

Bart Green, DC, MSEd, PhD
Musculoskeletal Epidemiologist, Sports Chiro
So this question is from Josh. And the question is, "What is the best way to stretch your psoas muscle?" And there's very few stretches that there is necessarily a best way when, again, when we're looking at the scientific literature. I am not even sure if there are very many, if any we call head-to-head trials that look at the best way to stretch one muscle versus another. There are probably a couple, but it's just a lot of it's preference of the person who's doing the instructing based upon what the person who needs to stretch, what their body style is like, and maybe their sport, and their activities. So I'll show you two that I like. And when we stretch a muscle, it's rarely that you're going to get one muscle at a time, and that's true as well when we're doing the psoas muscle where we're getting the hip flexors. And actually other muscles that go along with it, your diaphragm usually gets stretched out really good, you're also going to be stretching out your thoracic spine, and basically you're extending your body. So here we go. I'm going to do the first one standing. Basically, what you're going to do is you're going to put yourself in a pretty big, pretty wide lunge. And you should start to go forward on one knee, the knee and the front until you have a very mild stretch here in the front of your other hip. This is your hip flexor that's stretching it attaches on your femur, runs over your pelvis, surrounding the inside of your pelvis, and attaches to the front of your spine. And puts your arm in the air, start putting some stretching on here. And then you're going to just lean over onto your side and you're stretching out that hip flexor on this side, you're getting a little diaphragm stretching on the muscles in between your ribs. And if you take a big breath in and reach at the same time, feels super good and you're really going to get a good stretch on all that tissue. So that is one exercise that I really like. You can also do it on a gym ball. And have a look to the side so you don't fall over. Same stretch, a little more stable, reaching up and over, touching the wall. You've got 9 seconds to go, so I'll say I usually do it for 30 seconds at a time and use the deep breath. Hope that helps you with your stretching.