The sacroiliac joint, or SI joint, is a complex joint that can lead to holding you back from your goals. And it’s even harder when you look for answers, and the information you get is from sources that don’t have the full picture. Thi sis a problem because a dysfunctional SI joint will inhibit gaining strength and mobility and will cause pain and injury. So, if you’re looking for SI joint exercises, SI joint pain relief, strength, or mobility, check out this video first so you can get the deets on how to work with your SI joint.

The SI joint is not completely understood by a lot of people. You may say it’s problematic because when you want to go to work with it, you can’t work with it properly. If you can’t work with it properly, that leaves the door open to a lot of unbalancement, dysfunction, pain, immobility, all these fun things that nobody wants. So I want you to stay tuned because in this week’s video, I’m going to do a deep dive into the SI joint, but it’s going to be understandable, not too scientific. Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I own SolCore Fitness. It’s a therapy and fitness company where we work in-house here in Santa Fe, but also through our online program. I’ve been in this field for 30 years and I started as a regular trainer, but about halfway through I realized that I need to find a different way because when I got hurt, the traditional way of doing things, PT, chiro, corrective exercises didn’t produce the results that I knew I could get.

So luckily I found osteopathy and its holistic view of the body. It made total sense to me and so I dived in, I got a lot of results. So that’s what I talk about here in this channel is a holistic view on the body. Not, “I’ll give you three exercises to correct this issue,” Which doesn’t really work. So if you like this, please subscribe. If you like the video, give it a thumbs up and share with your friends. Each week I’ll put out a video so when you subscribe and hit that bell, you’ll be notified to get the new release. So when people come into my studio or I interact with them online, one of the first things I talk about or check is the SI joint. That’s because the SI joint is part of the pelvis. The pelvis, you can say, is the floor of the body or connects the upper half and lower half of your body. So that SI joint is a combination of your ilium, your hip bone, and your sacrum and the space in between. That’s your SI joint.

You have two SI joints because you have two hip bones. So if the SI joint is off, the pelvis is off, which means your whole body is off. That’s why when they come into the studio, it’s a joke with the people who do what I do, we say take off your pants. Now you don’t totally take off your pants, I don’t want to get in trouble here, we’re putting our fingers on the skin in this area right here at the SI joint in different parts and we have to do a bunch of stepping tests. We want to see how that moves. This is going to allow us to understand more about what’s going on with them because that SI joint is usually asymptomatic. They don’t know that they have an SI joint problem. They’re coming in for a shoulder issue or a knee issue or something of the sort and we go, well, let me check this first because if I go directly to the shoulder or the knee, in this example, and I don’t check the floor of the body, I can correct those all I want, the floor is off, the body’s off.

The SI joint is a total joint. By total joint I mean that it has a capsule around it. It has synovial liquid. Synovial liquid helps bring nutrition into that area and do a bunch of good things. It has little Proprioceptors, little computers within it, to communicate to the rest of the body about what’s going on within that joint. There’s ligaments in front and behind that, your sacroiliac ligaments in front or behind, that also have computers in them, that also help to communicate to the rest of your body to help manage that joint. There’s muscles involved in that joint that help stabilize and move that joint, either directly or indirectly, namely the piriformis, the glute max deep, the glute mead, the glute max superficial, and then the obturatorius and iliopsoas for the fascial connections. The SI joint has a lot of different areas within it that are important to know because if you want to be specific with how you want to work with it, you need to know these areas.

So in this SI joint, you have different lesser arm and greater arm and apex and base. The SI joint looks like a boomerang, okay? So in that boomerang, there’s a top part of my body, there’s a bottom part of my body. The top part is your lesser arm, the bottom part is your greater arm. So you have two of these and then within these arms, you have an apex, a base, a base, and an apex, and then right in middle, you have an ismus, means middle. So you have that on both sides. You also have a bunch of different movements the SI joint can make. The only physiological movement it can make is called an oblique axis. Oblique axis means here’s my hip bone, here’s my sacrum. If the sacrum moves forward, the hip goes forward and a little back, it goes back, it does the opposite. It does that on both sides. That’s what happens when you walk around and move, okay? So that happens normally if you don’t have any issues.

If you have issues, you have 20 more pathological axis that can happen, and then you have a bunch of combination of these pathological axis and more stuff to equal… A lot of stuff that can go wrong with your SI joint. So again, it’s important to know all that because you’re not testing all of them at once, but you want to understand that there could be many different reasons why you have an SI joint problem, not one or two. So you can’t tell me it’s not a complete joint. I say that because there’s a lot of practitioners out there who think that it’s not a total joint, that it’s fused or that the actions it has are more basic and not as intricate as they’re going to go into here in a little bit. It’s just problematic because if you go to one of these people and they don’t know all this information, then they’re either going to give you something simplistic expecting a result for a complex situation or just ignore it all together because they say it’s not there and your body doesn’t use it at all.

As I said before, the SI joint, an SI joint issue, could be asymptomatic, but it could still be a symptom of what’s going on. I’ll use me for example, and I’ve said this before but I’ll repeat it here. So I got L four or five compression, disc bulge and sciatic pain. I had no idea I had an SI joint issue, which was in combination with other things, because of that problem. But because my SI was off, my spine couldn’t sit in a good place and couldn’t operate from a good place, which then caused me to have, again with other things, to cause to have that issue. But I didn’t know what an SI joint was back then. I didn’t really know what it was and how it moved. And then all the practitioners I worked with afterwards, chiros, doctors, acupuncturists, PTs, they had little or no knowledge of the SI joint, which means they couldn’t really help me to get better. An SI joint issue could lead to a false short or long leg, it could lead to pelvic imbalancements, it could lead to tight muscles in the front or back of your hip and leg, it could lead to pelvic visceral problems.

Your issues don’t have to be orthopedic, it could be visceral. It can lead to hip pain on the inside or outside, it could also lead to pain away from the pelvic area. It could be knee pain, it could be upper thoracic or shoulder pain. Again, if the floor of your body is off, just think about the floor in your house, wherever, if that floor is off and dysfunctional, then everything associated with that floor, in this case above and below, it’s also out of balance and dysfunctional. Are you working through SI joint issues or after hearing me now, do you think you also need to incorporate some SI joint work into what you’re doing? Well, let me know what you’re doing. Put it in the description below. And then stay tuned, we’re going to talk about how I would work through the SI joint issues. For the first step in figuring out your SI joint issues is to have an assessment. I know that sounds basic, but you need to assess where in the SI you have issues. You can’t just say SI joint issues and then do some basic protocol.

People think, “Oh, I’ve got SI joint issues.” They type it into YouTube and all of sudden they get a bunch of videos saying, “Hey, do these three moves or this one move to get rid of your SI joint issues.” One, at best, it’s not specific enough, it won’t give you lasting results. At worse, it can make matters worse. So within the SI joint, like I talked about, there’s different areas. Again, you have a lesser arm and greater arm. Is your issue coming from the apex of the lesser arm, the base of the lesser arm, the ismus, the base of the greater arm, the apex of the greater arm or, more than likely, is there a combination of these and the other pathologies, the 20 pathologies that I talked about? First find that out or start where you think mainly it’s coming from because you’ll never be a hundred percent correct at the beginning, but you’ll get an idea of which way to go down. And then you train and treat that area specifically.

So whenever you have a dysfunction in your body, something goes out of place, then the area around it, namely your soft tissue, becomes dysfunctional. So I have an issue with my SI joint and then the ligaments around that area become confused. They start to have different information or bad information or no information because they get shut off, they become dry or too tight or too loose and then the muscles associated with that area also become too short or too weak or too less mobile because the muscles are told to do, by the fascia, because the ligaments are also the part of fascia, so they go with the fascia tells them. So you have to start working with those different areas. For me, I would start working with the ligaments first because the ligaments are the intelligent part of the body. They tell the body what’s going on. So I work with techniques that I would use like double TLS, which means I’m going to turn a ligament on, I’m going to wake it back up.

I’m going to use pumping to increase that flow of fascial liquid through those collagen tubes again because when I hurt myself, I stopped the flow of liquid, which means I stopped the flow of information, healing and waste removal. They’re going to work with the different fascial connections with fascial normalization because, again, it’s not just the area working, it’s the fascial chain that’s also being compromised, so I do fascial normalization and I take that exact same concept into the exercises I use. So again, with those exercises I said before, piriformis, the glute max, deep and superficial, the obturatorius, the iliopsoas, what am I forgetting? Did I say piriformis? I forgot what I said. But all those muscles I said I’m going to work not with just the muscle, but with the myofascial chain that’s involved because the body’s built holistically. Everything has a place, everything has a job, they all work together. So it’s not just about the issue I have with my SI joint or the surrounding areas, it’s about the chain that’s involved.

So I’m going to work within that chain, therapy wise, but then also exercise wise while I strengthen and while I stretch altogether. Everything combined, holistic. If you want to find out more on how to work with your body holistically because you now understand that that’s the most advantageous to work with it, because that’s how it’s built, then I’d love to help you. You can join my private Facebook group. So in the description below, there’s a link for it. It’s an interactive way to find out more. So you just click on that link, you answer a few questions, you agree to the terms, voila, you’re in. You can interact with me, you can take part in challenges where we take a topic, say SI joint and I talk about it, but also show you exercises you can do for it, you can participate in masterclasses where I’ll talk more in depth about whatever topic comes up or I just do little mini trains, like a little one, two minute, three little minute videos to let you know more about different topics that have come up in the group.

Or you can get my free ebook if you don’t want to be interactive. So in the description below, again, just click on it, put in your information, get instant access. It’s how to get strong and mobile and live your best life, those four steps. In there, I’ll talk more about what those four steps are and I’ll just start to work with it. And if you want to start now, then interact with me, schedule a consultation with me, use the link in description below to set up a time to talk with me personally where I can talk you through what you’ve been doing, your sticking point where I see you should go and only if I see you’re a good fit will I offer my services to you, either here in-house or with my online program. But I hope this allowed you to see a little bigger view of how you should be working with the body. Please stay tuned for next week. We’ll talk more about some holistic fashion and have a great day.

SI joint is not completely understood by a lot of people. And this may seem problematic because when you want to go to work with it, you can’t work with it properly. If you can’t work with it properly, that leaves the door open to a lot of unbalancement, dysfunction, pain, immobility, all these fun things that nobody wants. So I want you to stay tuned because in this week’s video, I’m going to do a deep dive into the SI joint, but it’s going to be understandable, not too scientific. So you can’t tell me it’s not a complete joint. I say that because there’s a lot of practitioners out there who think that it’s not a total joint, that it’s fused. This is problematic because if you go to one of these people and they don’t know all this information, then they’re either going to give you something simplistic expecting a result for a complex situation or just ignore it altogether because they say it’s not there and your body doesn’t use it at all.

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It’s so easy in our busy world to constantly be thinking about something other than what you’re doing.

To distract yourself with social media or news stories.

To text a friend instead of talking with the person in front of you.

To worry about tomorrow, or that time last week when you did or didn’t do that thing…

It’s all part of the emotional disjointedness of modern living. But when you’re not mentally present in each moment of your life, when your bodies are here but your thoughts are anywhere else, then you’re missing your true potential.

➡️ 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱, 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿, 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗴𝘂𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲.

➡️ 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗲𝗻𝗷𝗼𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗴𝗶𝗳𝘁𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂.

➡️ 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴.

If you realize that you only get today – that yesterday’s gone and tomorrow isn’t promised – then you can try to focus even more narrowly on each present moment. Here are some ways to do it.

✅ 𝑩𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒆: Nothing brings you back to the here and now like closing your eyes and taking three deep breaths. You don’t have to stop at three.

✅ 𝑮𝒐 𝒅𝒆𝒆𝒑𝒆𝒓. You can meditate, use an app to help you focus, or practice yoga.

✅ 𝑼𝒏𝒑𝒍𝒖𝒈 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒔𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒂. Nothing takes you OUT of the here and now as quickly. Plan times each day to catch up and scroll. Set notifications for anything that’s important. Otherwise, forget it.

✅ 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒘𝒔, 𝒕𝒐𝒐. The advent of 24/7 news makes you anxious that you’re missing out on something important. Or that everything’s going to come falling on your head. Like social media, the news business benefits from your continued watching. You do not.

✅ 𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒈𝒖𝒍𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒚. And purposefully move on those days when you’re not actually exercising. A 15-minute walk on your break can clear your mind and bring you back to the present.

✅ 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒆 𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒆. Write in your journal each day a few things for which you are thankful. Express gratitude every day in some way large or small. Smile at someone; everybody needs that.

✅ 𝑺𝒆𝒕 𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒂𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒌. That might mean pausing between tasks, turning off your phone at night, or declining to take on more than makes you comfortable. 

✅ 𝑭𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒎𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒊-𝒕𝒂𝒔𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈. Some people insist it’s the way to go, but it can also keep you from doing your best on the task at hand.

✅ 𝑭𝒐𝒄𝒖𝒔 𝒐𝒏 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖. What do you see? What do you smell? Do you taste anything? Is your mouth moist? Are your feet touching the ground?

Some people say they get frustrated with these kinds of focus techniques because it’s hard to STAY focused. And they’re right. In fact, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to stay focused. Our minds are always wandering – and that’s OK. Don’t fight it or get distressed.

Just do what you can to bring yourself back to right here, right now. Over and over. It’s an endless task, and there’s something profound and reassuring in that, since the next moment inevitably replaces this one. This is an exercise to stay present in your life. And like all practices, it takes time, but it also gets easier to do as you go along.

Just breathe. Take it easy. And pay attention. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.

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The key to transforming your life is to make conscious choices. These conscious choices help you manage stress and lead a better life. Check out this video on some great tips and reasons why and how to take your life head-on.

it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.

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Anterior pelvic tilt, or duck butt, is a postural problem that can lead to a lot of physiological issues, especially in your lower back. Anterior pelvic tilt disorders require understanding why you have the anterior pelvic tilt and corrective exercises for anterior pelvic tilt. Tune in to find out both.

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Anterior pelvic tilt, otherwise known as duck butt. Now as funny as that may be, the anterior pelvic tilt is actually not funny. It’s a pathological posture problem that can lead to a lot of issues. So if you’re interested in finding out more or you have an anterior pelvic tilt, they want to see what can happen with one and how to get out of one. Then stay tuned. How you doing? I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m a Soma therapist and a Soma trainer, and I’ve been in this field for almost 30 years and I had an interior pelvic tilt and it was one of the main causes as to why I got an L 4 L 5 disc bulge and sciatic pain on my left side. But nowhere along the process with the trainers and athletic trainers before the injury or the doctors and therapists after the injury, did anybody bring up that?

That’s the reason why I had it. That’s because all these people are symptom-based professions. They want to cure a symptom, not the cause. The cause. One of the causes was the anterior pilic tilt. I was even taught to squat by sticking my butt out and looking up to keep myself nice and tall. I was taught that it’s totally stupid. So I want to talk about this topic and more in a holistic fashion because it’s not just about the symptom or the one little goal you have, it’s about holistic the cause. What contributes to all the things that you want to accomplish in your life. So if you want to hear more, subscribe, if you’d like the video, give me a thumbs up and share with your friends. An anterior pelvic tilt is when your pelvis tilts forward more than normal and stays there. So your pelvis is naturally tilts forward, kind of dally forward and down.

Normally an anterior pillow tilt is if it gets pulled too far forward and can’t pull back, back to normal. The most stable position we have for our pelvis is quaded hands and knees on all fours. But since we have to be biped walk around our feet that a pelvis is always going to be in that slightly tilted forward position and even without an anterior pivot tilt, the forces for my body ascending, descending and intrinsic forces accumulate more down toward the lower back top of the pelvis. It isn’t bad if everything’s in place doing a job. It’s bad if it becomes pathological like an anterior pelvic tilt. Our body was designed to allow forces to attenuate, to disperse as we move around in life. So when we’re walking, taking steps or reaching over to grab something or the forces from gravity come down to us where somebody bumps into us, those forces that happen whenever we do things should move through our body in a pretty fluid way.

It’s called tensegerity. Tensegerity is by Buckminster Fuller who is an architect. And then a bunch of really smart people saw that tensegerity was also the body and they said, okay, this is biotensegerity. So that’s what we are. So that allows us to disperse the forces properly. You can see here in this shot that tensegeruity has a bunch of wonderful things that it can accomplish. It’s very effective structure to use, not in our body but also in architecture. But the main one I want to talk about here, which applies to this video is that the load produced on the structure is distributed throughout the structure. A tensegerity structure. Our body will continue to function even if part of this structure becomes compromised. So I can have one little part of my soft tissue become tight, weak, or stupid, and my body will continue to move.

It’s called compensation at the beginning. Compensation’s not a bad thing. It allows our whole body to continue to move. When one part’s not taken away, we we’re not a Christmas tree light. We don’t take one out and all thing shuts down. We can still move. So that’s great, but it’s not great because you continue to move so you think, eh, nothing’s wrong, but it is right. And now over time that compensation accumulates then activates another area to go down, then another area, then another area you’ll keep moving, but eventually the accumulation of compensations will become pathological and permanent. Let’s take a beat here so you can digest all the information I gave you and check in. Do you have anterior perfect tilt and if so, what are you doing for it? Just let me know in the comments. Now I want you to stay tuned because if you’re not doing anything for it, I want to let you know what could possibly happen and then let you know what you could do to get yourself out.

An anterior pelvic tilt in general is caused when the muscles in front of the pelvis, the cell as and all its hip flexor friends pull the hips, the ileum too far forward in conjunction the muscles in the back, the glute max, your back muscles, your hamstrings are either too weak or too tight or combination two that caused your pelvis to move forward. It’s generally caused, it’s generally a progressive thing, excuse me, and it’s caused by sitting down too much and not doing anything about it and a bad structure and gravity line, meaning you can’t hold yourself in place in your four degree cone. And generally if you lead too far forward it starts to cause that. But there’s also a genetic component. Some people are born with their butt sticking out more just in general. Well now for you it is not going to be a slow progressive thing.

It’s going to go quicker because you’re already going in that direction just from birth. You have like a genetic thing. So you have to have more intention placed to not go really pathological. So if you end up in this anterior, if it tilt whether they’re fast or slow, you can put yourself in a bad position. So now those forces I talked that should go through your body attenuate. Nice thing. They start to accumulate more at that area, namely the lower back and SI joint and pelvic area and hip area. They start to go there and they start to produce more force and stay, which means you lead to a bunch of bad things. I’ll give an example. So if I have that interior pelvic tilt and my pelvis is tilting forward while on the top of my pelvis connected to my sacrum, which is part of the pelvis is L5.

L5 stands for lumbar fifth. The lumbar is your part of your spine. So I’ve taken that part of my spine and it goes forward. Now, when it goes forward more, right, it’s going forward more than normal. That means it’s out of place. But because L 4 is above it, then L3, then L 2 and L1, they also go with it. But then because your body doesn’t want to fall down, they overcorrect themselves by coming backwards. Now you have lordosis. So lordotic curve means you have a good lower back. Lordosis means it’s a pathology. Now you have, well now you should have had a bunch of nice spaces between your joints. Now you don’t. They should have been sitting on each other a certain direction, but now they’re not. That’s going to leave the door open for stuff like a disc bulge, a herniation, a prolapse, some arthritis at the joint or in your facet joints, stenosis, what else?

Fun things. More fun things relate to your spine because you have an anterior pelvic tilt and because you’ve taught your body to do that, because you’re either teaching yourself consciously or subconscious or unconsciously, you’ve taught it unconsciously to be that position, it’s still learned to stay there. Now all those tendons, ligaments, muscles, they’ve been taught to do bad things. So now they’re having bad education and they’re going to keep doing that bad education unless you retrain it to do something different. It’s imperative that you train the muscles and the tendons and ligaments. It’s imperative that you tell ’em to do something different because the structure of our body dictates how well you function. Function obviously means how well you move around in space, but it also mean a lot more. So with this anterior pivot tilt, you can also end up with hip problems. You can end up with visceral problems in your pelvis. You can have problems having intercourse, voiding your system, a bunch of urethra type stuff. All that is within your pelvis. And if I put my pelvis out of place, who knows what’s going to happen. It depends on your weakest link. Probably better idea not to wait to see what happens if it’s out of place. Probably better to start training that system to go away. So what do you do? Well, keep it basic. If

Those in the front of the pelvis are too tight, you stretch ’em. If the muscles in the back are too weak and too tight, you strengthen and stretch ’em. But you don’t just do it with the muscle. Your body doesn’t work as a collection of muscles just operating independently. They operate together via the fascia that connects all of our body. So we train something. So let’s say I want to stretch my SOAs. I want to stretch my SOAs because it’s part of my hip flexor complex that also attaches to leg into my spine. Very important muscle. I’m going to have a video on it. I think last week I did very important muscle. So I’m going to stretch that SOAs. I’m going to stretch it to elongate it, but I also want to stretch it with all the fascia connections. If I just work in that muscle and I don’t work in the fascia, it might feel good, but then the next day your body goes back to the same position.

It was because you haven’t trained the fascia, which is part of the intelligent part of the body to do something different. So you have to stretch the SOAs and all the hip flexors and maybe even strengthen ’em. Maybe they’re weak. You have to strengthen fascially those back posterior muscles and then stretch those back muscles. Fascially. It’s impaired that you do this in a holistic manner. If your body functions as one, you need to train it as one. The best techniques I’ve found so far are osteopathic etiology exercises, right? So they take the segmental muscle, say the SOAs, they go, okay, I’m going to train or stretch the SOAs. But they also think, okay, it’s attached these things. So there’s a posture for each position to make sure that it’s working. The muscle and the chain by far so far in my 30 years the best.

So if you are in your twenties or thirties, I implore you to start something like this. Now, I wish I had done this back in the day. I had to wait until I got hurt, until I found something like this. Had I done this back in the day, like I hope you do. And I continued to function at my highest level while preventing myself from getting injuries. You see, when you do this type of program, you keep your structure in place, which means you prevent injuries, but you also increase productivity, which means you can work harder, you can lift more, run faster, do jumpy jacks, whatever, flips more. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, ski better. You can do it better and more effectively because it’s structure. Your body is more aware, it’s more balanced, it’s stronger, it’s more flexible. Everything’s working as one’s very, very effective. If you haven’t done this in your forties, fifties, maybe sixties, even seventies, and you have a pathology and anterior pivotal tilt in this case, then this needs to be your main program because until you bring that back into place, you’re compromising your body because we’re only as strong as our weakest link and relative to this

Video, the anterior pelvic tilt is the weakest link and whatever happens from that. So exercise is the number one way to do this. Not general exercise, not going to whatever, whatever. And just doing basic squats and pull-ups and pushups and or yoga and Pilates is specific exercises that can be used in conjunction with whatever program you want. So the best exercise I’ve found, like I said, are osteopathic type exercises. If you want to learn more, then I’d be happy to help. You can join my private Facebook group. You just click on the link in description, answer some information, agree to the rules and you’re in. And now even an interactive way to interact with me to ask questions, to see my little mini trainings, masterclasses, my big trainings where you participate with me in theory and also in exercises. Great way to do that or I have a free ebook is how to Get out of Paying, get Mobile and Live the Life of Your Dreams.

There’s four steps to that. Again, in description, just click on it, put in your information, you get instant access, or you can reach out to me personally by using the description. I always do that by using the link in the description that goes to my calendar link. You can choose a time that works for you and we can talk. So I hope this is helpful. Again, if you like this, please give it a thumbs up. It tells YouTube that it’s good and lets other people see it, and then also share it. And don’t forget to subscribe. Take care.

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The iliopsoas muscle, or psoas, is a really important muscle that can also cause a lot of problems. Illipsosas can cause bursitis pain, hip pain, pelvic dysfunction and low back pain. And just looking up iliopsoas stretches or iliopsoas strengthening exercises wont give you the full view of what to do. So tune in to learn more about the iliopsoas muscle and how best to work with it.

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Is your iliopsoas, or some people just call it the psoas, tight or weak and causing you issues? Chances are, if it is, what’s traditionally given to people and what you find on the internet, which is basically the same thing, is not the most effective. I want you to stay tuned because the psoas, iliopsoas is much more complex than you think, and so a lot more can be done to it than what’s traditionally given to you. Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness and I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, and I’ve been in this field for about 30 years.

Within that 30 years, like 17, 18 of them, I’ve been studying underneath the osteopathic model. Once I started to study under this model, I realized there’s much more to the body than what’s traditionally being shown to people. There’s a lot more different directions the muscles go, a lot more connections that we’ve ever seen, which means there’s a lot more ways to work with the body. It’s called holistic. Everything is interdependent and interconnected. We want to think about how the body functions so we can train it and treat it best. That’s what I talk about it in this channel, holistic. If you want to hear more about this, then subscribe to the channel. If you like this video, please give a thumbs up. It tells the algorithm that it’s good so more people can get benefit to watch it and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

The psoas muscle is actually called the iliopsoas muscle. Iliac is a part of it. There’s a bunch of different attachments, not just from your hip into your spine, there’s a lot more. You have a psoas part which is attached to three places. You have your lesser trochanter, and then you have at the middle of the spine at the body we say anterior medial, anterior meaning front medial means middle, and then you have the posterior meaning back and lateral to the side. That’s three. Then you have an iliac portion, which is in the hip. You have a minor part toward the down low and a major part up high, and then you have a little tiny muscle or even there’s a ligament called your psoas minor.

So you can see there’s a lot of different places that you can work with and the psoas has a lot of different jobs. Those jobs need to be performed properly. It can’t be performed properly if it’s tight or weak. So you may have things like an overarching of the back. You may have also your pelvis moving forward. You may have compression of your spine. You may have your hip moving in bad place like external or internal rotation. It could throw off a lot of things. In the osteopathic model, we say the psoas is a true tensegrity muscle because it connects the leg, the hip, and the spine. It connects all three. That’s why it’s super important. Now, when you search around for the psoas, you find more basic information anatomically and you may find some interesting information about spirit and stuff. I can’t talk about that. I’ve never studied about it. I guess it’s true.

I’m here to talk about more of the physiological components of the psoas. It’s really good to know the different places the psoas goes just like every muscle, they go a lot more places than people really think, because if I know which way muscle goes, I know which way I can strengthen it or stretch it because I want to see where the fibers go. Okay, the fibers go here. Whether I can go this way to strengthen it, I can move away from it to stretch it at a basic level. If it has these different attachments, then you need to think about the different places it attaches to and the different ways that the muscle fibers go.

But it’s more important to think about the muscle in terms of Hill’s Muscle Model. Hill’s Muscle Model says you need three components. You need the muscle, you need the fascia, you need the ligament or joint. You need these three aspects to work properly so it functions properly. It’s not just about working the muscle. In all muscles you have an epimysium, a perimysium, and an endomysium. Those are fancy names for fascia that goes between the muscle fibers and muscles. Those muscle fibers and muscle fascia go out toward the outside and connect to the muscle ligament. That ligament generally connects to a bone, but it’s not the bone, it’s the periosteum. Again, another fancy name for the fascia that surrounds the bone, which means if those layers of fascia go out to ligaments, which connect to the fascia and the bone, that means it connects everywhere, and that’s what your fascia does. It connects everywhere. Like you have one fascia that connects a thousand different places like a spiderweb.

When you think about the psoas, you think, oh, well, if it connects in that chain, then that chain must be down to the leg, up to the pelvis, and up to the spine because those are the three components of the psoas. The fascia iliaca, again, another fancy name for fascia, that surrounds all that connects to a lot more. Most importantly, it can connect to pelvic fascia. If you have a tight muscle, a tight psoas, you can have pelvic issues. It connects to the spine, but also connects to very importantly all the internal organs [inaudible 00:05:23], which means, again, if you have a tight or weak psoas, yes you have a tight, weak psoas, but you can also have some visceral problems. That’s the most important part and that’s the way to view this holistically.

Are you struggling with psoas or iliopsoas issues? Well, what are you doing? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to have a conversation with you and I want you to stay tuned and I’ll go through what people traditionally do for the psoas and what I feel is a little more important to do. A big thing people do is when they have psoas issues is they think they have to go straight to stretching, that’s not totally true and I’m going to get to that in a minute. They think that because it feels tight and it could be, but it could also be weak. If you look on the interweb, the big thing you see for the psoas is this posture, and you see it in physical therapy and you also see it in yoga. I’m not quite sure why you see it in both places, they’re two different aspects, but it’s the same thing. They’ll kneel, they put their hand here, they arch their back and they slide forward because they think, “Oh, I’m just stretching my psoas, this part.”

That’s from that basic anatomy and basic biomechanics, basic, right here. It doesn’t attach here as we went through before. They attach to all those different places and it has all different things you need to do. When you do this position it doesn’t take into consideration a lot of different things. First and foremost, one of the psoas’ jobs is to externally rotate the leg. If I want to strengthen something, I go in the action. I’ll go in external rotation. If I want to stretch it, I’m going to go opposite, which is internal rotation. In this posture you can see the foot’s right behind the butt. That’s neutral. I have to go, my foot wide, so my leg internally rotates. That’s the first issue, just basic issue.

The second issue is they’re arching our back and sliding forward well. The psoas again, part of its normal position, if it’s not pathological, is to keep a nice lordotic lumbar curve. Well, now that’s an action. Now I’m enhancing the action as I kneel and go forward so I’m not doing the opposite action. I’m doing the action and more into it. First I’m not stretching it, I’m sliding forward and I’m not doing it. I would need to tuck my pelvis and flatten my back and get tall because again, the so job is to stick your butt out. An opposite would be to tuck your butt. The psoas’ job then also is to keep your spine pulled together, co-optation, so I want to get tall. Those are some basic reasons why this stretch does not work.

Some issues I have with that is that a lot of people have spinal problems, and so if I’m sliding forward like that one, I’m not doing anything for my psoas properly. Two, I’m compressing my spine more as I go back. If I have a disc herniation, that herniation can go, well, it normally goes for a lot of people backing out posterolateral, but because it’s a ball, because I have pressure on a ball, it’s called Pascal’s Law, that pressure can go omnidirectional, which means I kneel and slide forward that pressure could also go forward. It’s a potential. So that’s one issue I have with that.

The main issue though is that it’s not done fascially. Again, you just think about the muscle in a basic position, which means I want to make sure that I stretch fascially. To do so I need to make sure that I have those opposite biomechanical actions. I talked about, internal rotation of the hip, pelvis tucked nice and tall. But I also want to think about, oh, it’s connected to the rest of my body so you need to know about the biomechanics fascially of the body and do stuff to put tension throughout the chain of the body to stretch not only the psoas but the iliopsoas. Then you think about what different directions do I need to move my trunk and pelvis or leg or whatever to get those different attachments of the psoas? Because, again, if there’s all those different attachments, you can stretch them differently, not just one way.

If I want to start working the SOAs more holistically with all the different factors it needs, then first what we talk about is we literally stretch the iliopsoas in all different directions myofascially. That’s the best way I’ve found to normalizing the lengthening and the balance in the body. We also normalize the fascia by itself. You can do that by getting treated. You find a therapist like myself who knows how to work with the fascia and understands that that fascia iliaca has a normal amount of torsion twisting, but if it’s twisted too much like a towel, then I can’t pull it apart. Grab a towel and twist it as hard as you can and try and pull it. It doesn’t move. Untwist it, say halfway and pull, you can see it moves a little bit. That’s the same idea because again, that fascia envelops the muscle and goes within the muscle. If it’s too twisted, it won’t work properly. First I normalize the fascia.

Then also I think about Hill’s Muscle Model, and I think, oh, look, I need to strengthen the psoas so I have a muscle. You can only stretch a muscle if it’s there. I want to strengthen the psoas again in different directions, not just one way. Now I’m working with the psoas in all these different directions, now you’re working holistically, and now you think about the other areas the psoas is attached to and stretch those. Not the areas of the endpoint to the psoas, but if it attaches to the spine, okay, if you attaches to the spine, what else is there? My transverse spinalis, my longissimus, my iliocostalis, my lat, stuff like that. You work out because muscles don’t work alone. They work in conjunction with other muscles and other fascia. You build out a program to not only work with what you need to work with, but everything around it that can help it work.

I want to leave you with something to help you out. As we know, the psoas has a bunch of different attachments, connects fascially, a bunch of different ways you need to strengthen it and stretch it. I’m going to give you one little nugget here. Myofascial stretching is fantastic for balancing your body, but the one thing that I like better to lengthen the muscle is to do postural stretching. Postural stretching is to get into a posture and hang out, to not be active. With the psoas, you can do that. Again, do you do this? If you feel you’re comfortable with it, I’m not prescribing it to you at all, but you’re going to sit on something, as you can see in this little video I’m going to show you, on the edge of a bench or your bed or a treatment table like I’m doing, and you would lean back.

Now, when you lean back, you pick one side to work with, and so you hold the opposite knee and let that other knee drop down. Then you just hang out there because a postural stretch. There’s no activity besides get into a posture and hanging out. Allow that to hang as long as you want and then switch sides and do the other side. If you have a predominantly tight side, do that one first. Allow yourself to sit in this position for as long as you can handle it on that side. When you’re done, you gently switch by bringing that leg up and switch in a hold of the knee, and then you do the other side. Do that and have good luck.

That’s just a little bit of information on how to think about working with the psoas, but also the body differently. I could go on a lot longer about all this, about different biomechanics and ways of move and stuff like that, but this is not a lecture. This is to help you understand more about the work with it. If you want to understand more, then I got some resources for you. You can join my private Facebook group. In the description below there’s a link. Just click on the link, answer a few questions, agree to the terms and you’re in. It’s a dynamic, interactive way to work with me to find out more about how to work with your body holistically.

Or, if you want to find out more about all these different rules and ways to address a body that I’ve been talking about in this video, then have a free resource. It’s called To Get Mobile, Get Out of Pain, and Live the Life of Your Dreams. It’s four steps, but it talks about these different rules and the way things are connected and how to think about the body so you get a better view of what I’m talking about. Not a total view, but a better view. Then you can reread it again so you can get more and more knowledge. If you like what you heard and you want to work with your body this way, then reach out for a consultation. In the description below, you’ll find a link for the consultation. You click on it, you’ll be taken to my Calendly link. You find time that’s good for you, you pick it and we meet and talk.

I hope this is informational. If you like this information, I’ll make more videos on the psoas about this. Please give it a thumbs up if you like it and share it with your friends and I’ll see you next week.

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