Addressing "The Situation"

***First, if you are here because you saw me on The Washingtonian's story on tri blogs by women in DC, welcome! Be sure to look at a few of my posts and I hope you visit regularly.***

As I mentioned last week, I have this thing going on with my hip, which is not an injury, so I have called it "The Situation." And of course, since the pain originates from the gluteal region, several obnoxious comments ensued. Rachel asked if I would be flashing "The Situation" around in bars. Jim noted that he would like to see more of "The Situation" himself.

Some people might get irritated by that. I've decided to roll with it and keep writing about this, but this time, I'll make sure that I don't prompt obnoxious comments about "The Situation."

Back to "The Situation" itself. For many problematic muscles, manual trigger point therapy, which is a fancy way of saying "very hard, very focused massage," is a good solution to getting things working again. However, that's not always an easy option - for example, if the problematic muscle is buried under other large muscles. In my case, "The Situation" largely stems from the left piriformis, which lies deep under the gluteus maximus.

(source)

As you can see, that's a lot of muscle to work through to get to that piriformis. 

Drats.

But wait! My trusty physical therapist has a solution: dry needling, which involves inserting thin, flexible needles into the skin and through muscle tissue to reach trigger points, or muscle knots. This way, he can get to those miserable parts of my piriformis (and gluteus medius, as necessary) and start banishing those nasty knots that are making my sciatic nerve unhappy.

Doesn't that sound GREAT?

No, no, I meant having the treatment DONE, not poking me with sharp objects.

 

 Hmph. So much for not prompting obnoxious comments.