The Psoas
- marketingc8
- 11 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The headline in Literary Hub jumped out as us almost like a dare:
“It’s the Most Important Muscle in Your Body and You Don’t Even Know What It’s Called.”
Perhaps they meant the average everyday person and not us here at the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System, but how often have we heard AIC founder Jon Zahourek and so many instructors discuss the psoas muscle?
And it’s importance!
It turns out the article in question was actually an excerpt from a book that looks fascinating: Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance by Henry Abbott, published by W.W. Norton this year.
As Abbott points out, the psoas is the muscle that is key to our mobility.
“I knew about visible muscles like biceps and quads, but had mostly ignored the invisible ones that keep us running,” writes Abbott. “Studies have correlated a weak psoas with bone wasting, surgical complications, poor prognoses in cancer treatment, and—amazingly, and for reasons that aren’t well understood—death.”
The psoas, notes Abbott, “works hard.”
The psoas:
· Exists both in the top and bottom halves of the body.
· Is the also the only muscle that truly moves around the body’s center of gravity.
· It stabilizes both the lower spine and the head of the femur (that’s quite the combination!).
· Is integral to posture, walking, running, lifting your body off the ground, and moving laterally.
· It’s also connected to the neighboring abdominal muscles and diaphragm, meaning the psoas has a deep back-and-forth with respiration.
The word itself is from the Greek for “muscles of the loins.”
We loved Abbott’s description of how find the psoas: “Lie on your back and find the knobby bone on the front of your hip. Now let your fingertips walk a tiny step into the soft tissue in the bowl of your pelvis, and press down. If you’re in the right spot, as you lift a foot slightly off the ground, you’ll feel something like a bass string pressing into your fingertips. That’s your psoas saying hello.”
And then in the article dives into an important topic related to the psoas—back pain. An estimated 619 million people live with pain in their lower backs, he writes, citing data from the World Health Organization. This muscle is central to our multifaceted disability crisis. “An estimated 619 million people,” says the World Health Organization, “live with lower-back pain and it is the leading cause of disability worldwide.”
In short, a strong psoas is a happy psoas. And a happy psoas is a mobile and strong human being.
Here’s Abbott’s suggestion for how to check on your psoas: “Stand on your left leg and raise your right knee as high as it’ll go under its own steam. If you sit a lot, it might stop parallel to the floor … With your leg up, test your hip’s rotation. Picture your knee pointing at the center of an imaginary clock on the wall in front of you, while your right foot dangles at thirty minutes past the hour. Keeping your hips straight, sweep the foot clockwise as far as it will go, and then counterclockwise. Experts suggest that between those two moves, you ought to be able to sweep fifteen minutes, commonly from twenty to thirty-five minutes past the hour. If you can’t, you might have a bony limitation, weak muscles, or the need for myofascial work.”
Did you try it? How did you fare? One the biggest culprits in the overall decline of our mobility as we get older?
We all know the answer.
We sit too much! And all that sitting is dangerous.
The Mayo Clinic noted: “Researchers analyzed 13 studies of sitting time and activity levels among more than 1 million people. They found that people who sat for more than eight hours a day with no physical activity had a risk of dying similar to the risk posed by obesity and smoking. But 60 to 75 minutes of moderate aerobic physical activity a day offset the effects of too much sitting.”
So keep that psoas happy!
If you’re reading this, get up and move around.
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