Mrs B is a 29 year old Physiotherapist who presented with a 6 week history of left buttock pain, which was now affecting her ability to run.
The pain had come on without any specific incident or change in her routine or running volume, but she had began a bootcamp recently and was performing more interval training at faster speeds.
After thorough whole body examination, we found that her gluteal activation was inhibited(gluts were not “firing”) both sides, but there were no obvious trigger points or tension in this region. She also had adverse neural tension signs in both lower limbs, and trigger points and muscle guarding in the right infraspinatus, left pec minor and subscap, as well as lack of mobility in several thoracic and lumbar segments.
When we performed treatment trials on iunhappy muscles and joints to determine the cause of the problem, we found that the biggest improvement in her gluteal activation resulted from release of trigger points in her right infraspinatus. This also resulted in a significant reduction in her buttock pain when she ran. She has been given exercises to activate and then build on her gluteal strength as she progresses.
We completed 4 treatments, and at that stage Mrs B was running relatively pain free. She has also worked on her running technique and focussed on relaxing her shoulders when she runs, which may have been causing tension in her upper body which affected her lower limb muscle function.
Of note is that our new treatment approach (Ridgway Method) helped us to solve this challenging problem, which was likely to remain unresolved with our old physiotherapy model.
