

Janet Carscadden is a physical therapist and yoga instructor. She owns Evolution Physical Therapy and Yoga and builds custom yoga programs for her clients to treat musculoskeletal injuries.
Therapeutic Yoga can be used to help your body return to a balanced state.
The psoas located on the front of the spine and hips can cause hip and low back pain when it is out of balance. The psoas is truly an admirable foe. If you overuse it, it will fight back with a vengeance, can spasm and leave you standing crooked and in pain; if you ignore it and allow it to get short and tight, it can lead to years of cascading muscle imbalances and injuries.
The psoas can be a tough muscle to understand. In part, this is due to the fact that you can’t really understand a muscle in isolation. You need to understand the company that it keeps. What most people think of as one large muscle, is really two. The Iliacus and psoas have different origins, but insert into the same point on the inside of the upper thigh. The psoas originates off of the front of the last thoracic vertebra, and each of the five lumbar vertebrae. The iliacus originates off the inside of the rim of the pelvis.
When the psoas is short, it pulls the vertebrae forward and accentuates the backward arch in the low back. When the iliacus is short, it pulls the pelvis forward. Muscles don’t get out of balance on their own. It’s a combination of poor postural habits, sitting for hours at a time, and weakness in the muscles on the opposite side of the body.
Muscles become strained when they are always taking on too much work. I often seen people with a strained iliacus and psoas and long, overstretched hamstrings, weak buttock muscles, and weak muscles in the lower belly. These three groups of muscles help to support the pelvis and spine. Many yoga sequences can excessively overstretch the hamstrings with too many forward folds and ignore the psoas with very few backward bends that control the movement of the pelvis.
Here are three strategies to tame that unruly psoas and bring it back into balance.
Give Your Psoas a Break
Strengthen Your Butt
Lengthen Your Hip Flexors
Janet Carscadden, PT, DPT, OCS, Cert MDT, E-RYT 200, is the owner of Evolution Physical Therapy and Yoga and is passionate about educating yogis and her patients about how to use yoga to restore balance to their bodies and minds.
Dr. Carscadden has two upcoming workshops on Releasing the Psoas.
Saturday April 2, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m., Burlington Yoga Conference
Registration and Workshop Details
Friday April 29, 5:45 p.m. – 7:16 p.m., Evolution Yoga
Psoas Release on the Yoga Wall
Registration and Workshop Details