretched ligaments become too loose to hold your joints together under pressure or tension. People with lax shoulder ligaments, for example, can sometimes dislocate and “pop” their shoulders back in too easily. People with lax ligaments in their spinal column are able to round their spines excessively.
   
   
   This common approach to stretching the hamstrings, done poorly, causes laxity in spinal ligaments

This person would be better off lying on his back and raising one leg at a time to stretch out his very tight hamstrings

Do you have any favorite stretches? Please share them with us! We can then talk about pro's and con's for the stretches you share.

As the summer sun mellows and fall approaches, this is my favorite time of year to go hiking. Hiking brings so many benefits, from lifting your spirits and relaxing in fature, to catching up with friends and spending quality time with family.

The physical health benefits of walking are well documented. Choose your terrain well, and hiking provides great cardiovascular exercise for all ages. If you have a sedentary job, walking around town can be an important part of what helps you to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

10,000 STEPS A DAY

If you like to track your progress, a pedometer to measure and increase your steps is a great fitness tool. Pedometer researcher Dr. Catrine Tudor-Locke published a study in "Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise" in 2004, showing that men in the survey took an average of 7192 steps per day and the women an average of 5210. The research showed that a sedentary person however might average only 1,000 to 3,000 steps a day. For people in this category, gradually adding steps is the way to go.

A reasonable goal for most people is to increase average daily steps by 500 each week until you can easily average 10,000 per day.

MODERN KNEES HAVE ISSUES

Among the common problems that prevent people from walking very far are knee problems. Ironically, a common source of knee problems is a problematic gait. Moving less then compounds the problem with stiffness and weight gain, which puts even more stress on the knees, setting up a downward spiral.

In our culture we now have an epidemic of knee problems; most are not associated with any injury. Over half a million Americans a year are diagnosed with meniscus (cartilage) tears and bone spurs. They have sometimes suffered years of inflammation, pain and loss of mobility in the joint. Thankfully, surgical repairs can be pretty good at restoring knee function, but it's always best to prevent the damage, try to improve the situation simply if possible, and use surgery as a last resort.

Let’s look at the figures:

http://www.healthline.com/health/total-knee-replacement-surgery/statistics-infographic

• More than 4.5 million Americans are living with at least one total knee replacement. That is 4.7% of people aged 50 and over. By age 80+ the figure is 10% and rising

• Knee replacements increased by 84% from 1997 – 2009

• Osteoarthritis is the principal diagnosis of knee replacement recipients

http://www.healthline.com/health/total-knee-replacement-surgery/understanding-costs

• The average cost of knee replacement surgery is $49,500, plus in-patient charges of $7,500

• The average cost of knee arthroscopy surgery is $11,900

• An estimated 850,000 meniscus surgeries are performed each year

http://www.newchoicehealth.com/Directory/Procedure/130/Arthroscopic%20Knee%20Surgery

A SIMPLE PREVENTIVE POSTURE MEASURE FOR KNEES

If you observe young children’s gait, you will see that they land on a slightly bent front knee. You can also see this in people from non-industrial cultures. Bending the front knee provides extra shock absorption for the knee joint. By contrast, if you are in the habit of landing on a straight leg (a result of inappropriately using your quads to lengthen your stride) the knee cartilage will be subjected to a much greater force as your foot hits the ground.

Landing on a straight front leg is often accompanied by several other postural aberrations as listed below. Conversely, bending your front knee at landing can help induce some of the other aspects of a healthy gait like a stronger, more propulsive action in your back leg and buttocks.

TRY IT

Start from standing with your feet hip width apart in a relaxed micro-squat position (with your knee and hip joints softened). This will help antevert your pelvis. Now imagine you are walking up a hill. This will lean you slightly forward. Your back leg can now propel you forward and your front knee is more likely to be bent at the moment of impact. Squeeze the upper buttock muscles (gluteus medius) of your back leg as it propels you forward, and use this muscle to help slow the landing of your front foot. You should land heel first, but only by just a fraction ahead of the rest of your foot (avoid an extreme heel-toe one-two step). If you succeed in making your landing soft, you will be providing additional protection for the knee.

It may help to try walking barefoot, on dirt or grass if possible. When doing this, you will instrinctively land more softly to protect your feet, which are no longer over-protected by thick shoes.

A good general principle to keep in mind is to use your muscles and spare your joints.

In addition to being a healthier way to walk, you may experience that a lighter landing on a bent front leg is more pleasant than crashing to the ground with a rigid front leg.

Walking is one of the techniques where students most benefit from hands-on coaching. In our six-lesson Gokhale Method Foundations course, we introduce elements of walking in the first lesson and build on them with each successive lesson. This gives students a chance to digest, practice and refine their technique with feedback from the teacher.

Walking habits can be deeply ingrained in your muscle memory and even your psyche—after all, it’s part of who you are and has been a lifetime in the making! It often takes a lot of repetition and hands-on cueing to change these habits. Gokhale Method teachers are trained to help you learn good habits by logically breaking down walking into smaller moves and then linking the new moves together. We teach elements of walking in our Free Workshops, our Initial Consutations and, most comprehensively, in our six-lesson Gokhale Method Foundations course.

We hope to see you in person at one of these offerings!