How Do I Self-treat Sit Bone Pain and Obturator Internus?

Transcript of: How do I self-treat sit bone pain and obturator internus?

Hey everybody! Welcome to this month’s question of the month. I’m here with my co-star, Luna Beam Suarez-Keil. She wanted to make a cameo, so I let her in. As you know, every month I answer a question of the month. If you want to submit your own question, go to yoganatomy.com/myquestion. (Luna you really help here by holding that paper up high.) This month’s question comes from Marie about how to self-treat sit bone pain and obturator internus.

The Question:

I have pain in my sit bones and right obturator internus. [DK: That’s super specific. Thank you for that!] What’s the best way to stretch my hamstrings and right obturator internus to self-treat? I see a pelvic floor PT to work on this internally. In your experience what do you recommend? Sitting in a car is painful on my right side.

The Answer:

All right, well. So first, I have to assume that your assessment/diagnosis of the actual problem, obturator internus and hamstring is correct. I’m happy to do that. Those could totally be involved in this. No doubt about that. I’m not the one touching and poking to kind of test that assumption, but that sounds good.

If it is the hamstrings, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to stretch your hamstrings, however. If the hamstrings are tight, there are different ways in which they can be tight. Sometimes it can be that the lower end, meaning the end closer to the knees, is too tight. When that’s the case, what you need to do is actually make sure that the knees are straight, which is kind of one thing and I do have a bunch of posts on sit bone pain on the website. So you should definitely go there. Click on the search bar when you go to articles and type in sit bone. You’re going to find plenty of stuff and one really exhaustive post on sit bone pain that might help you kind of figure things out.

trigger points in gluteus minimus muscle

I actually recently worked with somebody who has kind of sit bone pain going on. We also checked their obturator internus and externus, but what we found, in their case, and I’m kind of leaning this way for your description as well, is gluteus minimus, and especially the trigger points from gluteus minimus which refer towards the sit bone and close to the center line, even near the sacrum there. What we’ll do on this question of the month, when we put the post up there, if you go back to the website, we’ll drop in a trigger point image of gluteus minimus and even maybe gluteus medius, so you can have your PT maybe check those as well, to see how involved they are.

I want to go back to the hamstrings for a second though. Remember that sometimes I mentioned hamstrings can be tight on the lower end. Make sure you are keeping your knees straight in your forward bending if you’ve been keeping them bent. The other thing is it’s also possible that the hamstring is over stretched. How can that happen? If you’ve got a pelvic imbalance where that side, you said the right side, so the right side is tilted down and forward a little bit more, that hamstring and the back of the right side is already going to be over stretched. That can cause trouble as well, even regular pulling on the sit bone, and cause irritation there as well.

Sit bone pain is really common and lots of people are dealing with it, so you’ve got to try a couple different things. I think it’s better if you go to the website though as there are lots of resources there already.

All right, I hoped that helped a little bit. There’s something specific for you. Anybody else, if you want to submit a question, once again as you know, go to yoganatomy.com/myquestion and we’ll do our best to get to it.