Hey everybody! Andrew here, coach at EarthFIT bringing you amazing stretch at home series for your pesky piriformis, this muscle group attaches to the hip and the back. It does a lot of the work the glutes should be doing for you. If you have weak glutes, your piriformis is going to be very overactive, almost guaranteed, right? So this also caused a lot of pressure in the SI joint and hips, allowing sciatica to take place and lower back pain. So this is crucial for you to learn here. 

What we’re going to do is you can grab a bed, a bench and couch, and you’re going to simply start out with putting an ankle in front of you, perpendicular to your body, and slowly bend that back knee dipping the hips straight down to the floor. This knee is going to start to lower towards the surface, and you’re going to feel that back, right, right about here in the piriformis, you want to hip hinge forward. You don’t want to round the shoulders. Again, you’re trying to protect that low back and have better posture here.

Now, if you’re not comfortable standing like that, because it doesn’t require a lot of strength and stability, then we’re going to lay on our back, ankle on top of our opposite knee, pulling the bottom of our opposite knee towards our chest. We’re using this leg here. That’s 90 degrees as leverage, pulling this knee backward, this shin backward towards my body. So I can feel the piriformis on the opposite side, right?

Here’s another variation to prone position. Some people like it, they do it a lot in Yoga. You’re going to bring that ankle right up the perpendicular. And then you’re slowly going to hip hinge and put pressure on the ankle a little bit, put pressure downward, at least until you feel that piriformis stretch kind of how to maybe finagle a little bit…

Now, find that kind of causing some knee pain, especially if you have an ACL or MCL issues and things like that, or just very tight calves, right? And we just kind of causes some knee pains. So you, you don’t have to do the pigeon pose, but also it causes a little too much of a stress sometimes. But anyway, hold each one of those for 30 seconds, two minutes max – morning and evening, you’ll be well on your way to alleviating some of those issues or just bettering your hip movements. See you later.

-EarthFIT Coach Andrew