I'm so glad you did this video. Many years ago a guy came into my office complaining of a "psoas strain". He literally couldn't raise his arm over his head. He was taking a golf ball under a kettlebell and working on his psoas got his ureter kind of stuck into a spot which was limiting any upper body movement. it was a slow process in that session to get him back on track but seriously, if you don't know what's under the skin in the torso, stop sticking balls and tools into the abdomen. That's a rule of MELT. We don't MELT the spaces, only the Masses and if you want your spaces worked on, get a quality therapist to help you. Brilliant info
The world owes you a debt of gratitude for not contributing to the insidious flood of self-help books in as much as you have not written a tome titled "The Self Help Sacred Psoas Foam Rolling Bible." Your idea of getting "a quality therapist" to help is gold. The difficulty in finding a quality therapist is a lot like the people who decided to go pan for gold who found out that you couldn't stick a pan in the stream and pull up nuggets. I decided some time ago to peruse the offerings of courses offered for licensed _________ therapists which offered nationally certified CEU's. Of the 22 courses and teachers I investigated only three met the minimum criteria I had set. I wrote 2 of them and still have both of their responses. One blankly stated that he did not read any research articles as they were too hard to understand but that he got his information from, as he put it, "the popular press." On further questioning, he explained he meant "newspapers." The other, who was teaching foam rolling, after I asked her what certificated courses she had taken, replied that there were "no formal training program for foam rolling," but that she had picked it up from a book and RU-vid trainings and some practice instruction from two other people. She had never heard of Sue Hitzmann nor Divo Mueller which is sort of like saying that you are preaching the Gospel but you have never heard of the Apostles Paul or Peter. There are three things that are hard to find: a good partner, a good mechanic and a good manual therapist. And most likely you won't find them reading the newspapers nor a self-help book. Angie's (List)?🙄
I’ve been practicing CST since 1996 & this is the most beautifully visual/visceral description I’ve ever seen. I love the way you always keep a nature connection. Thank you
Great video, Gil. I have also found a lot of women who have had cesarian sections struggle with a pulling feeling in their gut, pelvic floor as well as their psoas. I find that the more gently I approach this area, the more it responds favorably although I can say that pretty much about the entire body ;-). Working on the kidneys from an energetic approach, from the front of the body while acknowledging the veins and the arteries, allows for a much more pleasant client experience and profound emotional releases. Such a powerful and sacred part of the body. Thanks for this great reminder. Greatly appreciated xo
Thank you so much my friend, and, thank you for the support for being a psoas/body whisperer!! xoxo Folks, for those of you who have not yet had the privilege of knowing the amazing Anne-Marie Duchêne, by all means learn more about her work here: artofalignmentacademy.com/
@@somanaut Awww, you are too sweet. Love you big time always. You are TOTALLY inspiring me with your videos. So proud for you & such amazing footage and behind-the-scenes work ;-) xoxo
Hi Gil ! Would you be willing to do a video about the lymph system? Especially around the neck area? How do you interact with the lymph system? Thank you!
Happy Halloween Gabe! And yes, I left out some stuff, should have said "etc.!" I wing these vids so not always as thorough as could be :) There is quite a lymph chain that runs medial to the medial border of the psoas along the anterior aspect of the bodies of the vertebra, not to mention also the sympathetic trunk running between the crura of the diaphragm and the upper medial border of the psoas, though I mostly haven't seen these directly on top of our famous friend psoas m. I do manage to show these structures in the Live with Gil Sessions mentioned in the vid description above! Thank you for your continued interest Gabe :)
@@somanaut I love how you fly when you wing it! I have been learning that chain in hopes of helping my filtering flow… the more living tissues I touch, the more I seem to organize around hydrodynamic influence. Lymph seems like such an unsung hero of our flow. Thanks for all you know. Happy Halloween!
Can you also discuss how the mesenteric root relates to the psoas in a future video? Or is there something on your website already? Thanks for all of your amazing teaching!!
Hi Erin! I definitely could have been more thorough here, but I am quite thorough in Season One, Episode 5 of "Live with Gil" with special guest Marty Ryan featured for Explorer's on my site where I do a slideshow including discussion of the mesenteric root with good images from the lab!
Thanks @somanaut (as always)! One thing I've often wondered with the Psoas Major is why it causes discomfort on its origins and not the insertion? Given that the lesser trochanter is a single point of insertion and the origins are many I always wonder why when the psoas is clearly shortened its the lumbar region where I see the most symptoms? I've never had a single patient complain of a lesser trochanter being tender vs the large number who present with lumbar pain. Even in extremes where a a patient cannot straighten up it's still the L1 to L5 area they feel the discomfort in. With regards the 'release' of a psoas with our hands I only approached this on patients after a year or 2 of releasing my own, it's easy to reach and gives us plenty of feedback. Only when I was confident in my own anatomy and feedback from the psoas did I dare to venture onto the muscles of a patient. A great way to learn respect for the area but even then I had too little respect for the region until I watched you uncover it via your Explorer program. Boy, that was an eye opener in terms of the complexity of the area! Loving the short videos like this too, can't thank you enough for feeding my brain with your knowledge. I will get to Denver in person one day!!!! Jay
I commend your restraint in slowly approaching this issue. Your cautious approach shows you are the great exception, whereas in most schools a form of psoas release is taught and then graduates are free to macerate their clients connective tissue when they pass the exam and get licensed. One of my teachers clearly asked that when I practiced on him for an exam that I not massage in or around his belly as he had been recovering from improper psoas massage for almost a year. I would like to answer your question in detail but I cannot because what you ask is far more complex than mere muscle origins and insertions. Muscles are merely the responsive party. They are seldom (if ever) the cause or source of their own woes but are simply reacting to the cues of other connective tissues, fluids and factors. As your anatomy knowledge grows and you study other tissues and fluids in the body you wlll come to see this much more clearly.
Thank you Jay and I agree with Barry in commending you for both your restraint and your curiosity, you are a genuine somanaut and I'll hope to meet you someday too :)
Psoas is my stress indicator ... Would like to let you know this: I told about your wonderful anatomy lectures to a friend of my daughter, who studies medicine at the MHH, one of the most prestigious universities for medicine in Germany and worldwide known and he was so enthusiastic about it and recommanded it to his fellow students. I think, you'll get some new fans among the future colleagues!
How wonderful Andrea, thank you for sharing a good word with your daughter's friend, I do hope those students will take advantage of the deep resources on my website!
Wow, yes, good to remember. Still I find working on the psoas is just so good for people. If you enter slowly and let glide away the intestines with clients knees bent, stay on the Psoas without really heavy pushing and let the person stretch the leg along the massage bed? Or just by staying relaxed on the Psoas and wait for it to release?
To be clear Judith I am all for good psoas work and I support you in your efforts, this video was more a cautionary word for the less informed among the community who might be glad to know of what to watch out for along the way! There are indeed lots of good ways to get in there mindfully as you suggest! I appreciate your interest very much :)
Hello Gil, love your explanation. It is so clear and visually explained with passion indeed. I have a question pls. If one has had a hysterectomy, where would the Ureter connect to? Could the imbalance of the ribcage to the pelvis be the cause of incontinence? Thank you Gil
A hysterectomy, being the removal of the uterus, thankfully does not directly implicate the ureters, which empty into the bladder. As for causes of incontinence, there are many, so I hesitate to hang all of that trouble on any one thing, though numerous elements could be contributing in any particular case. Thank you for watching Theresa!
Interesting! As a former professional ballet dancer, a number of joints in my body are prone to instability - the hip being the major one. As I'm also in the later stages of menopause, I have a massive feeling of instability at the anterior aspect of both hips which has progressively gotten worse in the last nine months. No matter how much I do for strengthening the hip flexors, Glutes and lumbar extensors, the instability remains. Sitting and lying are the worst positions to be in. Can the slowing of hormone production in the ovaries result in anterior hip pain?
You did not mention the psoas minor muscle. It attaches to the anterior lateral bodies of T12 and L1 and inserts into the medial posterior body of the ramus in line with the hip socket. Primary function is to align the spine over the weight bearing leg. I have devoted much of my practice to understanding this muscle because of a teen age injury to T12/L1 spinus The Lovett action is blocked by a fixed rotation. In my case the superior portion is inhibited more on the left and the inferior on the right. I advocate indirect palpation by feeling for vertebra motion with leg flexion and extension rather than trying to palpate through the abdominal contents. Most often there are partial facilitations and inhibition of varying degrees at different levels.
Haha oh my gosh I am laughing at my obvious oversight here which you thankfully bring to the fore, I appreciate your addition here Hans! I am actually good friends with the psoas minor m. so I hope it, and you, will forgive me for the oversight here. In some recently edited footage I do give a careful accounting and dissect the psoas minor on camera, we will upload this footage to my Anatomy from A to Z courses before long! Thanks for watching and for your valuable comment Hans!
@@somanaut Thank you for all the content you have shared with various interviews as well. Though I have never had the privilege with a human body, I have decades of experience dissecting, on the homestead it is called slaughter and butcher. If you want your students to experience living tissue try a rabbit it only takes a few minutes to remove the skin and the muscles are still alive and reactive.
@@hansmassage5964 You are most welcome! And for sure, animal studies are great, I have done my fair of roadkill and also made valuable visits to the butcher shop for study, and recommend it as a way into this world as well. Thank you Hans!
"Sticky Outie Bits" and yes, "Respect for the Psoas"-thanks for these important reminders so we're not barreling into the psoas without regard for nearby structures.
I do love to use the most current technical terms haha!! Stephanie, I have been collating all of my FB posts for the past 13 years, and it was nice to see you have been with me through it all, thank you for your enduring interest and support!
@@somanaut You're very welcome. The journey I took in your class almost 25 years ago still informs me. It was life altering and one of the most sacred experiences I've ever had. I will always be grateful to you for that. Thank you. 🙏
So good. Thanks, Gil! I blame gym bro culture for all the unnecessary affront to one of the most sensitive places on the human body. We need to have a little more respect.
Awesome video! Thank you so much! But in each and every training they told us the psoas isn't linked to l5 but you said it would be... could you please explain?
In my studies I have found that the books rarely agree, and often describe tissues and their relationships differently, which can make it hard to settle on a single description of things. To be super specific, the psoas major is normally in relationship in its superficial part to the bodies of T12 through L4, while the deeper portion of it is in relationship to the transverse processes of L1 through L5. It would have been more accurate of me to say that in the video to overcome some of the confusion around that! Thank you for watching and for your valuable question!!
@@somanaut I have to thank you, you have shown me relationships in the body that have helped me complete my inner view when I am treating patients... I can't hardly wait continuing my somanaut journey...
@@somanaut Do you find psoas major attached to lumbar discs? Another insightful model-dissector (anatomist?) has told me of 70-something attachments, including discs...(but he isn't leading "guided tours" anymore, unfortunately, and I always learn so much from yours whether 'live' or via camera! How many-ish do you count, and are discs among the attachment sites?)
@@stretchingbythebay Yes, the psoas fibers are sort of variously slathered along the lateral aspect of the vertebra and also the discs. I have occasionally found fibers actually going from vertebra to vertebra, the body being less picky than the flashcards regarding where it expresses relationships. As for "counting attachments," I am not much at math haha, and would surely get it wrong if I tried to count even by any agreed upon rules, but what would count as a discrete "attachment" when a tissue grouping is expansive over a large area and numerous bony prominences would surely bewilder me. There are predictably relationships from T12 body to L5tp, superficial aspect from T12 to L4 bodies, deep aspect L1 to L5 transverse processes. Consider that a guideline, as I notice, the body cares not for our attempts to boxify and categorize its liquid fractal outpourings of shape and relationship. I really can't fathom how your mentor comes up with "70 something attachments" without parsing out individual fibers/fasciulae for the fun of it! But far be it from me to dis-count what insights he might have gleaned from this parsing :) Even if, for fun, you counted a relationship of the same fasiculae that might overlap a body and a disc as "2" "attachments, I still couldn't come up with 70 even with an accidental dose of some sensory expander to facilitate! In the A to Z project I have edited but perhaps not yet uploaded some detailed on camera dissection of the psoas and I'd say there are per side maybe 12 distinct relationships of psoas fasciulae if you count the main groupings in relationship to bone/cartilage, but as an integral anatomist I do not reduce the issue to such attaachments, or origins and insertions as detailed in another video, preferring to rather account for the textural relationships over the entire surface of the tissue, sometimes fiborous, sometimes bony, sometimes membranous, sometimes visceral, sometimes tendonous etc. Thanks for watching Diane!
So my uncle has an urge to urinate 7 times a night and they think it’s an enlarged prostrate. He had a laminectiny last year at L5…could the incontinence be linked to damage on the psos?
Hi Christina! I would very much doubt that there would be any damage to the psoas from the laminectomy, the psoas fibers do not touch the lamina of the lumbar vertebrae and the approach would have been a posterior one to accomplish that, whereas the ureter runs on the anterior aspect. There are numerous possibilities that can cause such irritation in addition to an enlarged prostate, though that surely can be the culprit. Diet choices can also be a big influence on that sense of urgency, as there may be foods which are acting as irritants, but determining which foods are irritating is a very personal one-by-one process of elimination, and there is also the general tuning of his autonomic nervous system in that area. All these things can be healed with a bit of self attention and it also helps to have the qualified body helper of your choice as a partner in the discovery process!
I always cringe when someone tells me they just got a psoas massage....deep massage.....eeeek! My teacher Frank Lowen would often find injury in the viscera and omentum from unskilled psoas massage.....eeek!!!!
@@somanaut I get it....the tougher the better mentality. Another mentor of mine...in the boating world - Martin Litton when asked about running Lava Rapid at 70+ what it took? he said skill, and the less skill you had at reading and running the river the more force you must use. (he was no big guy and outlasted most running rivers...big Colorado. I like that analogy and your work and wisdom is helping many to be more skillful and respectful to the human being for meaningful interaction and helping another. Thank you very much.
