I get a shooting pain in my right thigh, which feels like running from inside the knee up through the inner side of the thigh. Thankfully, I do not get this pain at all in everyday activities. I am 100% certain it has something to do with leg adduction.

This pain completely disappeared when I took a more than 10 days of break because of sickness, but now it's back with the original intensity.

Where I get pain seems to correspond well to the gracilis muscle. As always, GetBodySmart.com shows you with a cool layered graphic where gracilis muscle is. The image on the right is from here; it should be a left leg with the inner side facing us.

The gracilis muscle is biarticulate, because it goes over two joints: the hip joint and the knee joint. The rectus femoris muscle I mentioned in "Why Are My Kicks So Miserable?" (Saturday, September 05, 2009) is biarticulate also.

It seems unlikely that there is anything wrong with the right gracilis itself. When I palpate my right inner thigh and my left inner thigh, I do not feel any difference. If that is true, self-massaging it will not help.

I said "shooting pain", but I am not even sure that is the right way to put it. It does feel like one when it occurs when I am doing left side kicks. Jd from the gym thinks shooting pain indicates some nerve being pinched because of some internal mis-alignment. She then suggested that I see a bodywork specialist.

I have another theory. The gracilis muscles goes over the hip joint and the knee joint and it is stretched when the knee is extended or the hip is abducted. It is no brainer when these two movements occur independently; however, I think it's not as trivial when these movements are combined. I think it can also be stretched by a bent knee if this muscle and the knee are aligned in a certain way. The straight line between the origin and the insertion of a muscle is where the muscle is in a natural state. But in the gracilis' case, the knee can be on this imaginary shortest-distance line, in which case the gracilis has to go around the knee, for which it has to stretch more. Is it possible this is a factor? It does not explain why I have the pain on the right side but none on the left, though.

Another thing to note because this might be relevant: When I stretch my right adductors, I sometimes feel a slight pain in the right cheek of the butt. I read about a stretching method for side splits, in which you start with beating both cheeks of your butt with your fists 50-60 times. I wonder how that can be conducive, but this suggests there is a connection of some sort between those areas and leg adductors.

I believe the cheek areas of the butt is where the piriformis muscle is, under the gluteus maximus. The piriformis muscle is supposed to abduct the thigh when the hip is flexed. So... that makes it an antagonist of adductors?

The sciatic nerve runs under (or through) the piriformis muscle. The latter can squeeze or irritate the former. This is called piriformis syndrome. eOrthoPod.com provides a detailed account of this syndrome. Piriformis syndrome is one of the reasons for sciatica, but I do not think I have piriformis syndrome or sciatica, for that matter.

I listed a piriformis stretching method using a foam roller in "Myofascial Release" (Friday, August 28, 2009) and other methods in "Piriformis Stretching" (Sunday, August 30, 2009).

I have mentioned the pain in what could be the gracilis muscle many times in the past: "C.'s Advice on My Roundhouse Kicks" (Saturday, October 03, 2009), "Health Update" (Wednesday, October 28, 2009), and "Kicking Can Improve Your Hip Flexibility?" (Monday, November 02, 2009).