Psoas Anatomy

If you've been to a yoga class lately, chances are you heard your teacher talk about your psoas muscle, and it's mysterious to most because it's quite a deep muscle. It's actually what's called the filet mignon in a cow, again, sorry vegetarians, but this is a really deep muscle, and it's actually from my meat-eating friends I heard it's not actually a very tasty cut of meat because it's so deep, it's so muscly, it doesn't have a lot of fat on it. So this is our filet mignon, our psoas muscle, and it has in the anatomy books an origin and an insertion. It has an origin at T12 and then all of the lumbar vertebra, L1 through L5, the transverse processes and also to the discs of L1 through L5. It wraps anterior to this bowl of the pelvis, really snugly in, and then it attaches or inserts to this lesser trochanter, this little bump on the upper, upper inner thigh bone.

Now I say in the anatomy books that's what's given us the origin and insertion, but remember our bodies really aren't built that way. It's actually continuous tissue with our diaphragm, which is this prime mover of respiration. Now as the anatomy books will tell you, the psoas muscle is the prime mover of hip flexion, so it narrows the angle between the femur and the pelvis at the hip. So to stretch that muscle, we take the leg into extension or the spine into extension to move the origin and insertion away from one another. Now remember, because it is really continuous with this diaphragm, affecting the breath will have an effect on the pelvis.

It's not some far out thing your yoga teacher says. It actually is a very true scenario that having an effect on the diaphragm will have an effect on the hips, or having an effect on the hips in a yoga practice may have an effect on your breathing and on your diaphragm. Teachers really like to talk about this psoas muscle as holding a lot of fear, something I've heard a lot. I think what they might be meaning is that when we are scared, if I were to come charging at you, your body wouldn't go taking yourself into extension, making all of this vulnerable. You would move into lumbar flexion and hip flexion and protect all the goods, or you'd run away doing hip flexion, hip flexion, hip flexion to reach safety.

So this psoas is really involved in that fear response. And so it can be very vulnerable to come into extension of the spine or extension of the hips making this area vulnerable, seen, expressed. I am not of the thought that one muscle will hold one emotion. I think we're way too complex for that. But in this case, the psoas is a really beautiful, hidden, deep, and integrated muscle that in the next episode, we'll start exploring, is it tight?

Is it weak? Is it connected? We'll do some tests to see what's going on in there.