By :Jimmy Smith
It seems Piriformis Syndrome is becoming more and more to blame for failure of proper movement execution. Piriformis syndrome is caused by local trauma and results in things such as adhesions, anatomic peculiarities such as the common peroneal nerve passing through the muscle and vascular issues due to direct compression such as sitting on your wallet. Some signs and symptoms include SI joint, butt, groin, hip and leg pain. Typically, there is tenderness below the posterior pelvis. There are a few methods to assess this so I’m going to tell you some of the easier ways.
- Simply put, most people say that they have “sciatica”; this usually is the first sign.
-A straight leg raise with the leg internally rotated might aggravate the entrapment, while a straight leg raises with leg externally rotated might decrease the pain.
One technical and the other not so technical, either way works. So why do we have this sudden rash of injuries? We’ve ignored both functions of the glute max. Many of the articles that discuss the glute max today deal with it as a hip extensor and ignore its other function as an external rotator. Since we typically rest in internal hip rotation our external rotators have to work overtime, as a result they tighten up. Now here comes the injury part, if our glute max isn’t firing, we’ll end up getting the external rotation with our hamstrings
This is why we’re seeing more and more lateral hamstring injuries. Take a soccer player I work with, he kept overloading his lateral hamstring. It wasn’t until I made him perform various piriformis stretching and getting his glute max to fire in external rotation did his hamstring clear up. So here’s what we need to do
-Perform cable chops in a partial range of motion.
-Rotate your foot out slightly when you’re performing a bridge
-Drop into a figure four stretch and loosen up your external hip, move your hips side to side and into rotation as well.
-Spend more time on single leg exercises. Get strong on single leg movements.
