climbing

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. . .

I like to exercise in the woods. There! I’ve said it. I’ve said it aloud too - so there’s no going back. Truth be told, I’m much happier here among the trees than the squeezing between the pec-decks and stationary bikes at my local globo gym. I even prefer it to pounding the streets or hiking through the fields. In fact I prefer it to pretty much everything.

There’s something primal about the woods. It’s not just the smells, the sounds of the whispering trees, the presence of birds and other wildlife, or the dappled sunlight effect that the forest canopy casts on the ground. I think it goes further than that.

It’s a place where human beings seem to instantly feel at home; an environment that at once welcomes and intrigues. For me, being in the woods puts humans back where they belong, back where we started before the first of our species walked out of the forest on two legs and into the African savannah.

Of course you could argue that other environments could be thought of as just as natural for humans - the desert or the mountains, for example. What’s different about the forest though is that you can’t see it all at once. Upon a mountain top, you can gaze out over acres of terrain at one glance. In the Sahara you can cast an eye over mile-upon-mile of undulating dunes if you stand on top of a high one. In a forest however, only as you walk through it are its secrets revealed to you. You stumble from one little discovery to the next with a surprise around every corner.

I don’t just walk in the forest though. That’s enjoyable enough but there’s so much more fun to be had. No, I use the forest as my gym. There’s far more to do there than there is at your local LA Fitness centre. You just need to know how to use it.

There’s no end of challenges when you learn how to spot them. Can I jump that log? Can I vault that broken stump? Can I balance on this branch – or hang underneath that one – or move hand-over-hand along it?

Now you might be wondering what any of this has to do with posture or the Gokhale Method? What’s easy to forget is that posture is just a snap shot of movement. If you can move successfully between a range of different but correct postures, we can say that you ‘move well’. The challenge of moving well only becomes real when we are asked to engage in real, complex and unique movement patterns.

Ok, so you’ve used the Gokhale Method to improve the way you stand, sit and lie down. Maybe your back pain has cleared up? Maybe you no longer feel like a hunchback when you look in the mirror? That’s great! But that’s not the end of the Gokhale Method or your quest to make the most of the body you’ve been given.

The next test is to use your new-found sense of balance, posture and grace in an increasing number of more challenging ways. And, to my mind, there’s nothing outside of the woods to beat this.

As you walk through a forest you’ll notice the floor beneath you is uneven. Can you keep your foot arches nicely intact and your ankles, knees and hips in alignment? Or do you allow your knees to pitch inwards, your shoulders to pull towards each and your head to be pushed out, grimly, in front of you? If you can learn to control your posture while moving in a complex environment like this, you’re well on the way to mastering your body. It’s both the training and the test. You’ll move with greater efficiency and grace, be protected from injury – and certainly enjoy yourself a whole lot more!

There’s something to look for with every step. When you notice you’re going to have to duck under a low branch, do you find yourself rounding your back and tucking your head into your shoulders? Or do you hinge neatly at the hips, while keeping your back straight and true?

Another example: try walking along a log. You’ll find you’re much more balanced if you engage your inner corset and ensure you’re using your rib anchor. In fact, the extra stability you gain from appropriate use of your abs and obliques will extend into every movement.

If you try to lift a sizable log from the ground but don’t do it from a healthy start and end posture, your body will tell you about it. You might get away with reaching for your toes badly under ordinary circumstances – but try it before lifting a heavy weight from the ground and suddenly all Esther’s teachings make sense. (In fact many powerlifters and strongman competitors unconsciously employ the skills and positions that Gokhale Method student practice – that’s what makes them so successful.)

Whether you’re jumping, crawling, climbing, lifting or carrying, these principles will all still apply. You can’t really break the rules. You can only break yourself against them.

When I take new clients into the forest to train I find there are two things that make them feel pretty darn stiff the next day, even if to my conventional gym goers it appears that they’ve only done a light workout.

Firstly their bodies go into positions that they would otherwise never find themselves in. Joints will go through a much wider range of motion that they are used to, making this excellent mobility work. (If you’ve tried taking a huge first step to get off the ground and onto the first branch of a tree, you’ll know what I mean.)

Secondly, every movement is unique. Because each inch of a wood is different, individuals must adapt their movement in complex and subtle ways each time. Every muscle and every joint has a part to play. There's no machine isolating muscle groups as there will be in your local LA Fitness center. Movement faults or postural issues have nowhere to hide.

The mind-body link has a large role to play here too. To respond to this environment fully, you must be highly alert: alert to the branch you might walk into; alert to the shifting terrain under your feet; alert to the position of your body in space; and alert to how you’re controlling your body in this ever changing landscape.

The overall benefits of a workout like this are entirely holistic. Because we never use sets and reps, improvements are harder to measure yet easier to feel. We’re simultaneously addressing mobility, strength, speed, stamina, balance, movement skills - and, of course, bodily awareness in the form of the Gokhale Method.

The better you apply your refined awareness skills the more quickly the other benefits will follow, all the while protected from injury by the balance, alignment and stability that the Gokhale Method confers. Twenty minutes on a stationary bike while staring at a LCD screen just doesn’t compare!

My hope is that one day we will all return to moving, standing and sitting as humans have for thousands of years (and as some indigenous people still do.) I hope also that we will reject the artificiality of gym exercise and get back to performing authentic human movement in the sort of environment in which our bodies and minds have evolved to thrive.

By Oliver Selway
Author of Instinctive Fitness

www.instinctive–fitness.com

www.woodland-workouts.co.uk

Book available from Amazon: http://amzn.to/2vPiIA8

Join us in an upcoming Free Workshop (online or in person).  

Find a Foundations Course in your area to get the full training on the Gokhale Method!  

We also offer in person or online Initial Consultations with any of our qualified Gokhale Method teachers.