The Sartorius: It's More Powerful Than You Think
In this episode of the Unreal Results podcast, I talk about the often overlooked sartorius muscle. This episode happens to be a clip from episode 26, Sartorius B.I.G. In this episode, I talk a little bit more of why the sartorius muscle should not be overlooked including its connection to peripheral nerves, vascular structures, and its fascial lines & containers. It’s honestly one of my go-to spots for treatment and I share some of my techniques that I utilize in this area.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
Episode 26: Sartorius B.I.G.
Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers*
Spiral Line Stretch: Watch Here
Instagram Reel: Dynamic Cupping
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* - denotes that this link is to my Amazon Associate store. As an Amazon Associate, I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
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Anna Hartman: Hey there, and welcome. I'm Anna Hartman, and this is Unreal Results, a podcast where I help you get better outcomes and gain the confidence that you can help anyone, even the most complex cases. Join me as I teach about the influence of the visceral organs and the nervous system on movement, pain, and injuries, all while shifting the paradigm of what whole body assessment and treatment really looks like.
I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Unreal Results podcast. So, uh, just a reminder that the podcast for the summertime, so about a month and a half between the beginning of July and the middle of August 2024, We're going to be doing some, um, reruns, but not whole episodes, just clips of some of my favorite things that I've covered in the last 66 episodes.
I'm going to be focusing on more of the episodes that haven't got as many downloads as others. Um, just thinking that, you know, Not sure why you missed it, whether it was timing of the year, or the title, or whatever. Um, want to make sure you get the information, and then also I know that when you, when it comes to learning stuff, whenever you can hear it repeated again, it's going to have a better opportunity to sort of be absorbed and stick.
And then also, um, my experience and a lot of the mentorship alumni. Experience is when you re listen, re watch material, go back to it in a, you know, in another year, in another time, sometimes you hear and catch different things because often what we pick up in a class or what we pick up in a lecture is what we need to hear in that moment.
And you are a completely different person now than you used to be, um, a completely different practitioner, especially if you. been listening for a while and implementing some of these practical tips of utilizing a more true whole body approach, uh, that considers the viscera and the nervous system in your, uh, assessment and treatment plan.
So, um, Maybe it is exactly what you've already heard, but you're going to hear it in a different way and pick up different gems and different information from it. So I hope you enjoy it. I'm curating this specifically for you. And, uh, thanks for being here. Enjoy this episode.
Hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of the Unreal Results podcast. This clip coming up is from episode 26 called Sartorius B. I. G.
Yes, it was a play on the one and only Notorious B. I. G. But in all seriousness, the sartorius is a very commonly overlooked muscle because it's a synergist. People don't like give it much thought. It's not like people are like. You know, they gone like, let's train the sartorius, but is actually an area of the body that comes up a ton in terms of where I end up doing treatment on my athletes
to make huge changes for their entire body.
And so this clip gives you a little bit of insight into the uniqueness of the longest muscle of our body, the sartorius, and why you need to consider it in your treatment when you're considering especially this visceral and neural lens of view. Have a great day. Enjoy.
not largest, it's the longest muscle in our body.
So it goes from the top of our pelvis at the, typically, um. Originating on the A S I S of the ilium, all the way to the tibia on the medial side of the lower leg. So it expands our entire length of our thigh, plus the majority of the height of our pelvis. Um, so it's pretty long. Um, and it's also a two joint muscle, much like the rectus femoris.
Because the rectus femoris has that shared origin at the, um, Iliac spine, so there are some variations and some people the sartorius attaches more into the IT band and the TFL, uh, as well as down at the knee and sometimes it just attaches into the knee retinaculum versus. below on the tibia. But for the most part, those are its origins and insertions.
It is like an s curve because of that. Obviously it goes from the latter, most lateral part of your body to a medial part of your leg. And, um, so it has this nice sweeping s curve. Um, I'd say that the, the thing that most people miss is it's a little bit more. The S curve happens higher up than down below, so some people think it kind of is like the middle of your leg, but the, it stays pretty, um, medial, it like goes medial pretty proximal, um, as it, um, goes over, and you'll notice this border typically more so in people with hypertrophied quadriceps muscles than people without hypertrophied quadriceps muscles, though everybody typically has one, um, there's always those quadriceps.
It's a little outlier variance that these long synergistic muscles, you know, you tend to, it can actually be an anatomical variation not to have it. But for the most part, I, I'd say it's not so common to not have one. Um, the, I, the thing that, well, let's talk about like the traditional, you sartorius. Its function is hip flexion.
Uh, hip flexion, hip external rotation, and slightly hip abduction, as well as tibial internal rotation when the knee is flexed, um, when the knee is straight. It's just that long axis external rotation. So this is the function because it doesn't. Because it crosses the hip, but doesn't touch the femur, if this makes sense.
So, it crosses the hip joint, but it doesn't originate or insert on the femur itself. It doesn't have the greatest leverage to control the hip joint. So, it is a very synergistic way to flex the hip. With that said, plenty of my athletes, um, Like, like, you know, have a pretty strong sartorius as a primary hip flexor, I'd say, if anything, that tends to be its dominance, hip flexion, external rotation.
So, um, I'd imagine. Your athletes who have, like, powerful adductors as hip flexors, um, have powerful sartoriuses too. So the athletes that make, this makes me think of right out of the gate is hockey athletes, but, um, my sprinters all have real strong sartoriuses as well. Um. Then, the other common, um, thing we know that the sartorius plays a role in is medial knee stability.
Because of its attachment on the inside of the knee and its origin more lateral, it really controls that medial collapse of the knee, especially in the absence of good, good, yeah, medial hip stability. And the sartorius does this, controls medial knee stability, along with the gracilis, which is our long adductor muscle, as well as the semitendinosus, uh, so one of our hamstring muscles.
Oftentimes, when this is a primary... I don't want to say primary medial knee stabilizer, but when this complex, the sartorius are getting, um, overstretched because of this medial knee stability, um, tends to create some medial pes anserine bursitis. And, um, So this is probably most people's, I'd say this is most people's, um, knowledge of the Sartorius here, and, um, I'm not going to argue with that, that is something that we see fairly commonly, um, and I'd say sometimes I see it from the Sartorius just not Maybe even being kind of a little bit bound down in that fascial container, um, more so than necessarily hip weakness, but this goes back to sort of to how I see weakness of muscles is the first thing is, is the muscle really weak or is the neural activity to it not?
Not being optimized. All right. So, um, the other thing from a functional standpoint of the Sartorius, which is probably got me most interested at first is the role of Sartorius plays as part of our consciousness. spiral anatomy train, or fascial line. So, um, our spiral line, described by Thomas Myers, is a line of muscles and fascia that's primary role is to balance the arches and, um, rotate, create our, our bipedal Rotation, right?
So it actually takes the rotation from our trunk and transfers it to the legs or vice versa, takes that spring action that's inherent in the legs and transfers it to the trunk. So, um. I look to the Sartorius as a way to connect into our, um, Spiral Lion and our good movement patterns too. It's the main connector, in my opinion, between the, um, foot and the trunk.
Um, so having this as a, like, healthy, mobile, muscle that can do its thing is important. Um, the rest of the spiral line, it goes from sartorius and it goes peroneus longus underneath the, or, I'm sorry, posterior tibialis underneath the arch of the foot connecting to peroneus longus up the lateral side of the leg connecting into that IT band meeting back up at that um, iliac.
Spine of the pelvis and then connecting with the oblique sling system up into the serratus Through the rhomboids and then to the same side neck. So that is our spiral joint and we have one on both sides. So The interesting thing too is the the beautiful thing about that spiral Or the sartorius, as you can see, the spiral of the shape of the muscle ray is that nice S curve coming from, um, lateral to medial in the knee.
And this is, um, mirrors the spiral of our leg that is inherent to us from an embryological standpoint. So you may have heard me talk about this before, but from an embryo standpoint, before we're born, you know, after our limb buds, our leg limb buds have come from the embryo and start to grow into legs.
Um, the front of the leg and the back of the leg sort of switch because what happens is the leg twists and it's on itself. And so the front of the leg becomes the back of the leg and the back of the leg becomes the front of the leg. This is why if you've ever thought about it, the term dorsiflexion, when you dorsiflex your foot, you're moving your foot towards the front of the shin.
That's actually our dorsum. That's our dorsal surface of our leg. And so that spiral going into internal rotation is what gives us that bounce, that spring back into external rotation, right? So the winded up spring is internal rotation, and the, the recoil of it is external rotation. So you can really see that in these.
In the sartorius to win this, the leg is fully internally rotated. It really stretches out that sartorius. And if we think about it as a rubble rubber band, it recoils it and pulls it into actual rotation. And so I think this too is why so many of my athletes have such a, um. More prominent or easier to find sartorius is because in general most of them do a lot more elastic recoil activities than general population So with that said too that means it's probably an important part of our elastic recoil function of the lower extremity Alright, so that's sort of the, um, that's sort of the, I'd say, more common things we know about the Sartorius, and usually why I'm treating it is for these reasons.
So, the Sartorius is very superficial. It's like skin. Not a whole lot of adipose tissue, typically, between the skin and the sartorius. It is a very superficial, it's within the superficial fascia, or the first container of the fascial compartments of the leg. And, um, very similar to the relationship, a very similar looking container to what the erector spinae look like in the, in the trunk.
So the erector spinae are enveloped in a fascia. Um, like, all around it, basically, right? And then, all that, those three layers of fascia come together, hooked to the spine, and then three layers of fascia come together on the other side, and then invest into the three layers of the abdominal muscles. Same thing.
Sort of the sartorius it is within the fascial container and has a connection to the medial compartment It is in the anterior compartment, but it's compartmentalized on its own as well Even though it's technically part of the anterior compartment. It's kind of its own little compartment So it has two interfacial triangles on each side of it, medial and lateral, and then it also has a connection to the posterior compartment.
So it joins with the posterior and lateral intermuscular septum, as well as the medial intermuscular septum. So it actually, Sartorius actually influences and has a pull or relationship on each of the three compartments of the thigh. Because of... That it can influence the neurovascular structures in all the compartments.
So this means a sartorious a tight, if you wanna use the word tight, I don't love that, but it's kind of the best way to think about it. A tight sartorious or sarti sartorious that is not sort of free in its own compartment, free to pull on those compartments, can create tension in the sciatic nerve, the femoral nerve, the saphenous nerve, as well as the obterator nerve.
So it can affect function of the quads, um, sensation to the entire thigh, the medial part of the low leg and toe, and the, um, posterior side of the thigh, as well as, like, general function of the entire lower extremity, and then the inside medial thigh via the obturator nerve. Um, so... That's super important to realize and because it's so superficial and so Related to the skin.
This is actually why treat it so much is because it's really easy to treat You could technically Depending on again, this is like depending on how free it is to move when it's free to move Use you can use your fingers to pick up someone sartorius and kind of separate from the quadriceps which is really cool to see.
If someone's not that free to move, I use the silicone cups, which I call dynamic cupping. It's the more flexible cup. I do the cup, and I do a skin lift technique with the cup to sort of help lift that. I get a two fold response here. I get a reflexive response within all of the compartments, but then I also get a response directly to the sartorius itself from the cup.
Because of the relationship to the skin. So I get this reflexive relaxation and of the Sartorius itself and everything beneath it and around it. And the cool thing is the things that are beneath it and why I care, like why it becomes also so important. The Sartorius is one of the main borders of, and I say Sartorius, not just the muscle, but the fascial container itself, the fascia beneath it.
is sort of the border of the adductor canal, or also the sometimes called the femoral canal. The adductor canal contains the femoral artery, the femoral vein, the lymphatic structures, and then branches of the femoral nerve. The biggest branch being the saphenous nerve, which is the large cutaneous nerve of the femoral nerve.