Training the Psoas

[madmacca]

After a few months of aerobic basebuilding (thank you Joe Friel), and a couple of weeks of intervals, yesterday I tried my first climb of the season, up to Kinglake. While I could definitely do with more anaerobic work, I could really feel it in the lower back. My (limited) knowledge of anatomy suggests this is the psoas. A muscle fatigue kind of pain that dissipated fairly quickly if I got out of the saddle, not the sharper pain of an injury or muscle strain.

This was an issue last season as well, although it did reduce as the season went on and I got more climbing under the belt. But I feel like the endurance of this muscle is my limiter, rather than the legs or cardio-vascular fitness.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how to address this? I've done some digging on the interwebs, and found some stretches for these muscles, and I will do them, but I'm kinda skeptical that it is a flexibility issue.

* Is it a bike fit issue?
* Should I be specifically strength training this muscle? If so, what moves?
* Are there any on-bike drills I should be doing?
* Or do I need to just suck it up and climb more to develop the endurance of this muscle?

I'm targetting the ACE250 in January, so avoiding the hills is not an option.

Thanks,

Macca.

[vander]

I am just going to write my few thoughts.
Psoas will likely be used more in standing than seated cycling.
Yes it is unlikely to be a flexibility issue and is more likely a control issue but its impossible to tell off this much information.
It is rarely just one muscle or one thing that is causing the pain.
With climbing it is likely that you are limited cardio-vascularily

Get a bike fit from someone that really knows what they are doing. They should look at the way that you pedal aswell as just the bike. Hopefully they will do a full physical assessment of you to determine areas of weakness/lack of control/lack of flexibility. It is too hard to truly determine what is wrong and what to do on a forum like this.