[QUOTE=Becca;861402]So the musle that cramps is the stronger muscle? I know when I was having major issues with my lower back aching and getting tierd long before it should, a trainer had me work my hip flexors in several ways. I’d assumed that my back was aching because it was the weeker rgion. Was it really my hip flexors being week causing my lower back to work harder?[/QUOTE]
I don’t know / it depends
the “simple” answer is that your hip flexors may have been facilitated (lower contractile threshold) / hypertonic (higher resting tone) and / or congested (e.g. - if you sit a lot, they stay shortened and can “pool” up ); by “working” on them you possibly a) cleared out the metabolic waste / pro-inflammatory substances (histokinenes e.g.) b) got a post-contractile relaxatory effect
the variables are what sort of activity (concentric, isometric or eccentric), what part of the range you worked in; to what degree of intensity you did what you did (e.g. - to point of relaxation or actual failure)
you may also have activated lower abdominals via “spill-over” from resisted hip flexion
you may also have issues with intestines, uterus, pelvic floor, actual joint restriction, issues with other muscles (hams, erector spinae), and you may also have a synergistic effect of contracting during emotional stress; you may also hold your breath a lot during the day without being aware of it; the list goes on and on, and all these things can effect LBP to varying degrees, and can respond to generalized input with varying degrees of success depending on the way in which they all interact on any given day or moment even (beginning to see why off-the-cuff “advice” gets me nervous?);
fortunately, the body is very good at taking a lot of different types of input and using it to assist the general drive towards homeostasis; which is why a lot of different things can “work” for a variety of different situations - for good or ill: on the one hand, many people can receive benefit from even rudimentary / relatively unskilled and general input - but this usually is when someone still has the ability to compensate enough in the system, or doesn’t have “contradictory” issues (e.g. - multi-planar / directional shearing strains in the connective tissue system) - when you have that sort of thing, the ability of the system to take a general input (e.g. - massage, resisted isometrics, long-lever adjustments) and use it is compromised, because “fixing” one issue can irritate the other;
so, again, I don’t know specifically what is up w/you, but yes, doing “stuff” with hip flexors can help LBP for any number of reasons, including “weakness” of hip flexors - but that is a bit more complicated and has to do with length-tension relationships of hips flexors, especially in terms of how the operate functionally during, for example, the gait cycle
oh, BTW, shadowlin said i was supposed to apologize to you after i responded to one of your posts on my “Life After Forms” thread - I guess he must have intuited how crushed you were by my response or some such…I’m guessing you were so broken up about it, that you forgot to mention it to me…
