Experiential Psoas Test

So, this young lady might look familiar to you, Linda Baffa, who has several classes available on yoga anytime, and we're so thankful to have her join us to look at the psoas. Now it's really common, most yogis will start to think or be told that they need to stretch their psoas, stretch it, stretch it to get these kind of glorious backbend shapes that we see on Instagram or in Yoga Journal. In my estimation from what I see from my students, a lot of them already have a pretty loosey goosey psoas, and what we're really looking for is integration and some strength. Every muscle, to be a healthy balance muscle, should have both flexibility and the ability to do oomph when it wants to do oomph, right? So it's such a deep kind of mysterious muscle underneath all of the abdomen muscles, all of the organs or most of the organs that it's a little hard to suss out.

So one way that we can suss it out is something called the Thomas test, I believe named for some guy named Thomas. We'll have her come gently down onto her back, she can be careful as she does that, and then since you moved back a little bit, I'll have you do a little scooch down, yeah, graceful. So she's going to bring her right thigh into her chest just loosely holding it with her hand so her sitting bone is still kind of heavy and her pelvis stays fairly symmetrical on the mat. Then she's going to, she has nice long legs and you can already see her knee is dipping way below the table. Now in someone that has a tight psoas, they might be showing this Thomas test, their knee will be a little bit higher than the table or level with the table, but look at Linda go.

Linda is presenting a very loosey goosey psoas, which is wonderful, right, is how she's built. All right, so we could test out both sides, but what I'd like to do is then show you how we can reintegrate a loosey goosey psoas so we have a more full body experience of its actions. So I'm going to have her very carefully come up to sit, she can use her hands, a lot of belly strength, she used her belly, scoot back just so you're comfortable, a little bit forward actually, yeah. And then for this exercise, so she doesn't compensate with her arms, I'm going to have her bring her hands on top of her head, all right. So soften the ribs in, seat is level on the bed here and then she's going to breathe deeply and then on her exhalation, she's going to lift her left knee up and I want you to take a look at her pelvic bowl and the iliac crest here and then she can do it on the other side, she can inhale, place it down, she's working hard, exhale, bringing the leg up.

Psoas really kicks in after 90 degrees, otherwise the quads are helpers, right, so she's really forced to do this from her psoas muscle and then her inhale, place it down, she'll do it a couple of times and then watch if the rest of her body is compensating in that action, you see a little bit of a dip, right, one more time, good, yeah. So if you're noticing a lot of compensation, you can try it a couple of times with the hands down on the mat and soften the front ribs in, she's a rib-boinker and then she can try it a couple more times just using a little bit of support, finding on the exhale as the pelvic floor is rising, as the belly is rising naturally, she can let it help lift the leg, you can keep everything else nice and soft and love our psoas, not fight with our psoas, good, and then perhaps after a few of those she can take her hands back up to her head and test out what happened, sometimes you only need to do this four or five times before the psoas remembers it's a team player and not just leading the charge, right. The psoas, happy life.