Glute Min!

This is my first muscle post on my official business page i wanted to make it a good one with an important muscle! This muscle i want to talk about today is a huge player in stabilizing the hips and you use it every time you take a step, it's called the gluteus minimus.

Even though the glute min is a small muscle, it's very important. It is located on the outside of the hip and is the deepest of all the glute muscles sitting under the glute medius and the glute max. The glute min is responsible for abducting the hip or bringing it away from the body as well as medially rotation the hip. It attaches on the top of the hip bone and runs down the side of your hip to attach on the greater trochanter of the femur. 

A huge function of the glute min is it helps stabilize your hips when you are standing on one leg, like when you are walking or running. Glute min helps to raise the opposite hip during walking so that the leg can swing through, without this very important muscle (and some help from glute med) that hip would collapse down and make walking much more difficult.

Keeping stable hips is so important for a healthy back and healthy knees also. My husband had debilitating pain in his right leg and into his knee for several years, we found glute min as one of his big problems. Glute min wasn't working correctly so other muscles of his legs had to overwork.

Take care of your body today, it works hard for you!

Gaining Momentum.....

The time has come to announce what I've been working on. I have been a massage therapist for 5 years now.  There are stats that say the burn out rate within the industry has been estimated at 50 to 90% within the first 3 to 5 years in practice. I have been on the edge for the past year or so, frustrated, tired, and not sure where i wanted to go in my career. 

It doesn't help that over the past year my entire world had been turned upside down. My husband and i moved across the country, he changed positions within his company and literally everything in our lives felt like it was crashing down. We never felt like we made the wrong decision, but the stress in our lives was high. On the flip side of the stress this change has been the push we needed. 

My big decision came after an accumulation of events and talking to a few of my mentors. The cross road had been laid out and I needed to make a decision about what i wanted my future career to look like. Everything fell in to place and the deciding factor was my husband saying to me "Elyse, you have to do this, i don't know why you wouldn't." The waffling i have been doing suddenly made complete sense! I need to find my passion again, what i love to do, the clients that i love to work with, if i don't I won't be able to be happy in my practice.

AND thus the idea of Momentum Massage and Bodywork was born! Starting May 1st i will be opening my own business in Newport News, VA. I am so excited! My passion has always been the structure and movement of the human body and my business is going to focus on those goals! 

There are many people that have helped me come to this conclusion, notably, my husband Ben, my mentor Shawn (shawnsmovementworld.wordpress.com), and my friend and trainer Gary (coastalfitnessva.com). This will be a new chapter in my practice and i really can't wait to get started!

Deep Six!

You may have heard of the piriformis muscle, and you may know that it is deep in your hip area and it's a real pain in the butt when it's angry, but did you know that the piriformis is actually only one of the six small muscles that make up your hip's external rotators AKA "the deep six".

The deep six are the piriformis, superior gemellus, inferior gemellus, obturator internus, obturator externus, and quadratus femoris. There wont be a quiz on those names, but it's important to your hip joint that these muscle are functioning properly.

They all externally rotate the hip like when you turn your foot out. They are also a big stabilizer for the hip joint itself. I find a lot of times the deep six have to stabilize extra when the much larger glute max is lazy. This can cause tightness and pain in the hip as well as range of motion problems and even worse, irritate the sciatic nerve.

Our bodies are very adaptable. When one muscle gets lazy a different muscle or set of muscles will try to take over the work in order to keep you upright and moving. It's like at your job when one employee with a special work project gets sick, two of his co workers have to take over this project. Though these two employees may get the job done, odds are it wont be done as well as if the specialized sick employee had done it. In this case these two muscles have completely different jobs, but if they don't step in, how will your body function?

It's important to not only address the symptoms but also the "why" of your pain. Your body works hard for you! Take care of it!