Hunterdog

Title says it all. I am getting a pain/discomfort in right butt near thigh with some discomfort into right quad after about an hour on indoor trainer and after a few hours outside. I foam roll a fair amount but not sure if at right spot. Quad issue and/or hamstring issue? Fitting issue? Any ideas?

caloso

abramj

I agree with caloso. I would seek professional help. A true Massage Therapist for a deep tissue massage, and a Physical Therapist certified. You may have a pinched nerve that needs some muscles loosened up.

jon c. 

sounds like it could be sciatica. for which I can offer no suggestion of relief.

Hunterdog

Good suggestions. I do have a small herniation at the L5-S1 and have had issues with pelvic mobility, so it makes sense. I was hoping that the cure would be a new bike though.

KraneXL

Sure, you're one-sided. Good news is, everybody is...to some level. Hence, the left/right side dominant thing. In my case, I'm not only cursed with the natural genetic imbalance, but an additional injury to my right back/shoulder nerve cluster magnified it by a factor of ten.


In the best case scenario this imbalance goes unnoticed. Only when we train and approach your limit do these things start to show with joint/muscle soreness similar to what you describe.


To fix it, you need to consciously focus on making the adjustment to your weaker side. In the worst case, you have to employ some external instrument or ancillary modification to balance the difference.


In my case, my right arm is nearly 1.5" smaller than my left due to atrophy. It was much worse prior to my rehab. I basically began from a skeleton arm. But I got very depressed and gave up completely. Even though I now train regularly to rehab my right side, I still can't go anywhere near my left arm's potential. If I did, the imbalance would become even greater than it already is. Been there, done that. It provides some measure of relief, but only temporarily. Still, if I could afford it, I'd do it regularly. My physician suggest acupuncture. Not sure if that's more quackery or not, so haven't decided whether to make the appointment yet.

Cyclist0108

I have a small difference in leg length (undiagnosed until I was being measured for a custom bike), but it is enough to cause this if the saddle is slightly too high. Before doing anything drastic, see if lowering the saddle a small amount helps.

Carbonfiberboy 

There is a non-piriformis issue: usually that pain goes down the back of the leg, not over into the quad. IME that's quite odd. And it's usually felt pretty strongly in the lower back, too.

A really good bike fitter with a background in exercise physiology or PT would be a very good person to talk to.

I get one-sided pain sometimes, not from imbalance necessarily, but because I've happened to load one side unevenly while doing something, playing some sport, etc., and pulled a muscle or irritated a tendon. For me, those things go away with every-day stretching and continued exercise that doesn't involve pain.

There's something vaguely diagnostic you could do right now: go out on your trainer and get long and low: put a folded towel on your bars and get down into the invisible aerobars position, roll your pelvis forward, straighten your back as much as possible, and try to pedal perfect effortless circles in a low gear for a half hour. See what that feels like. Then do the same thing, but sitting up, hands on bar tops, back again as straight as possible. Note differences.

I find that ibuprofen can be diagnostic to some degree: Take 600mg of ibuprofen every 6 hours for a day. See if the pain goes away. If it does, it's from inflammation. Then the question becomes what caused it?

Hermes

Pain is hard to diagnose because a strained or tight muscle can refer pain to other areas. So one could think leg pain is from a pinched nerve in the back while it is really from an injured glute. And then there is the mind body connection where it is the brain creating the problem.

I use a physiatrist to diagnose this type of problem and he prescribes drugs, physical therapy or massage and etc. I have a track racing friend, who is also a certified PT. He has helped me at the velodrome releasing tight muscles with manipulation that were causing pain.

Besides the foam roller this is also the lacrosse ball and even a baseball. Sometimes to relieve tight muscles one has to apply a lot of pressure, at the right points, to get the muscle to release. So one thing that can be done is start with a lacrosse ball and while on your back put the lacrosse ball between the glute and the floor and apply some pressure. Roll around and find the spot that generates the most pain and then gently add more pressure and breathe through the pain.

It is better to see a doc and go to PT and let PT suggest a lacrosse ball and instruct how to use it. YMMV.

caloso

My piriformis issue manifested itself as pain in my knee. It was due to a tight IT band that was compensating for a weakness in my piriformis. It was solved by PT (surgical tubing crab walks and other exercises), a foam roller, and playing more soccer (strengthened my adductors).

Hunterdog

Follow-up: Saw PT yesterday. It is her opinion that the pain is the result of high hamstring tendinitis (I previously had mistakenly said pain traveled to quad when I meant the pain traveled down back of leg). She recommended that I sit on hard bench with lacrosse ball under area of pain, 3 to 5 locations, and raise my leg 5 reps. followed by hamstring stretches. I am hopeful!

Carbonfiberboy 

^Sounds right.

Hunterdog

Carbonfiberboy 

I had, and to some extent still have, an abrasion issue about where you're describing, and only on one side. I think my issue comes from one leg being quite a bit shorter than the other. I shimmed the short leg which helps, but it's impossible to shim it enough to completely even things out. A shorter crank on that side would probably help. For me, what helped the most was a different saddle which didn't have saddle where my issue was. Also saddle of the correct width. The first thing to try is to get the LBS to measure your butt and then try different saddles of the recommended width, looking for saddles that don't rub there. Best thing is to sit on them first in running shorts so you can really feel the saddle. I've done that in the store.

Now that Performance Bike is gone, I don't know another source for such a wide variety of saddles, which is too bad. However, I doubt that a custom saddle is necessary since there is such a tremendous variety of saddles available. You could look on ebay.

noglider 

Walking can be good for this, and it's good for a lot. I don't stretch enough in general. Walking helps me.

Seattle Forrest

Cycling doesn't really use the hamstrings unless your saddle is too high. So ours tend to be less developed than our quads, etc. Romanian deadlifts are a great hamstring stretch.

Carbonfiberboy 

Depends on how you pedal. I can pedal entirely with my hams, glutes, and hip flexors if my quads give out. Looking at and feeling my legs, I might have more muscle mass in my hams than in my quads. I'm another one who needs a saddle that's narrow at the tops of my hams, possibly for that reason.

Hunterdog

Carbonfiberboy 

There was a guy on here quite some time ago who had tendinopathy in a quad-related tendon. Tendonopathy seems to be a bit rare as usually tendinitis causes one to modify behavior or get it treated. Be that as it may, this guy went through a great variety of treatments, etc., no better. Finally he found a trainer who said what he had to do was to hit it with heavy weights, concentric, low reps. Fixed it. As they say, I'm not a doctor and am not prescribing, In your case, there's the additional issue that hams are easy to pull and can also tear a meniscus if too strongly activated. But all that said, it might be worth looking into with an appropriate PT person. Right now, google "heavy slow resistance tendinopathy." From one of the studies: " HSR yielded an elevated collagen network turnover."

Carbonfiberboy 

Another thought: On the bike, I roll my pelvis forward so that I perch on the bones of my pubic ramus. This is normal for road cyclists. These bones form a V-shape, narrower in the front. My current saddle, which works for me, is shaped so that it follows the shape of my pubic bones. I perch on the saddle so that my pubic ramus is just behind the edge of my saddle. The very tops of my hams are thus about 1.5" away from the saddle and don't touch it at all.

Rollfast

I have big fat comfort saddles normally so I actually feel better there and riding than in this stupid desk chair.

there's your sign?

Anyway, I tend to agree that you should investigate a different saddle or it's positioning.

That and let that thing heal...pain is there to tell you it don't work right!

Seattle Forrest

I pulled my left hammy a bit earlier this year from cycling. My saddle was a little too high for me. I may have missed it or forgotten, but how does the bike fit you?

Hunterdog

seedsbelize 

I had this issue, on the left. I started a floor workout, aimed at the glutes, and it fixed it very quickly. Five minutes a day.

timtak

I could start a new thread but I prefer to keep useful (the above was, I am not sure if mine will be) information together. Sciatica! and Lower Back Healt and Track Cycling is also very relevant.

I had an intermittent pain in my right butt since getting a spinal hernia from over zealous leg kicks while swimming crawl. I presumed it was some sort of sciatica/piriformis (not sure of the right word) due to the nerve poking out my spine a little. The pain was not great. I would poke my butt with the tip of my saddle from time to time and otherwise ignored it.

Recently however, I have been experiencing hip instability, as if my hip is starting to dislocate (which I think it is/was) on the same side when jogging, doing lunges especially curtsy lunges, and felt that cycling was not helping.

So I have been doing a lot of core exercises lately to try and regain hip stability. After a couple of weeks of lunges and hydrants and squats etc I ran up a local mountain (hill? 350m) and still felt my hip sort of give way a couple of times. It does not hurt, it just sort of goes. Scary.

My ability to run up the 'mountain' made me think my core strength is generally okay, but the fact that my hip gave out, made me realise I had a specific injury.

So, I started to take Dr. Back Stuart McGill's "glute amnesia" theory seriously. He claims that when people damage their back as a result of using glute muscles (as may have happened in my case with that hyper-extended leg kick in crawl) the same glute muscle can go to sleep.

So I got down on hands and knees and tried to find the weak spot. It was not difficult. I moved my leg in a crawl leg kick kind of movement and with my leg extended 45 degrees out back (between a hydrant and a donkey - or in a diagonal donkey - kick position) I felt that old (sciatica ?) butt pain. I googled diagonal donkey kicks and found a YouTube video saying that they are good gluteus minimus excercise. The position of the gluteus minimus is just where I had been poking myself in my right butt.

I think it is as simple as Dr. Back ( Stuart McGill) says or simpler. The slight sciatic pain that I felt when using that right glute minimus made me reticent to use the muscle, which I can avoid in my stompy very high saddle stance. My gluteus minimus got weaker and weaker until it can't hold my hip in its socket! I am 56 this year.

So I have been doing lots of gluteus minimus exercises. That diagonal donkey kick is best. I do it standing which exercises the support hip too, with 3kg on each ankle (some times more). Lateral leg raises, and isometric (one legged) glute bridges, one leg squats (which had cured my bad knees) and karate knees (knee kicks with pelvic thrust at the end) are good too. I am finding gluteus minimus exercises are really helping, and I think that my hip stability is back:-)

Since core exercises are rather dull, though I do intend to keep doing them, especially one legged squats, in future I will mix in some hill running and try and use my glutes to cycle even if it does cause a little pain. I am lucky in that my sciatica is almost entirely in my right butt (very slight sense of running down my leg) and not too painful.

I may also do pigeon type sciatica stretches (face down and face up) which I find nails the pain entirely.

So...don't ignore butt pain? I am not sure. There are many types of butt pain no doubt, but in my case I wish I had found out what it was early and exercised the afflicted part, rather than changing my exercise style to avoid the pain entirely.