MIHP Think Tank Brainstorms… Movement Training Specialists

A confession and discovery…

Okay, I'm coming clean.  I confess. I read Men's Health Magazine.  It has been coming to our house for a while now, and being a woman, I didn't feel I should open it lest I find secrets intended solely for men.   However, since I live with four men (three of them are my sons), I thought it may enlighten me on the workings of the male psyche, and help me understand them and be a better wife and mother.  Good reasoning to me.  I was pleasantly surprised and slightly disappointed.  Although there were no "secrets", I found it to be  a very well written magazine which covers a variety of topics that  I found it very entertaining as well as interesting.

While browsing through the October 2009 issue, I came across an article titled:  Small Muscles, Big Results by Ted Spiker.  Being in the physical therapy field and specializing in human biomechanics, I was instantly intrigued.  Unless you are a clinician or personal trainer, most people have never heard of the serratus anterior, piriformis, psoas major, tensor fasciae lateae and the rotator cuff muscles supraspinatus and subscapularis. I thought, great!  An article that discusses these small, but extremely important muscles.

For the most part, the article was right on and started out great.  Then it came to the piriformis. Yes, the piriformis, which is located under the glute max and assists with rotation of the hip,  suffers from overuse when the glutes are weak. Perfect!  The next paragraph, "Test it", was completely wrong.  They say to test it, "sit on a chair and cross one leg over the other, with the crossing ankle of one leg resting on the bent knee of the other.  If you can't get your top leg parallel to the ground, your piriformis is tight."  The way they suggested testing it is actually putting it in a shortened position.  The correct way to test the piriformis is to lie on your back and bring your bent knee towards your opposite shoulder. Actually, if you flex the hip past 90 degrees, the piriformis is an internal rotator, so the way to stretch it is to pull your foot towards the opposite shoulder - like the supine figure 4 position. If you feel a stretch in the glute area pretty quickly, your piriformis is tight.  Just the opposite test of the  article.

Then "The Fix" doesn't work at all.  The stretch in the article instructs to "lie on our back with your knees bent and your feet placed wider than shoulder-width apart on the ground.  Press your knees together, and then return to the starting position."  For one thing, that exercise doesn't even touch the piriformis.  To stretch the piriformis, you must bend your hip past 90 degrees and angle your knee toward the shoulder, just like testing it. But the bigger question is, does the piriformis need to be stretched? Why is it tight to begin with? The piriformis muscle usually gets tight when the bigger external rotator of the hip, the gluteus maximus, isn't doing its job. Rather than stretching it, the best exercise is to make sure that the glute max is doing it's job which will automatically let the piriformis relax.  A good exercise for that is to stand on one leg with the knee straight, yet unlocked.  Keep the back straight as you reach with both of your hands to an object 8 - 24 inches off the ground (or however low your hamstrings will let you reach).  Return to the standing position.  You should feel this exercise in the upper back leg and the gluteal muscle.

The section about the psoas, supraspinatus and subscapularis (rotator cuff muscles) are equally contradictory, but I'll save that discussion for a later date.  Until then, I will continue to enjoy Men's Health magazine.  There's bound to be a secret in there sometime.