Making strides with Physical Therapy

So it’s been about two weeks since I’ve started physical therapy, and my groin pain has pretty much gone away. If I try to engage my adductors they let me know that they’re not 100% but while I stand here typing this out I’m not experiencing any of the pain that I once was.  I recently progressed to an extremely complex exercise that I’ll just call “glasses” (bit of an inside joke).  I won’t even try to describe what goes on in glasses, but it has effectively turned on my glutes and turned off my right adductors, thus the alleviation of groin pain.

Although the groin pain has subsided considerably, I still have some impingement going on, and until the physical therapist, Mike, is able to move my hip around without it catching on the acetabular socket we can’t progress to standing exercises (which is a big deal).  Surprisingly, I now have full ROM with my right (bothersome) hip, it is my left (pain-free) hip that is not responding to the stretches and exercises as nicely.

In doing a stretch for the left hip, Mike was super concerned that I would irritate my right hip. He kept asking if I felt any pinching. To which I kept telling him I wasn’t.  He responded with “well that’s a good thing, that means your pain is probably muscular, and not capsular.”  I was being honest when I said I didn’t feel any pinching, but when I replicate the stretch at home I’m now worried that I might be experiencing a pinching sensation. I might be psyching myself out here, but I keep worrying that maybe I’m not. Maybe some of the pain I’m feeling isn’t muscular, that it’s something that can only be corrected with surgery?  It’s fears like this that keep me up at night. I just have to keep telling myself to calm down, that we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, I just need to focus on my adductors.

The progress on the groin pain has been awesome. However, I am still experiencing some small, dull type of pain in my hip area.  Of the onion of pain that my hip has proved to be, I think I’ve peeled away pretty much every layer now except for one.  I mean, I think it’s one last, underlying issue.  The pain is strange, it seems like it moves around, different parts of the hip get this dull… ache, I guess? It’s very hard to pinpoint. I keep thinking it’s the pectineus, but it very well might not be. Who knows.

I hope that working with Mike we will get to the bottom of this, that we can figure out precisely what is going on. I sure hope so.  Mike, as a physical therapist, doesn't think that squatting ass-to-grass would be a good goal.  He thinks squatting to that depth is bad for one's knees.  ...He knows that I'm in disagreement on this, and he would be interested in why, so I'm sending him some links and other info.  Thankfully neither of us are getting defensive on this issue, he's a great guy and I recognize that I'm not the one with the degree.  Still, I really, really hope I make him a convert.