13 January 2025

Gluteus maximus getting in the way of sleep

For the last four years, I have had to stretch my gluteus maximus every day, in order to make it not get in the way of my daily life. And it has been working all right. I sometimes have to do an emergency bum stretch, but not very often. And sometimes I am lying in bed and am a bit uncomfortable in the buttock, and that tends to be difficult to deal with, as I am soft in the heart, and doing anything to relieve that would disturb the cat, which I actively avoid doing. But given that I can't remember ever having had that issue for a long time, I assume I normally just fall asleep in spite of it.

Sometimes, my exercise regime gets disrupted, for instance when I travel, or am ill. And maybe some activities make it worse, such as sitting on your bum in a train all day. And recently, I did all of these in quite short succession. I don't know if that was the reason for that things escalated a bit, but it could well be. 

Discomfort in the buttocks to such extent it made it hard to sleep became a thing in January. And I am not enjoying that at all! And unfortunately, both buttocks were involved in this. And the left one I could stretch as usual, and I had been doing industrial amount of stretching, but the right one really protested against stretching. It hurt! I couldn’t do it without making a plethora of unelegant sounds.

A bum stretch

I also took the yoga roller I have out of the cupboard. It had been gathering dust there for a while. But now it was all hands on deck. I also did industrial amounts of rolling. Anything to get my comfort back. I really need my sleep!

After a night in which I saw it get to 4am (which was the night I got the message from Nick) I contacted the physio. He suggested exercises to increase mobility of the lumbar spine. I googled a bunch. The one that seemed to do the most was the ‘sphinx stretch’ so I now do that too. 

Luckily, after that one night I at least could sleep. I’m still not back to normal, but that’s a start. And I just keep stretching, hoping I will get my full comfort back sooner or later…

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