Sweet as the PSOAS.

First, before minds are being blown by the Psoas knowledge, my apologies to all my beloved readers for taking a month off. Short and sweet version why?... New job, new people, new distraction, new places, new lessons, new bedtime...That's heaps of news which in itself creates a hell of allot of Fun! So there you have it, no excuses just been getting down like the beats they spin underground.

  Through all my playfullness and good times I have had some amazing breakthroughs in my Pilates practice. Completing a straight leg tendon stretch was seemingly an impossible task to me three weeks ago but voila, now its the reverse, side leg, tendon stretch that seems to be blowing my mind. Teaser another movement that causes a huge sigh to escape from my lips has become interesting in my body in a way that causes experiments in the movement instead of giving up on it. I have become slightly addicted to the feeling of my psoas muscle running along the front of my body acting as my internal suspender straps, thus my theme for this post.

  A little background on the Psoas muscle, the iliopsoas is perhaps the most misunderstood of all the muscles we commonly speak about in the human body. I say ‘that we commonly speak about’ because there are many other muscles that we don’t know that much about either. Coming into my training program I had no idea what my Psoas was or what it did for me and that's with an undergrad in Sports Medicine and ten years of being in the field, my bad or was it never addressed in dealing with body language. The psoas muscles are the bridges between the upper body and the legs. They are the only muscles that directly link the spine to the legs. The psoas attach directly from the lower spine to the top of the inner thighs at the lesser trochanter of the femur. They do not attach directly to the pelvis, but influence it through their connection to the iliacus muscles, which are attached to the walls of the inner pelvis.The psoas is a combination of slow and fast twitching fibers. The Psoas is responsible for flexion and external rotation in the hip joint. One of its orgin points is T-12 of the thoracic spine, which is why with psoas connection and control your low belly is fired up! Most of us dont think twice about picking our legs up but think about every step we take we HAVE to pick a leg up and everytime we do we stand on one foot, think walking up stairs. I'd take a bet half of america hauls from their superficial hip flexors and overdeveloped quads thus causeing in the long run back pain and knee joint sorrow. 

   Try to find your psoas.
      Take a seat now take yourself on the backside of your sits bones...Do you feel your low belly? From that position try and and lift one leg and then the next...suspenders? If you felt that awesome in me it feels oh so good, if you havent had the sensation keep trying sometime the nervous system has to be shaken up quite a bit to get the cells to fire their signals effectively. 
  

Utilizing the Psoas Teaser and Breastroke.