Your potential "Why" to your hip pain:
The “why” might take a little longer to discover and your homework and awareness over the coming weeks should help provide more information. Here are some things we found that might be contributing:
The piriformis (deep buttock muscle) appears to be tight and treatment to this area could give some relief.
The low back or lumbar region does have a significant curvature (too much arch) that could be contributing to your pain. This could be due to abdominal weakness (not your core in this instance, but actual “six pack” abdominal muscle strength allowing the ability to tilt your pelvis the other direction)
Core muscle weakness. The “deep” core muscles we assessed were able to turn on, but were on the weaker than we would want. When the core is weak, one can compensate with the more superficial muscles like the glutes, low back muscles, and the piriformis muscle. When these muscles are tight, this can cause back or hip pain and possible cause “sciatica”.
This is just the start of discovering the “why”. With more time and attention, we can hopefully narrow down the information gathered and find the “why”.
The following program is addressing some of the findings above.
Home Exercise Program
Elbow on Knee Stretch: you will need to go a little farther to get a stretch here, should have no pain, just a nice discomfort, hold for 1 min and perform x10/day or more.
Knee to Opposite Shoulder Stretch, same rules as above x10 per day
I would also consider the following: EXPRESSIVE WRITING. This can be used for the hip pain, but this might be a good start to help the left knee pain. Expressive Writing is basically working on the “pyschosocial” aspect of the pain (kind of like the snake story example). I usually recommend writing down your “feelings” or anything you want about your pains for 10 mins twice per day. Once you write down on paper your “feelings”, immediately tear-up, burng, throw away the paper. This allows you to acknowledge your feelings, but to work on separating from them. There have been 1000 research studies to support the use of Expressive Writing and for chronic pain, this practice by itself can eliminate your pain all together. The following web page has more information, but I would give it a try as it is really easy to do.
https://backincontrol.com/the-4-stages/stage-1-laying-the-foundation/begin-expressive-writing/
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DrE@averyphysicaltherapy.com
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