The Psoas Minor

The psoas minor is an interesting muscle, if it is in your body at all. Most anatomy books refer to this muscle as devolving and claim that only fifty percent of people have one.

But a few years back while attending a workshop with one of my favorite teachers Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (bodymindcentering.com) she said that in forty years of working with people she had never met anyone who didn’t have a psoas minor. That was good enough for me and I proceeded to teach accordingly often referring to the dichotomy between what Bonnie said and what the books said.

Fast-forward a bit to another workshop with Bonnie. While doing a partner exercise with one of her teachers we began talking about the psoas minor. She had had the exact response as I did when Bonnie said that everyone had a psoas minor until she went to a cadaver workshop where she mentioned this to the instructor. They checked all thirty-nine cadavers and only one had a psoas minor.

This again threw me for a loop until I was reading something by Tom Myers (anatomytrains.net) that referred to a fascial connection through the diaphragm, iliopsoas, piriformis and the obturators. He mentions how this connection would be responsible for the energetic feeling of the psoas minor being present and this is likely what Bonnie was referring to.

It is all so fascinating and confusing isn’t it?