Tight Hip Flexors-The Source of Your Back or Hip Pain?

Could your tight hip flexors be the source of your hip or back pain?

Have you ever been checked?

Your hip flexor muscle is the muscle that you use to raise your knee toward the ceiling as though you were marching. When you sit, you are putting your hip flexors on slack. The more you sit, the stiffer your hip flexors become.

The hip flexor muscle is made up of two separate muscles. One is called the iliacus muscle. The other is called the psoas muscle. The combined name is the iliopsoas muscle. Just to review some anatomy, the iliacus originates on the ilium bone and inserts on the upper femur. The psoas muscle originates on the lumbar spine and inserts at the same point as the iliacus.

ILIACUS                                                   PSOAS

When your hip flexors become stiff, they can cause a few functional problems. First, hip flexor stiffness can impair your ability to move your leg backwards into extension. This has the effect of shortening your stride and can put a lot of stress on the hip flexors. This, of course, can cause pain in the front of your hip or hip flexor (iliopsoas) tendinitis.

The second thing that can happen is the pelvis rotates forward or anteriorly. This anterior rotated position of your pelvis can increase the extension in your lumbar spine thereby causing an impingement in your lower lumbar spine…onset of low back pain.

Is there a possibility that both problems could happen simultaneously? Yes…definitely.

The more that you walk and the faster that you walk, the more likely both hip pain and low back pain will occur.

So what do you about it?

You need to come and see us so we can perform a complete bio-mechanical evaluation to determine the true SOURCE of your pain.

Here are a few short videos highlighting the way that we pre test and post test using the Thomas Test and a very effective treatment approach and exercise for tight hip flexors.