Chapter Two

EATING YOUR PSOAS

Will you take your tenderloin rare, medium or well-done? Tough, stringy, gristly? Flaccid, pale, tasteless. Will you take your breath like black pepper? Small, dark, gasping? Heave your breath like salt? Scattered, rationed, uneven? How will you move your psoas, the tenderloin of muscle connecting the vital column of spine to the long stilts of your legs? Great hacking jerks as if under a dull steak blade; in shuddering catches as if under shredding tears of your teeth?

USDA Prime psoas is rich, red, meaty, low in fat and connective tissue, made supple by its power to extend/arch your lower (lumbar) spine, made rich by its job to bridge the transition of thoracic spine to lumbar spine and walk your legs, made tender by equally balanced use. Made red by full, bottomless breathing; uninterrupted flow of life to each meaty cell.

Eat your psoas. (Cold rare, no pepper, light salt.)



TAKING YOUR PSOAS – THE MECHANICS

You own two tenderloins, a left and right psoas. Most people have two petite tenderloins as well, a psoas minor, left and right, but not everyone.

At its extreme connection, that powerful hunk of meat called the Psoas (so-as) is a muscle which starts at your twelfth thoracic vertebra to the back of the inside of your high thigh bone. That is a pretty powerful position in the architecture of the human animal – to connect the spine to the legs across the great divide of the pelvic bowl expanse. Specifically, the psoas attaches at T-12, where your last rib floats at the back of your ribcage, and at the next four vertebrae, or spine bones, below that rib. That broad, fanned series of contact points is narrowed to one connection at a bump on the femur - your leg bone - called the lesser trochanter. Between those attachments the muscles gets to be that thick meat you like to grill. At least that’s the preferred condition.

Sitting for long periods of time shortens that muscle. Letting the lower spine arch forward tightens it. Inactivity in general makes that muscle short, weak, ischemic, brittle. Pilates, on the other hand, demands that the psoas do its job of stabilizing the spine and flexing the legs, the bending of the thigh forward at the hip joint.

Often the problem is not that the psoas needs to be strengthened, but that it needs to be conditioned and used appropriately. The muscle often needs eccentric conditioning, that is, the muscle learns to contract as it is being lengthened - as the leg is moving from bent at the hip (flexion) to full extension (or straight).

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