What is Iliacus muscle pain and how to treat it?

What is the iliacus muscle? What does it do?

The iliacus muscle is a flat triangular muscle located deep in your pelvis/hip. It combines with your psoas major and psoas minor to form the iliopsoas muscle. This group of muscles help to flex your hip, anteriorly tilt your pelvis, bend your trunk forward, and side bend your trunk. It plays a big role in your everyday life during walking, running, sitting, or standing.

This muscle is commonly injured with sports that cause you to flex your hip often like in gymnastics, dancing, and track and field. It can also be injured in people who spend a lot of their time sitting as your muscle adapts to the shortened position it spends most of its time in. It is also common in those who do not warm-up properly before exercising.

Different Conditions involving the Iliacus muscle

Generally speaking, this type of injury will result in reduced movement in your hip/back, as well as stiffness, weakness, and possibly some swelling and inflammation. As mentioned above, this muscle has a lot of different roles so you can feel discomfort in your hip, back, groin, or even referred down to your knee.

There are a range of different conditions labelled under iliopsoas syndrome. This can include tendonitis, snapping hip syndrome and bursitis.

• Bursitis: This is when the fluid filled sac that reduces friction near the iliacus muscle becomes inflamed. This causes pain that often radiates to the legs and hips. It can be common in those with tight hips like runners, skiers, and swimmers. Tight hips cause increased pressure on surrounding ligaments, joints, and muscles. It is best to get this seen sooner than later by a physiotherapist or your GP. It is important to watch out for signs of infection (pain, fever, chills, warm/red skin, and feeling sick) and contact your GP immediately if you notice these signs and symptoms.

• Tendinopathy/Tendonitis: This involves the tendons of the iliopsoas muscle and is common in people that hyperextend their hips like dancers. You will notice pain in the hip/groin/low back area especially with kicking and rotating your hip. You may even notice a snapping sound or feeling.

What can we do to treat it?

It is important to get these conditions looked at by a physiotherapist and/or your GP. They can work together to determine the cause and rule out other conditions. At your physiotherapy appointment, we will look at the range of motion, and strength of your hip to look for any muscle imbalances and movement limitations.. Common areas would include weakness in your glutes or core, and poor endurance and/or tightness in your hip flexor muscles themselves. We can prescribe targeted exercises and stretches to help relieve your pain and prevent it from happening again. We can also advise on walking aids, icing/heating, and provide manual therapy and trigger point release.

If any of this sounds like you, come book an appointment online or give us a call today at Ballsbridge Physiotherapy in Dublin 4.