The hip mystery continues.

So with all this physical therapy some things are becoming clear while others are not.  It seems that my right groin muscles are always “on”, one reason why I’ve pulled them more than once now. So I’ve been doing exercises that work the glutes as well as trying to shut off the adductors on the right side.  Conversely, my left side is almost always “off”, it’s hard for me to activate them. This imbalance is at least one of the reasons why I tend to shift my hips sideways (to the right, I think) when I squat heavy, especially if I use a wider stance. It is also a reason why I pulled my groin in the first place, as well as why I am still having hip pain.

So that all makes sense, but some other things, namely sources of pain, are still a bit of a mystery.  Sometimes when walking when I push off of my right foot I get a pain in the front of my hip. It feels like it’s in the femur rectis area, but perhaps it’s the psoas, I’m not sure.  However, when the PT tested the muscles he found both to be supple (and neither were in pain).  Of course, after he did that I walked around and have no longer felt that particular pain, so that’s a good thing.  Perhaps it was the pectineus, I’m not sure if we checked that out. Regardless, it was nice to hear that both of those muscles, which previously had given me trouble, were behaving nicely. But still, it begs the question of what the hell is going on and which muscles are acting up? Perhaps it’s all entirely my groin right now, and after working on the groin some the other muscles, that were acting up, have settled down. Who knows, all I know is that I need to keep working on my exercises and not do anything to cause a setback.

Speaking of setbacks, it has been hard to shut down working out the lower body completely.  There are temptations to do leg extensions or curls, calf raises, etc., but I have to avoid doing any of these in order to stop aggravating my groin.  I see these guys in the gym doing reverse grip bicep curls in an attempt to do a power clean, and my ego begs to do some real power cleans to show them who’s boss. But for the past couple of days I have stayed true. I have decided to even avoid farmer’s walks for now, it’s so annoying but I fear the stress on the groin of walking with weight will set it off. The only leg exercise I’m am allowed to do so far is riding the bike for a bit, provided I don’t aggravate the impingement in my hip and the resistance is low enough. Now I’ve been doing 10-15 min of mild bike as a warm up for lifting and so far I’m able to walk away without feeling like I might have tweaked something.  It has taken me years to get to this point, hopefully it will only take like six weeks to reverse it all.