Full-Body Patterns of Tension That Involve the Iliopsoas

As I mentioned in my first article about the iliopsoas, it’s important to understand that chronic tension in a single muscle is never the sole cause of a painful condition, habitual posture, or movement limitation.

Every posture we adopt and movement we make involves many muscles throughout the body working together. So, every pattern of tension that we develop involves chronic tension in muscles throughout the body. We must work with releasing and changing the entire pattern of tension in order to relieve chronic pain and change habitual posture and movement.

So, while we teach a highly effective Iliopsoas Release exercise in Clinical Somatics, we still always work with the entire full-body pattern of tension. Your full-body pattern of tension may be keeping your iliopsoas stuck in a shortened state. No matter how much time and focus you spend on releasing your iliopsoas, if other tight muscles are keeping your iliopsoas stuck in a shortened state, it will not be able to fully lengthen until you release and retrain the entire pattern of tension.

The iliopsoas, which is how we refer to the iliacus and psoas muscle as they work together, is a major hip flexor. This means that it brings the knee in closer to the abdomen and chest, decreasing the angle at the front of your hip. The iliopsoas performs other actions as well, which I discussed in my previous post and will discuss in this article as well.

Due to its location deep within the core of our body, the iliopsoas is involved in all muscular patterns that involve the lumbar spine and pelvis. In this article, I discuss the three most common full-body postural patterns of tension that involve the iliopsoas, and list the exercises that are most helpful for releasing the muscles involved in these patterns.

Tension in the iliopsoas is at the core of all three patterns, helping to keep you stuck in that pattern. But, which pattern you adopt is largely determined by the other muscles involved—not by the iliopsoas itself!

In addition to the three main postural patterns described in this article, the iliopsoas is chronically tight in pelvic torsion and pelvic rotation. Those patterns of pelvic misalignment can be present along with any of the three postures described below.

How the iliopsoas is involved in Action Response posture

The action response describes a postural reflex that occurs automatically every time we want to get up and go. We arch our back, lift our head, pull our shoulders back, stick out our chests, straighten our knees, and rotate our legs outward.

Our action response is also triggered by eustress, or positive stress, such as giving a presentation or meeting our new boss. Whenever we want to make a good impression and be on our game, we instinctively contract the extensor muscles of our back so that we stand up straight, look taller, and appear to be confident. This posture prepares us both physically and psychologically for action.

If you tend toward action response posture, your pelvis is likely tilted forward, or anteriorly, as shown in the photos below. This creates an exaggerated arch in the lower back, referred to as hyperlordosis.

You may initially adopt this posture as a result of positive stress, athletic training, or a repetitive activity. Then over time, as your pelvis is held in anterior tilt, the iliopsoas will gradually become tighter as a result of being held in a shortened state. Once the iliopsoas is tight, it can help to keep you stuck in this posture.

The reverse can occur as well. Your iliopsoas may become tight as a result of repeated hip flexion, such as occurs with running, kicking, or even sitting down for long periods of time. If you have chronic tension in your hip flexors and you’re standing upright, your nervous system has two options to allow your hip flexors to stay in a shortened state:

1. It can allow the pelvis to tip forward, as occurs in action response posture.

2. It can allow the pelvis to stay upright or even tilted backward, but must flex (bend) the knees in order to allow the hips to flex. We’ll talk about this posture in the next section.

I have seen this referred to as the “psoas paradox.” Chronic tension in the iliopsoas can cause either hyperlordosis or hip flexion depending on the person’s full-body postural tendencies and the position of the body relative to gravity (standing vs. sitting vs. lying down).

Lastly, the iliopsoas laterally rotates the hips. This means that it rotates the legs so that the feet point outward like a ballet dancer. External hip rotation tends to occur along with the arching of the lumbar spine in action response posture.

So, in order to allow the iliopsoas to fully lengthen, we need to not only pandiculate the iliopsoas itself, but also the entire pattern of tension that’s keeping the pelvis stuck in a shortened state: the action response posture, in which the pelvis is tilted forward and the hips are rotated outward.

The tabs below list exercises that address the full-body pattern of tension that causes action response posture. After becoming comfortable with each individual exercise (by learning them in the Level One & Two Courses), you can start by practicing the short daily series, then rotate the additional exercises through your daily routine in a way that works for you.

How the iliopsoas is involved in Withdrawal Response posture

The withdrawal response is an innate reaction to fear or negative stress. We instinctively pull our extremities inward and bring our body into a crouched or fetal position, protecting the most vulnerable parts of our body from attack. Our abdominal muscles contract; our hips, knees, and ankles flex; our inner thigh muscles and hamstrings tighten; our elbows bend and our arms rotate inward.

For those of us living in industrialized societies in which our lives are not being threatened on a regular basis, the withdrawal response does more harm than good. The never-ending demands of work, family life, financial responsibilities, and social expectations are constantly present in our minds, and we perceive these stressors to be life-threatening. When we experience these types of chronic psychological stress our withdrawal response is constantly activated, contracting our abdominal muscles and bringing us into the rounded posture we associate with aging.

In addition to stress, spending long hours sitting at a computer or driving can cause us to become stuck in withdrawal response posture. So can chronic fatigue, being very tall, feeling cold on a regular basis, or having an abdominal injury or surgery.

In withdrawal response posture, the pelvis can be upright or tilted backward, as shown in the illustration of the man on the left in the image below. In withdrawal response posture, if the pelvis is upright or tilted backward, then the knees must bend to allow the hip flexors to contract.

Alternatively, if the abdominal muscles are quite contracted, anterior pelvic tilt can occur in withdrawal response posture. But instead of creating hyperlordosis, the entire spine and head will tilt forward, as shown in the photo of the man on the right above. This brings the hip flexors into a very shortened position.

In the action response posture that I discussed in the previous section, the iliopsoas may or may not play a central role in the postural pattern developing in the beginning, depending on the person. But in withdrawal response posture, which arises from our instinct to curl up in the fetal position, repeated contraction of the iliopsoas is by definition an initiating factor in the development of the posture.

Adduction of the hips—bringing the knees in toward each other, contracting the inner thigh muscles—also tends to go along with this postural pattern. And as it happens, the iliopsoas is a hip adductor.

So, in order to allow the iliopsoas to fully lengthen, we need to not only pandiculate the iliopsoas itself, but also the entire pattern of tension that’s keeping the pelvis stuck in a shortened state: the withdrawal response posture, in which the abdominals are contracted, the hips are flexed, and the hip adductors are contracted.

The tabs below list exercises that address the full-body pattern of tension that causes withdrawal response posture. After becoming comfortable with each individual exercise (by learning them in the Level One & Two Courses), you can start by practicing the short daily series, then rotate the additional exercises through your daily routine in a way that works for you.

How the iliopsoas is involved in side-bending postures

When I say side-bending postures, this includes lateral pelvic tilt (functional leg length discrepancy), scoliosis, and any small degree of lateral curvature of the spine that is not large enough to be diagnosed as scoliosis.

This imbalance between your right and left sides may develop due to the flexor reflex. This reflex makes us automatically pull our body away from a source of pain, like stepping on a thumbtack. In a similar way, when we suffer an injury, undergo surgery, or have chronic pain, we contract certain muscles to protect the painful or injured area, and modify our movement patterns to avoid the pain.

Side-bending postures can also develop simply as the result of repetitive activities, like carrying a baby or heavy bag on one side every day. They can also develop from athletic training in which the sides of the body are used differently.

Because of its attachments to the lumbar vertebrae, the psoas muscle contributes to lateral flexion of the spine (bending the spine to one side, as shown on the left in the image below). It also contributes to lateral tilting of the pelvis (hiking the hips up one at a time, as shown in the middle and right in the image below).

If other tight muscles—like the obliques and the quadratus lumborum—are keeping you stuck in that side-bending posture, focusing on releasing just the iliopsoas will not fully solve the problem. In order to allow the iliopsoas to fully lengthen, we need to not only pandiculate the iliopsoas itself, but also the entire pattern of tension that’s keeping the pelvis stuck in a shortened state.

The tabs below list exercises that address the full-body pattern of tension that causes side-bending postures. After becoming comfortable with each individual exercise (by learning them in the Level One & Two Courses), you can start by practicing the short daily series, then rotate the additional exercises through your daily routine in a way that works for you. As you become comfortable with the exercises, you can read or watch How to Even Out the Imbalances in Your Body and apply those principles to your daily practice.