Fixing Spinal Erector Imbalance

Thank you kindly for the replies folks, particularly Altered. I feel like I should be paying you for this consult (take 2 days off work instead) very kind of you to offer your assistance and knowledge.

I am resuming work tomorrow after 2.5 years off (share trading) and that will force me to have a break from my daily schedule in the gym. I’ll try to use some of these suggestions to rectify the imbalance and I’m confident that the rest will alleviate or eliminate the pain.

Should the side planks etc not provide the answer, I’ll see an osteo.

Grind - I’m a big fan of ART so I’d be interested to see how your treatment goes in the longer term.

Thanks guys.

Altered State,

It hurts in the most in the morning, specifically when I go into a posterior pelvic tilt. If I rest my elbows on a waist high table, support myself on my right leg, letting my left leg dangle, I exhale, relax my abs and I get a really dull ache on my left side. When I try the same with the right hip, I feel absolutely no discomfort.

The pain use to be on both sides but not anymore, probably through some of the mobility, soft tissue, or activation work I’ve done. This leads me to believe there is either a right/left imbalance or there I have a weak synergist making my QL work extra hard.

My left quad is noticeably larger than my right. That said, my right hip rotators are tigher than my left leading me to believe I shift more of my weight to my left side while squatting (a compensation pattern). I don’t think this is causing my pain though. I took 2 months off bilateral squatting to see if I could take the stress the burdened left side. However I found no alleve.

Hi guys, i’m having the same kind of problem at the moment with not being able to effectively recruit the right side of my erector spinae’s.
Building up to this i use to deadlift quite a lot and noticed that when deadlifting the left side of my anterior core contracted hard and had a nice feeling of stable pressure but the right side seemed a little soft or a little more relaxed.

At the time i didnt think too much about it and thought it would balance out the more i trained but after a while i slowly started to realise that my right erector spinaes was also contracting less and less which leads me to where i am at the moment.

I done a little research and discovered that the deep transverse abdominis muscle seems to work in tandem with the multifidi muscle which is a major erector spinae.
If for whatever reason the transverse abdominis is not being recruited properly on one side then i think it shuts down or inhibits the use of the multifidi on the same side.

For me this makes perfect sence so now im gonna find out if im leaning to one side slightly making the muscles on my left side tight and contract more strongly than the muscles on my right side thus giving the symptoms of my left TA & multifidi to be recruited harder than my right TA & multifidi during exercises.
Hopefully with a few ab/hip/back/leg stretches and specialised exercises i can level things out, start recruiting the whole of my transverse abdominis properly again and get some symetrical contraction in my spinae erectors.

Old thread i know but if anyone has the same problems then this mght be something to concider.

The difference could be due to a discrepancy in the genetically determined lengths of the muscle bellies, as major asymmetry usually is.