What position should the pelvis be in when you run? It’s a question you probably haven’t given much thought to unless you’re a runner with a performance goal or with an injury.

There are many popular blogs and Youtube videos on this topic that argue the pelvis should be in a neutral position. I even found one popular post that claims the gluteal muscles should be slightly tense during the duration of a person’s run to maintain pelvis position.

Before making blanket statements about what the pelvis should and shouldn’t be doing during running, it may be helpful to understand the basic anatomy of the area.

The Basic Anatomy of the Pelvic Area

Your pelvis is a bowl-shaped structure comprised of two halves. Each half of the pelvis consists of three bones: the ilium, the ischium, and the pubis.

• The ilium is the wing-shaped structure on the side, whose ridge you can feel in the front—it’s commonly referred to as the hip bone even though it’s a pelvis bone.
• The ischium is the base of the pelvis, and the ischial tuberosity, a portion of the ischium that protrudes, and serves as an attachment point for several muscles, is commonly referred to as the sitting bone.
• The pubis is the bone in the front of your torso below your belly button. The point at which these three bones converge is the acetabulum, aka the hip joint. The femur (upper leg bone) inserts into the acetabulum.¹ Many muscles cross the hip joint and control movement at both the femur and the pelvis.

The sacrum attaches to the pelvis at the sacroiliac joint, and the coccyx, or the tail bone, comprises the back pelvis.

Remember how there are two halves to the pelvis? There are also two sacroiliac joints, one on each side, because you have two ilia. The SI joint is stable, and dislocations of the SI joint are extremely rare.²

In the front, the two halves of the pelvis meet at the pubic symphysis, an interesting joint that is separated by a fibrocartilaginous disc between the two bones. It’s designed to allow a small amount of translation and rotation; because the pelvis is shaped like a closed ring, movement at the pubic symphysis means there is movement at the SI joint.

The Position of the Pelvis As You Run

The position of the pelvis is determined by several things, including the position of the legs and torso. The joints of the body don’t work in isolation; they work in an integrated way.

When you run, many things happen to allow you to transmit force throughout the body as you move forward. The rotation occurs in the pelvis, which is counterbalanced by the rotation in the thorax (the part of the torso where the ribs are located).³

This movement helps you maintain your center of mass over your base of support as you move from one leg to another, traveling forward in space.

Think about this for a second. The pelvis rotates as you run, which means it needs to move in a multidimensional way. If it remained still while you ran, that would change how you performed the act of running.

Try this:

• Come into a standing position. Walk down your hallway. Feel how your knees bend and straighten naturally during the walking gait.
• Now, keep your knees straight while you walk forward. Does that feel different? What changed?
• Now, bend your knees quite a bit and keep them bent as you walk forward, never straightening them. How does that feel different?

When you change the way the knee joint is integrated into the movement, you change how the load is distributed up the leg. Each situation resulted in different loading patterns and different amounts of movement in the pelvis.

The same thing would happen if you tried to keep the pelvis still while you walked down your hallway. Your gait would change to accommodate the stiffness through the center of your body.

How Much Should the Pelvis Move When You Run?

Now that you understand that, yes, the pelvis moves when you run, the next logical question would be, how much should the pelvis move when you run? And what does anterior pelvic tilt have to do with any of this?

Think back to the bowl shape of the pelvis. When the pelvis tips forward, this is referred to as anterior pelvic tilt. It turns out; the pelvis makes an interesting oscillating movement while running that creates a spring-like mechanism throughout the leg.⁴

It also turns out the pelvis naturally moves through both anterior and posterior pelvic tilt during the running gait, coordinating with hip movement.³

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “I learned that if I don’t have a good hip extension, I will have more anterior pelvic tilt.”

Maybe. But maybe not. Static hip extension tests (think lying on your side while someone moves your leg around to see how much it moves) don’t correlate to the ability of the pelvis and hip to coordinate efficiently during running.⁵

A more significant indicator of how well the pelvis and hip coordinate may be the ability of the ribs and pelvis to work together synergistically. This ability isn’t related to anterior pelvic tilt but is related to both motor control and having a base level of strength.

A Note About Lumbar Extension

When you run, the lumbar spine naturally moves, coordinating with the movement of the pelvis. When you run downhill, there is an increase in lumbar spine movement, possibly to dissipate the additional ground reaction forces that occur while running downhill.⁶

Additionally, there is variation in the amount of natural lumbar curvature between individuals and between the sexes. (Females tend to have a more significant lumbar curve than males, possibly to support the shift of the center of mass that occurs during pregnancy).⁷

This curvature means that visually when you look at someone and see their back curving in, that they may not have a weak core or issues with an anterior pelvic tilt. It might just be their structure, and that structure might support them just fine while running if they can keep the top and bottom half of the body working together.

The Synergy Between the Ribs and Pelvis

I mentioned this a couple of paragraphs back, but perhaps the accurate determination of efficient pelvis and spinal mechanics during gait is the relationship between the ribs and the pelvis.

If the ribs are disconnected from the torso because they are flared up and forward, it’s almost like the force that is distributed up the spine from the legs stops. If the ribs aren’t anchored to anything, this alters how the pelvis moves while it propels you forward.

What this means is maybe the issue isn’t that you need to engage your glutes or abs while you run if you feel like your running mechanics aren’t efficient, or it seems like you have to work harder than you think you should as you move forward in space.

Maybe the issue is you need to create more of a connection between the top and the bottom of the torso, finding vertical compression and maintaining vertical compression as you move forward in space.

Perhaps this would make you more efficient, make your gait feel smoother, and result in less wasted energy.

The next time you go for a run, imagine the ribs and pelvis connected in the front and the back. See if you can maintain that connection as you run. If you can’t find the connection at first, that’s okay.

Try tapping the bottom of the ribs in the front and the top of the pelvis. Imagine those points are gently coming closer together.

Now tap the lower ribs in the back and the back of the top of the pelvis. Imagine those points are gently coming together. Think occasionally about the points that you tapped as you run. As the connections become more apparent, you will feel your ability to shift your link between these areas increases.

The pelvis is designed to transfer force from the lower body to the torso—keeping it still limits its ability to do that well.

Finding ease in your running stride is multifaceted and should be viewed from a whole-body perspective. This ease is also what will enable you to run for many more years to come.

References:

1. Lewis C.L., Laudicina N.M., Khuu A., & Loverro K.L., “The Human Pelvis: Variation in Structure and Function During Gait.” The Anatomical Record. 300(4), 633-642. Pub. Mar.15, 2017.

2. Wong M., Sinkler M.A., & Keil J., “Anatomy, Abdomen and Pelvis, Sacroiliac Joint.” StatPearls Publishing [Internet] Jan 2020. Treasure Island (FL).

3. Preece S.J., Mason D., & Bramah C.A., “The coordinated movement of the spine and pelvis during running,” University of Salford Manchester, Online Nov 20, 2015. Elsevier. Human Movement Science. Vol 45, Feb 2016, Pg 110-118.

4. Otani T., Hashimoto K., Yahara M., Miyamae S., Isomichi T., Hanawa S., Sakaguchi M., Kawakami Y., Lim H-o., & Takanishi A., “Utilization of human-like pelvic rotation for running robot.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Jul 8, 2015.

5. Anthony Schache, Peter D. Blanch, Anna T. Murphy. “Relation of anterior pelvic tilt during running to clinical and kinematic measures of hip extension.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2000:34:4:279-283.

6. Levine D., Colston M.A., Whittle M.W., Pharo E.C., & Marcellin-Little D.J., “Sagittal lumbar spine position during standing, walking, and running at various gradients.” Journal of Athletic Training, 2007:42(1):29-34.

7. Hay O., Dar G., Abbas J., Stein D., May H., Masharawi Y., Peled N., & Hershkovitz I., “The Lumbar Lordosis in Males and Females, Revisited.” PLoS One, 10(8), e0133685. Aug 24, 2015.

The post The Pelvis When You Run, Viewed From a Whole-Body Perspective appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

One of the most critical medical interventions of the twentieth century is a saline solution.

Chances are high if the hospital is admitting you, it will be placing an IV drip that administers saline directly to your veins. Saline is one of the first items shipped to disaster sites and, at times, is in such high demand that the drug companies making saline experience shortages.¹

We Need Salt and Water

Saline solution is just a fancy name for saltwater, and the saline you receive in the hospital is comprised of .9% sodium chloride. A few years ago, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) recommended that due to the saline shortage, oral hydration should be used whenever possible. Oral hydration is a fancy term for drinking.

Most of us acquire the right amount of water and salt naturally, through drinking water and eating food.

We need both water and salt to maintain adequate blood sodium levels of 140 millimoles of sodium per liter of plasma.² This number is finely tuned; dropping below 135 mEq/L can lead to a myriad of issues, including:

• Cognitive impairment (think headache and confusion)
• Seizures
• Comas

The medical term for this is hyponatremia.³

Several things cause hyponatremia, including prolonged vomiting and diarrhea.

It can also occur in endurance athletes who over-drink. If an athlete consumes more water than they secrete through sweat and urine, they experience an increase in total body water compared to total body exchangeable sodium.⁴

How Much Is Enough?

This leads to an interesting question—how do you know when you’re drinking too much water? And how much water should you drink?

Maybe not eight glasses a day, suggests Eduardo Dolhun, a medical doctor with a particular interest in dehydration. (He also founded Drip Drop, an electrolyte powder⁵ that contains a precise ratio of electrolytes specifically designed to be used as an oral rehydration therapy, so there may be a financial bias.)

“Do you see the Massai running with water bottles?” he asks in James Hamblin’s book, “If Our Bodies Could Talk.” ⁶

He has a point. I searched images of Kenyans training and couldn’t find a single picture of anyone with a water bottle.

The Kenyans are some of the fastest humans on earth. Though their climate is relatively temperate (they train in the morning and late afternoons, when it’s often in the low 50s and 60s F), it’s also at altitude, and they aren’t exactly moving slowly.

Intrigued, I ran a PubMed search⁷ to find out about Kenyans drinking habits. It turns out, researchers have found the Kenyans are hydrated day-to-day with ad libitum fluid intake.

Ad libitum fluid intake means they drink whenever they want, however much they want. They also eat a diet comprised of low processed foods, including lots of vegetables and the occasional glass of whole milk. Hence, their dietary habits, perhaps, meet their daily needs without too much additional tinkering.⁸

It’s worthwhile to note that urination and feeling thirsty are the ways we evolved to regulate our fluid status. We also have the built-in ability to know what kind of drink we need intuitively—the taste buds in the mouth send messages to the brain about how much salt to ingest and how much water is required.

These messages cause a cascade of anticipatory reflexes that send information about when to start and stop drinking; this occurs before the water hits the bloodstream. These signals come from both the gut and the brain.⁹

Drinking in modern culture isn’t necessarily based on thirst. It’s based on:

• Pleasure (alcohol, hot chocolate, or lemonade on a summer’s day)
• To rev us up (caffeine)
• To calm us down (chamomile tea)

We become adept at either pre-empting thirst signals (drinking because we feel like we should) or ignoring thirst signals, just like we learn to ignore other interoceptive signals like pain, sensitivity, or hunger.

Listening to Our Bodies

Interoceptive signals are your internal cues about how you are feeling.

Much like the information from the external environment, like what you see, hear, and smell, informs your sense of safety and plays a large role in your movements and behavior, it also, makes your conscious and unconscious interpretation of your interoceptive cues.

Maybe part of what moves us out of our physiological balance point is a shift away from listening.

When we reconnect with the ability to pay attention to what our body is asking for, often, the solution unveils itself readily, whether it’s drinking water, eating a specific food, or moving in a particular way.

There is simplicity in listening, and simplicity is often confused with a lack of depth, as though the simple solution can’t be the real solution because it’s too easy. Instead, we search for complexity, and perhaps it is within this complexity that we lose touch with what it is that we need.

Improvisational Movement

When was the last time you sat down on the floor and permitted yourself to begin moving to see what showed up? And maybe instead of fighting your initial instincts because you weren’t sure they were right, you allowed yourself to move in a way that felt good and nourishing in some way?

• Nourishment can show up as strengthening or stretching.
• Nourishing movement can also show up as gentle movement, not fitting neatly into one box but still feeling supportive in some way.

You can try this right now. I will take a break from writing and do it with you. I usually do it for the length of one song, but if music isn’t your thing, set a timer for four minutes and see what happens. And if you have never done improvisational movement before and don’t know where to start, pick one body part and begin moving it.

See how the movement unfolds, spend time with what feels interesting, and see where that leads you.

How was that? How do you feel now compared to four minutes ago?

I feel so much better, and I didn’t even know I didn’t feel right before. The first song was too short (two minutes), so I went for two songs or about six minutes.

I started with stretch-type movements and rolling movements for my legs, which are sore from my workout two days ago, and that morphed into a fascinating upper extremity loading, leg mobility exploration. My legs feel less sore, I feel more energetic, and I feel more connected throughout my entire system.

When things get so out of balance, you no longer remember how to listen to your internal cues, and you can’t tell when you’re thirsty or when you could use some broccoli, take a moment to pause, and listen. Honor what you hear and see what happens.

Fred Rogers once said, “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”

Maybe learning to apply this basic principle to our selves is the ultimate biohacking technique. Or perhaps that’s too easy.

References:

1.U.S. Food & Drug Administration. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., “updates on some ongoing shortages related to IV fluids,” Press Release, 2018, Jan 16.

2. Parsons P.E., & Wiener-Kronish J.P., 2013. Chapter 45: Hyponatremia and Hypernatremia. In B.W. Butcher and K.D. Liu (Eds.), “Critical Care: Fifth Edition,” pp. 322-328. Elsevier. Google Books.

3. James L. Lewis III, MD. Hyponatremia. On Merck Manual Professional Version. 2020.

4. Hew-Butler, Tamara, et al. “Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia: 2017 Update.” Frontiers in medicine, vol.4:21. Mar 3, 2017.

5. DripDrop, ORS, “Oral Rehydration Solutions (ORS) are a scientific breakthrough that treat and prevent dehydration for millions of people worldwide.” Accessed Aug 30, 2020.

6. James Hamblin. “If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body.” Doubleday. 2016.

7. Fudge B.W., Easton C., Kingsmore D., Kiplamai F.K., Onywera V.O., Westerterp K.R., Kayser B., Noakes T.D., & Pitsiladis Y.P., (2008). “Elite Kenyan endurance runners are hydrated day-to-day with ad libitum fluid intake.” Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise. 2008 Jun; 40(6),1171-1179.

8. Christensen, Dirk L. “Diet Intake and Endurance Performance in Kenyan Runners.” Equine and Comparative Exercise Physiology 1, no. 4 (2004): 249–53.

9.Popkin B.M., D’Anci, K.E., & Rosenberg I.H., “Water, Hydration, and Health.” Nutrition Review, Vol 68(8):439-458. 2011.

The post Can Hydration Be As Simple As Listening To Our Bodies? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

A client came in recently, slightly irritated. “Jenn, you aren’t going to believe the commercial I recently saw. You are going to be upset.” Intrigued, because this client knows me well and she knows very few things phase me, I went ahead and took the bait. “What?”

“One of the feminine hygiene companies is making incontinence products targeted towards younger women. Just what women need—to be told they need to spend more money on products when they could get stronger and save themselves the money and the embarrassment of peeing themselves.”

A Little Background

This client had two children via C-section. One of her main goals, when she started seeing me, was not to pee herself when she got older. We work on things. No leaking has happened in the 13 years she has worked with me.

In the last two years, she found out both her stepmom and her sister struggle with UI. When she asked me what they should do, I told her they should both get referrals from their doctors to a pelvic floor physical therapist. I also told her I don’t think it’s a topic that’s talked about often enough. I train a lot of women who have had children, and I care about their total body strength, including the pelvic floor, though I am by no means anywhere close to an expert on the subject.

At some point, she looked at me and said, “I am beginning to think you’re right about why women take so long in the bathroom—they are cleaning themselves up as discreetly as possible.”

Women in the bathroom used to perplex me until I started realizing the sheer number of women struggling with incontinence. I have become more patient and understanding in recent years when waiting for several minutes for a stall.

After our session, which involved a lengthy discussion about the importance of strength and some mean, deeper abdominal exercises (for her), I began a search of urinary incontinence and exercise on my lunch break. What I found was interesting and, in my opinion, anyway, article worthy. Let’s start with the obvious.

Vaginal Birth and UI

One of the risk factors for UI is denervation of the pelvic floor muscles. Denervation means there has been a loss of nerve supply to a specific area. Nerves provide sensory and motor information to a body part—if you can’t feel an area, it’s more difficult to control that area.

One of the things associated with denervation to the pelvic floor is vaginal birth, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that statistics show up to 37.9% of women experience UI, even after 12 years past childbirth. Hence, UI products.

It’s not that cesarean delivery guarantees you won’t have UI, but the odds are less. Risk of pelvic organ prolapse is also less during a cesarean delivery; however, it is surgery, and there are a host of other factors that increase following C-sections.¹

As an aside, I have found training women post c-section is related to different concerns than working with women post vaginal birth. I will speak more about this in a later post.

From a movement perspective, this is important. If you are working with women who had a vaginal birth and you are moving towards higher impact movements, you probably want to make sure they can feel their pelvic floor during breath work and squats.

Female Athletes

It’s a problem that extends beyond vaginal births. An observational study² published in the European Journal of Sports Science found the prevalence of UI in high impact sports athletes was 70%. At the risk of stating the obvious, when you consider chances are low, the 82 out of 118 women surveyed reporting had given birth, this is a bit of a problem.

A meta-analysis³ examining the prevalence of urinary incontinence in female athletes found female athletes had a 177% increase in presenting with UI when compared to sedentary women.

The researcher’s physical exercise places women at higher UI risk because of increased intra-abdominal pressure that’s generated during high-impact activities, but aren’t we designed to run and jump and climb? And if we are designed to do those things, shouldn’t our pelvic floors respond by getting stronger?

Curiously, a literature review⁴ by Steenstrup et.al, (2018), found that while data is limited, sedentary lifestyle appears to be a risk factor for UI. At this point, it appears being a woman places you at risk for UI.

Menopause

Lest you think the issue disappears with age, in China, more than 20% of women between the ages 45-59 experience Stress Urinary Incontinence, (SUI).⁵ SUI refers to leaking during elevated abdominal pressure during coughing and sneezing.

Data collected from a questionnaire⁶ given to women between 1995-2005 found that of 1,339 women reporting UI, 61% did not seek treatment because 73% believed the UI wasn’t “bad enough,” and 53% believed UI was “a normal part of aging.”

This begs the question: how many women struggle with UI and don’t report it? Hence, products aimed at women specifically for UI.

And Don’t Forget About the men…

Prostate cancer happens. One of the treatments for prostate cancer is a radical prostatectomy (removal of the prostate). When the prostate is removed, the risk of UI increases.

And maybe UI just happens. A survey⁷ of 23,240 Danish men found 1,657 reported various forms of UI. Granted, this is a lot lower than the numbers reported for women, (7% as opposed to 20% or more reported in the sections above), but it’s not insignificant.

Implications for Movement Professionals and Personal Trainers

So at this point, I think we can all agree UI is a bit of an issue, probably one that’s bigger than many of us realize. What can movement professionals do?

As always, creating a line of open communication is key. If any of your clients shy away from a higher impact exercise without offering an explanation, respect there might an underlying issue she/he doesn’t want to discuss. If at some point, someone does share with you, she’s struggling with leaking, encourage her to get a referral to a pelvic floor physical therapist.

Here’s what we know:

• Pelvic floor muscle training has a positive effect on UI in women⁸
• In men with UI following a prostatectomy, research suggests improvement in UI following a strengthening program that includes Kegels, squats, supermans, and bridging; hip extensor strength and endurance were significantly higher in the continent group.⁹
• Women who regularly exercise have stronger pelvic floor muscles mid-pregnancy than women who are sedentary.¹⁰
• Ankle position facilitates greater contraction of the pelvic floor muscles.¹¹

^​

Let’s look at this another way. Getting strong will affect the entire body, all of the way to the skeleton. Your pelvic floor muscles are no exception; if you load the pelvis in a variety of ways, the muscles that support the pelvis will get stronger.

A Brief Note About the Physiology and Anatomy

Muscle tone and strength maintain your structural integrity. When the muscles of the pelvic floor are stiff and/or stretched out, the muscles fibers are less able to generate power. The majority of the muscles that comprise the pelvic floor are made up of slow twitch, so contraction during urination is initiated by a small number of fast twitch fibers. These muscles are affected during denervation, but with the appropriate exercise and pelvic floor training stimulus, can be strengthened.¹²

Kegels are a low-level activity, and while they may be appropriate to begin to improve coordination and awareness of the pelvic floor, in a movement and strength setting, the structure of the pelvis should be challenged in a way that stimulates strength and mobility.

The muscles that support the pelvis should be trained in different positions. If someone doesn’t have the ability to move the pelvis in isolation, chances are slim the pelvis is going to participate in an integrated way during movement.

From a practical perspective, it’s less about anterior or posterior pelvic tilt being bad, and more about the ability to being able to move the pelvis both directions, as well as laterally and rotationally. Basically, if you can channel your inner burlesque dancer, you have good access to mobility in the pelvic region.

Putting Theory Into Practice

How many positions can you perform a pelvic tilt? Can you do it in:

• Supine?
• Quadruped?
• Tall kneeling?
• Half kneeling?
• A squat?
• A lunge position?
• A plank?
• Seated?
• Long sitting?

You own the movement when you can translate it into a wide variety of positions.

External Rotation

Strengthening external rotation of the hip may increase pelvic floor muscle strength, possibly because of the orientation of muscles such as the obturator internus and piriformis.¹³ The piriformis is actually one of the muscles of the pelvic floor; it’s also one of the rotator cuff muscles of the hip,¹⁴ so it stabilizes the femur in the socket during movement.

It’s not only implicated in UI, but it’s also implicated in non-relaxing pelvic floor dysfunction, which can involve pain during urination and sexual intercourse (different topic for a different day, but worth noting).

Putting Theory Into Practice

External rotation should be strengthened progressively. There is so much value in groundwork and different floor transitions; I frequently use the floor work from the MovNat system and squat variations from the GMB elements program to work on external rotation. I also using breathing techniques and isometric holds to feel movement in the pelvic floor.

If someone struggles with external rotation, teaching the basic clamshell exercise creates awareness and the ability to isolate the movement of external rotation. Like Kegels, these are a low-level movement and clients/students should be progressed to more dynamic movements.

The shin box/seated 90/90 exercise is an excellent way to teach external and internal rotation. A wide number of variations and transitions can be implemented from this position once basic points are covered. Prone frogger is also an excellent exercise for isolating external rotation at the hip joint.

Ankle Position

How you use your feet and ankles affect how you experience work in your pelvis and hips. Have you ever cued someone to push through the heel when stepping on to a step in order to get the person to feel the gluteal muscles more?

Or maybe you’ve cued the pressing of the big toe and arch into the floor while staying centered in the heel in order to help someone feel the adductors. Your feet and your hips work together to create movement; it shouldn’t come as a surprise that ankle position impacts pelvic floor activity.¹¹

Think about what happens when women wear high heels. What position does their pelvis naturally move to accommodate the motion? Anteriorly, right? Again, this isn’t about anterior or posterior pelvic tilt being better or worse, but it should make sense that ankle dorsiflexion or a neutral ankle improves resting activity in the pelvic floor muscles.

Try this: come into standing on the balls of your feet. Try and contract your pelvic floor. Now, lower your feet to the ground. Try and contract your pelvic floor. Which was easier?

Now, in a standing position, move your pelvis into an anterior pelvic tilt. Contract your pelvic floor. Move your pelvis into a posterior pelvic tilt. Contract your pelvic floor. Which variation was easier?

Putting Theory Into Practice

Our pelvis should be able to move anteriorly and posteriorly. Our ankle should be able to plantarflex and dorsiflex. If you are working with someone who struggles with UI, early on in the programming, work on ankle mobility and create awareness from the feet to the pelvis by utilizing a variety of positions while working on the feet in a flat position.

Conveniently, squats, squat walks, and low lunge variations strengthen the hips and pelvis while also improving ankle dorsiflexion. You can also spend time simply working on feet exercises barefoot in order to create more mobility in the muscles in the feet and ankles.

A Brief Note About Female Athletes

I noted earlier female athletes appear to have a higher incidence of UI than their sedentary counterparts. This is probably, like all things, multi-faceted, but I do wonder if more restorative, mindful interventions surrounding the pelvis and the feet would help?

Slowing down a little bit and paying attention to feeling how different areas move can create awareness, downregulate the nervous system, and improve overall coordination. While gravity, force, and pressure all play a role in the pelvic floor, so does having access to a variety of positions and balanced strength. I couldn’t find any meta-analyses that looked at these types of interventions, and it’s an area I think that deserves further study. Strength happens from the inside out.

Urinary incontinence is a topic that’s considered taboo. It affects men and women of all ages and athletic capabilities. Creating programs that strengthen and mobilize the pelvis, hips, ankles, and feet in a variety of ways, utilizing isometric holds, and knowing who the pelvic floor physical therapists are in your area so you can refer out are all excellent ways to help clients deal with an issue that can decrease overall quality of life.

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References:

1 Keag, Oonagh E, Norman, Jane E, Stock, Sarah J, “Long-term risks and benefits associated with cesarean delivery for mother, baby, and subsequent pregnancies: Systematic review and meta-analysis. ” PLoS Med. 2018 Jan; 15(1): e1002494. Published online 2018 Jan 23.

2. Cardoso, AMB, Lima, CROP, Ferreira, CWS. “Prevalence of urinary incontinence in high-impact sports athletes and their association with knowledge, attitude and practice about this dysfunction.” European Journal of Sports Science, 2018 Nov;18(10):1405-1412. Epub 2018 Jul 19.

3. Teixeira, RV, Colla, C, Sbruzzi G, Mallmann, A, Paiva, LL. “Prevalence of urinary incontinence in female athletes: a systematic review with meta-analysis. “Int Urogynecol J, 2018 Apr 13.

4. Steenstrup, B, Le Rumeur, E, Moreau, S, Cornu, JN. “[Sedentary lifestyle and urinary incontinence in women: A literature review]. “Prog Urol. 2018, Aug 8 pii: S1166-7087(18)30184-2.

5. Lifen, Liu, Ying ZHANG, Jingya GONG, Xin Chen Hongmei WU, and Weipei ZHU, “Effects of Different Treatment Methods on the Clinical and Urodynamic State of Perimenopausal Women with Stress Urinary Incontinence” Iran J Public Health. 2018 Aug; 47(8): 1090–1097.

6. Waetjen LE1, Xing G1, Johnson WO2, Melnikow J1, Gold EB1; Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN). “Factors associated with reasons incontinent midlife women report for not seeking urinary incontinence treatment over 9 years across the menopausal transition. ” Menopause. 2018 Jan; 25(1):29-37.

7. Juhyun Park,† Dong Hyun Yoon,† Sangjun Yoo, Sung Yong Cho, Min Chul Cho, Ga-Young Han, Wook Song, and Hyeon Jeong, “Effects of Progressive Resistance Training on Post-Surgery Incontinence in Men with Prostate Cancer.” J Clin Med. 2018 Sep; 7(9): 292. Published online 2018 Sep 19.

8. Dumoulin C1, Hay-Smith J, Habée-Séguin GM, Mercier J. “Pelvic floor muscle training versus no treatment, or inactive control treatments, for urinary incontinence in women: a short version Cochrane systematic review with meta-analysis.” Neurourol Urodyn. 2015 Apr;34(4):300-8. Epub 2014 Nov 18.

9. Juhyun Park,† Dong Hyun Yoon,† Sangjun Yoo, Sung Yong Cho, Min Chul Cho, Ga-Young Han, Wook Song, and Hyeon Jeong. “Effects of Progressive Resistance Training on Post-Surgery Incontinence in Men with Prostate Cancer.” J Clin Med. 2018 Sep; 7(9): 292. Published online 2018 Sep 19.

10. Bø K, Ellstrøm Engh M, Hilde G. “Regular exercisers have stronger pelvic floor muscles than nonregular exercisers at midpregnancy.” Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2018 Apr;218(4):427.e1-427.e5. Epub 2017 Dec 26.

11. Kannan P, Winser S, Goonetilleke R, Cheing G. “Ankle positions potentially facilitating greater maximal contraction of pelvic floor muscles: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Disabil Rehabil. 2018 May 7:1-9.

12. Andrea Marques, PT, Ph.D.,* Lynn Stothers, MD, FRCSC,† and Andrew Macnab, MD, FRCPCH FRCPC, FCAHS†‡, “The status of pelvic floor muscle training for women .” Can Urol Assoc J. 2010 Dec; 4(6): 419–424.

13. Tuttle, Lori J. PT, Ph.D.; DeLozier, Elizabeth R. SPT; Harter, Kimberly A. SPT; Johnson, Stephanie A. SPT; Plotts, Christine N. SPT; Swartz, Jessica L. SPT. “The Role of the Obturator Internus Muscle in Pelvic Floor Function.” Journal of Women’s Health Physical Therapy: January/April 2016-Volume 40 – Issue 1 – p 15–19.

14. Stephanie S. Faubion, Lynne T. Shuster, and Adil E. Bharuchac. “Recognition and Management of Nonrelaxing Pelvic Floor Dysfunction.” Mayo Clin Proc. 2012 Feb; 87(2): 187–193.

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Regardless of whether balance is something you ever think about, you have a sense of where your center of mass is located. It’s the spot where you feel most stable and least likely to be knocked off balance. When you move, your body searches for the place that feels the safest, giving you a sense of postural control.

Balance. The ability to recover from something that knocks you off center. The feeling that scampering over loose rocks doesn’t pose a threat because you know you have the ability to catch yourself.

Regardless of whether balance is something you ever think about, you have a sense of where your center of mass is located. It’s the spot where you feel most stable and least likely to be knocked off balance. When you move, your body searches for the place that feels the safest, giving you a sense of postural control.

The Role of Postural Control

It turns out this postural control is based not only on your overall strength and mobility but also whether you practice any sort of balance training. A systematic review by Low, et.al, ran meta-analyses on 22 trials that examined the effectiveness of balance training, resistance training, or a multi-component exercise intervention on older adults’ postural control.¹ Balance training improved postural control; resistance training and multi-component exercise training did not.

“Wait,” you’re thinking, “balance training is so 2006.” True, but falls and fractures are so 2018 that it could be argued maybe balance training should make a comeback.

Curiously, the muscles of the abdominals associated with postural control are considered stabilizers.² Many people interpret this to mean they keep the spine still while the limbs move around them.

However, if balance training improves postural control while resistance training doesn’t in 22 studies, perhaps a better way to view these muscles is they prevent you from falling. Training low-risk situations where you have to recover from a disturbance of balance, otherwise known as a perturbation, may be a more effective way to train postural stability.

Additionally, poor balance is associated with low back pain.³ The solution to low back pain is often endless planks, but what if dynamic balance were another way to strengthen the muscles that provide support to the spine? Some may even find the idea of dynamic balance fun, a word no one uses to describe endless planks.

Dynamic balance training is unique in that it uses the visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive system to accomplish the goal (recover from a fall or remain upright). Because of this, it’s not just trunk muscles that work to maintain stability; the muscles that provide stability to the hip, such as the gluteus medius, and the ankle show increases in activity, while the visual and vestibular system is challenged to provide accurate information to the brain.⁴ Balance training, then, could be considered a mind/body exercise.

Balance Training for the Mind

Conveniently, the total body nature of balance training may increase neuroplasticity in the regions of the brain associated with visual and vestibular self-motion perception. This, of course, makes sense given the fact your ability to perceive where your body is located in space is based on visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive input.

But what you might not realize is that the same areas that perceive visual and vestibular information are related to spatial orienting and memory. This is potentially good news for your brain if you are planning on living a long time. Maintaining neuroplasticity in these brain regions might help with cognition as you age.

Okay, so if you are at risk of falling and/or you have low back pain, you care about your memory, and you like the idea of incorporating something that’s good for your brain and body. But you barely have time to fit in your lifting program; adding one more thing sounds like an impossibility, and you don’t have any aspirations of joining the circus. How can you implement this information?

Balance training doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective, and can easily be worked in between sets, as a dynamic warm-up, or on recovery days.

Examples of dynamic balancing exercises include:

• Walking on a 2×4 a variety of ways. Options include walking forwards, backward, while throwing a ball, with high knees, getting as low as you can, slowly, and with the feet touching. Set a timer and use the 2×4 either as a warm-up or cool-down.
• Single leg squat work without weight. Weight makes it easier to balance; spending time on a variety of unweighted single leg squat drills will improve your ability to recover when you lose your balance and make your ankles more responsive.
• Single leg mobility drills while staying loose. The ability to stay perfectly still on one leg is admirable, but it doesn’t translate into being responsive. Responsiveness is what allows you to recover from falls, not rigidity.
• Practice falling. Falling becomes much less scary when you have strategies for dealing with the floor. Basic rolling moves, like rolling squat get-ups, can be a great place to start. Once you get comfortable and gain the mobility needed in the back to roll forward and backward softly, progress to backward rolls and forward rolls.

There are a few things to pay attention to as you begin exploring dynamic balance. The first is to make sure you don’t hold your breath. Often, when people are exposed to things that are new and/or stressful, the breath is the first thing to go. This doesn’t help with stability or staying calm, so check in with yourself and make sure you are breathing by emphasizing the exhale once in a while.

The next is to make sure you aren’t trying to hold yourself perfectly still. There is a sweet spot between not being so loose that you feel out of control and not being so rigid that when something finally knocks you over, the thud you make is spectacular. Rigidity does not equate to stability.

The final thing to notice is where is your weak link? Do you feel like the all of the parts respond equally to helping you maintain balance, or is there a lot of movement or tension in your knee, or your ankle, or your right pinkie finger? (I don’t know what it is about the right pinkie finger. Clients stick it out as though it alone will maintain their balance.) When you are able to strike a balance between stability and mobility, things work a little bit better, especially when you are trying not to fall.

Find Your Dynamic Balance

Working on dynamic balance will improve body awareness and coordination which, while it might not translate directly to your back squat numbers, will help you out if you decide to participate in a game of pick-up basketball or go for a hike up uneven terrain.

Additionally, while you aren’t 65 yet, hopefully, you will be 65 someday, so working on your balance now gives you a head start to reducing fall risk and maintaining your cognitive abilities as you age.

References:

1. Low, D.C., Walsh, G.S., & Arkesteijn, M., (2017). Effectiveness of exercise interventions to improve postural control in older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of centre of pressure measurements. Sports Medicine, 47, 101-112.

2. Cioni, M., Pisasale, M., Abela, S., Belfiore, T., & Micale, M., (2010). Physiological electromyographic activation patterns of trunk muscles during walking. The Open Rehabilitation Journal, 3, 136-142.

3. Berenshteyn, Y., Gibson, K., Hackett, G.C., Trem, A.B., & Wilhelm, M., (2018). Is standing balance altered in individuals with chronic low back pain? A systematic review. Disability Rehabilitation, 1-10.

4. Stokes, H.E., Thompson, J.D., & Franz, J.R., (2017). The neuromuscular origins of kinematic variability during perturbed walking. Scientific Report, 7(1), 808.

5. Rogge, A.K., Roder, B., Zech, A., Hotting, K., (2018). Exercise-induced neuroplasticity: balance training increases cortical thickness in visual and vestibular cortical regions. Neuroimage, 179, 471-479.

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The gluteal muscles. Peaches. The thick musculature that generates the forces needed to run, jump, and propel you forward. It’s an area that receives a lot of attention and people have a lot of opinions on how to strengthen, but how does this muscle group actually work?

When people refer to the gluteal region, they are usually talking about the gluteus maximum, a multi-pennate muscle that is akin to the deltoid of the shoulder- it generates hip movement in a variety of ways, depending upon how the bones are positioned.

Directly underneath the gluteus maximum is the gluteus medius, a muscle that essentially supports the movement of the gluteus maximus. It rotates the femur internally and externally, and like its sibling the gluteus maximus, its muscle fibers also run in more than one direction, meaning that what it does depends on how the bones are leveraged.

Finally, underneath those two muscles is the gluteus minimus. It plays a supporting role in both stabilizations of the hip socket and movement.

You also have one more group of muscles that are worth noting- they are the rotator cuff muscles of the hip and, like the rotator cuff muscles of the shoulder, support and provide stability during movement.

While the gluteus maximus is often considered the prime mover of the hip joint, all of these muscles work together during various phases of gait and dynamic movement to keep your joint in the socket and to keep you moving forward.

You may have read somewhere on the internet that these muscles are “off” or they are “inhibited” or they “aren’t working.” The nature of their location means if they aren’t working, you wouldn’t be able to stand up or walk, so as long as you are upright, they work. However, your ability to load them so you feel the sensation of work is dependent upon position.

The Deadlift

To illustrate this, let’s look at the difference between a squat and a deadlift, two frequently taught skills, both of which use the gluteal muscles to accomplish the task of returning to a standing position, but the way the gluteal muscles are used differs because of position.

In the deadlift, the torso is hinged forward, the pelvis is back, and the shins are vertical. In order to return to an upright position, your feet and hips work together to pull your pelvis forward.

Try this: Begin in a standing position. Step your right foot back about 18-20 inches. Let your left knee bend and feel the weight in the left foot (your right foot is on the floor as well, but for the purposes of this illustration, think about your left foot). Lean your torso forward a little bit and reach your hands forward and down, as though you were starting to reach for something in front of you.

Now, keep your left foot firmly in contact with the floor as you pull the left foot towards the wall behind you. The foot won’t move. What does that do to your torso, hips, and right leg?

For most of us, it will move the torso and hips over the left leg and it will bring the right foot to meet the left leg. You “pulled” yourself into a standing position.

This is the same action that occurs during a deadlift. Your pelvis is being pulled forward using the muscles in the back of the pelvis and posterior chain, aka the gluteal muscles and the hamstrings.

In fact, research that looks at EMG activation, a surface imaging technique that measures the electrical activity of skeletal muscle, shows higher activation of the gluteus maximus during the straight leg deadlift and single leg deadlift than of the hamstrings.^1,2

This doesn’t mean the straight and single leg deadlift don’t work the hamstrings at all, it just means the glutes work a little bit harder to move your pelvis back to the starting position.

The Squat

Now, let’s look at the action of the squat. Come into the same position, with your left foot forward and your right foot back, but this time, keep the right heel off of the ground and keep your torso right over your hips. Your left knee will still be bent and your left foot will still firmly be in contact with the floor. Press the left foot straight down into the floor. What happens?

Your left knee will straight and your head will move straight up towards the ceiling. Your torso won’t change position very much. How does that feel?

This more closely mimics the squat position, which is characterized by the torso staying fairly vertical over the pelvis, the shins moving forward of the ankle, and and the torso and pelvis moving back. Instead of the foot pulling the pelvis forward, the foot pushes down to move the body straight up.

The difference in leverage means the muscles work differently to do this action, though the gluteus maximus still remains a key player. The main difference is the muscles associated with pushing are the quadriceps instead of the hamstrings. Research has looked at different torso position during a squatting exercise.³

The researchers found when the torso was flexed to 30 degrees, hamstring recruitment went up and quadricep recruitment went down, which should make sense when you think about the pushing and pulling actions—the more forward the torso, the more work it is to pull it back over the pelvis.

I said there are muscles beneath the gluteus maximus that stabilize the femur in the socket. Another way to think of this is they allow for a little bit of internal rotation of the femur and a little bit of external rotation of the femur, depending upon what the other joints are doing.

If the pelvis is internally rotated, the tibia is in internal rotation, and the foot is everting and pronating, the femur will be internally rotating as well, which means it will look like the leg is pointed relatively straight ahead. This is what happens during the lowering down phase of a single leg squat—a series of subtle rotations inwards.

The reverse is true when the knee begins to extend during a single leg squat. Everything rotates just a little bit externally, including the femur, again, giving the illusion that nothing has changed and the leg remains straight ahead.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that during single leg squats, in addition to lots of muscle activation in the gluteus maximus, quadriceps, and hamstrings, the gluteus medius also works noticeably hard to create the right amount of stability and movement.^4,5

It’s a balancing act, literally and figuratively, between the muscles in the glute region, the muscles in the torso, and the muscles in the rest of the leg to accomplish the act of standing on one leg and moving, repeatedly, without falling over. (There are other factors at play, too, but I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about the brain during this article, so strict muscle talk it is).

Footwork is Everything

Altering foot position during a regular squat can also increase muscular activity in the gluteus medius. If you change the position of the bones, you change the way load is received from the skeleton, which means the muscles will be loaded differently.

A study of lower limb muscle activation with ballet movements⁶ found two ballet movements, the demi-plie, and the releve, resulted in higher amounts of muscular activation in the gluteus maximus and medius, gastrocnemius, rectus femoris, and adductor longus, than an isometric heel raise and an isometric squat.

Let me interpret all of that technical jargon for you. When you place the heels together, turn the toes out, and lift up your heels coming on to your toes, the muscles in your bottom, inner thigh, outer thigh, front of the thigh, and calf work really hard to support you. If instead of lifting up your heels, you bend your knees, keeping the knees pointing over the second toe, those same muscles continue to work really hard.

Don’t worry. I am not suggesting you give up the weight room in favor of a barre class. However, if your goal is to load your peaches in a variety of ways, embracing horse stance or sumo squats might not be a bad idea.

The gluteus medius and minimus (along with other muscles), are also well positioned to move the femur into internal rotation which, as I mentioned above, occurs when you walk.⁷ If you rotate at all by changing directions, you need internal rotation to control the changing position (8). What this means is don’t just do sumo squats or Cossack lunges- play with curtsy squats or bowler squats once in a while to maintain strength and mobility during internal rotation.

It is easy to get into the habit of only working your legs one way. However, the strength and mobility of the hip joint is dependent upon the femur being able to withstand load in a variety of positions.

Take the time to assess what positions you struggle with and ask yourself why are you stuck. Is it a mobility issue? A motor control issue, i.e., you just don’t know how to do it? Or is it something else? You can’t seem to control your pelvis position or your foot position? Be honest with yourself and begin addressing your sticking points for a fully functioning, powerful derriere.

For different squat ideas, check out the video above. You will notice my leg is working hard to stabilize because of the surface I am on- that’s okay. In the gym, on a hard, flat surface, I have a lot less knee play.

One of the benefits of strengthening the hips in a variety of ways is the tissues can tolerate controlled knee valgus because the muscles in the hip are strong. Training for tissue resilience and motor control intelligence makes new environments a lot less scary and more interesting.

References:

1.McKurdy, K., Walker, J., & Yuen, D., (2018). Gluteus maximus and hamstring activation during selected weight-bearing resistance exercises. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 32(3), 594-601.

2.Distefano, L.J., Blackburn, J.T., Marshall, S.W., & Padua, D.A., (2009). Gluteal muscle activation during common therapeutic exercises. Journal of Orthopedic Sports and Physical Therapy, 39(7), 532-540.

3.Lee, T.S., Song, M.Y., & Kwon, Y.J., (2016). Activation of back and lower limb muscles during squat exercises with different trunk flexion. Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 28(12), 3407-3410.

4.Mausehund, L., Skard, A.E., & Krosshaug, T., (2018). Muscle activation in unilateral barbell exercises: implications for strength training and rehabilitation. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, (4).

5.McCurdy, K., O’Kelley, E., Kutz, M., Langford, G., Ernest, J., & Torres, M., (2010). Comparison of lower extremity EMG between the 2-leg squat and the modified single-leg squat in female athletes. Journal ofSport Rehabilitation, 19(1), 57-70.

6.Kim, M.J., & Kim, J.H., (2016). Comparison of lower limb muscle activation with ballet movements (releve and demi-plie) and general movement (heel rise and squat) in healthy adults. Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 28(1), 223-226.

7.Neumann, D.A., (2010). Kinesiology of the hip: a focus on muscular actions. Journal of Orthopedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 40(2), 82-94.

8.Ventura, J.D., Klute, G.K., & Neptune, R.R., (2015). Individual muscle contributions to circular turning mechanics. Journal of Biomechanics, 48(6), 1067-1074.

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Do you dream of being able to sit comfortably on the floor, with your legs long in front of you? Or maybe you have loftier goals, like being able to fold forward in a wide leg straddle with your chest approaching the floor, but no matter how hard you try or how long you stretch, nothing happens. You remain (mostly) vertical, your muscles rejecting the position you are trying to place them in by announcing their discomfort.

Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about because you can easily fold forward, chest on the ground. However, you may still want to continue reading because chances are high at some point you will meet someone who struggles to sit on the ground, limited by a lack of movement and motor control.

Hip Movement

When you consider the movement of your hips, you probably think of what position your leg can easily move into. While that is definitely one piece of the movement, let’s quickly review how the hip joint works.

The head of the femur, the long thigh bone, meets the pelvis in neatly designed cup called the acetabulum.¹ The acetabulum located a little bit forward on the pelvis, in the place where the three bones that comprise the pelvis meet. The femur does indeed move all directions inside the joint, enabling the leg to move in a variety of directions.

The pelvis also moves around the femur in a variety of ways. This is also a form of hip mobility.

Try this: Come into a tall kneeling position, probably on a blanket or something that supports your knees. Now, step your left foot forward and transfer most of the weight to your right knee. How many ways can you move your self around your right knee?

You can also try coming into a hands and knees position, with your knees set up directly under your hips. Begin by rolling the pelvis down and up. Now, rock your pelvis back and a little bit to the right. Try it going to the left. Go in a circle. Can you begin to feel how these motions are actually mobilizing the hip joint?

Why does this matter? Because when you sit on the floor with your pelvis rocked back because you lack control/awareness/strength/flexibility to move the pelvis forward, you can spend the next 12 months diligently stretching your hamstrings and still never feel truly comfortable.

If your pelvis is unable to roll around your femur, you will bend from somewhere else, more than likely the place where your pelvis meets your back at the sacroiliac joint. This isn’t necessarily bad, it just results in more work. It’s less economical and will limit your mobility potential.

Steps to Improve Your Hip Flexion

Okay, so what are you supposed to do to improve your hip flexion?

• Step one: learn how to feel how your pelvis moves around your hips.
• Step two: learn how to isolate hip movement in seated positions.
• Step three: use your newfound pelvic control to find forward movement in seated positions.

We will begin with step one, improving your sense of how the pelvis moves around the hips. Since the goal is to be able to do this seated, a couple of reference points in the pelvis might be helpful, the first of which is the ischial tuberosities.

When you are sitting, at the bottom of your pelvis are two bony protrusions that serve as attachment points for multiple muscles. These are your ischial tuberosities or sit bones.²

They provide sensory feedback to the nervous system about where the pelvis is located in space. The ability to feel these two bones while you are sitting in a chair makes it much easier to understand how to move your pelvis when you are folding forward.

In the drills below, I am moving my pelvis forward, back, and circularly while sitting. I alternate which leg I have crossed on top, and when I move circularly, I am moving around my sitting bones.

Another way to approach sensing the pelvis is by feeling how the pelvis moves in space. What I mean by this is if you can differentiate pelvis movement when you have less contact with the floor, chances are high you will be able to control how your pelvis moves when you have lots of contact.

Try this: Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands on the two front hip bones. Gently bring your low back towards the floor. What happens to the area under your hands? The two bones probably feel like they are moving up towards your ribs. Now, arch the low back away from the floor. What do your hands do now? They probably feel like they are moving further away from the ribs.

Come into a tall kneeling position with your hands still on your two front hip bones. Can you make the same motion in this position, letting the area under your hands move towards your ribs and then away from your ribs? Can you feel how the pelvis is moving around the femur. Go ng back and forth a few times, clarifying how it feels to move the pelvis in isolation.

You can do the same thing in a variety of positions, isolating movement at the pelvis and coming one step closer to realizing your twerking skills.

Your Pelvis While Sitting

Now that you can feel your pelvis moving in a variety of positions, let’s return to how all of this works in the sitting position.

If you sit down and promptly feel your pelvis roll backward, rounding your low back, sit on a blanket, book, or very small step. Can you prevent your pelvis from rolling backward in the slightly elevated position?

If the answer is yes, this will make a good starting position. If you still feel your pelvis rolling backward and you can’t seem to prevent it, prop yourself up a little bit higher.

The props are temporary and are tools that enable you to feel what pure hip flexion feels like and allow you to get comfortable and build the necessary strength and motor control to translate the motion to other positions.

What does it mean to not roll your pelvis backward?

• Remember the sit bones we discussed earlier? See if you can find the place where you feel those two bones pressing into the ground.
• Once you have that, extend your legs forward and wide, so they are straddled. It is generally easier to learn the action needed for hip flexion with legs wide than it is with the legs together, so we’ll start here.
• Place your hands on the two front hip bones. If they move back, away from your fingers, what happens to your pelvis? Where does the weight go, in front or behind of your sitting bones? And did you get closer or further away from your legs?
• Now let the two front hip bones come forward, towards your fingers and down, towards your thighs. Your torso will move forward as well.

What does this feel like? Where does the weight shift in the pelvis? Can you feel how you roll in front of your sitting bones, even if it’s just a little bit? And does your torso move a little bit closer to your thighs?

Go back and forth between the two positions a few times, just feeling what happens in the pelvis and how where your torso goes.

Allow the torso to go the same direction as the pelvis, so you aren’t arching or rounding your back- it’s like the entire unit is being moved one direction or the other. Think about what’s happening at your hip joints as you do this- you are flexing at the hip when you move the pelvis forward.

Now that you have an idea of how to isolate and feel the pelvis during a seated position, it’s time to build up endurance in the position. This, really, is all flexibility is- the ability to hold a particular position or shape comfortably, for a set amount of time.

How much flexibility you need depends on your goals. All of us can benefit from being comfortable on the floor, so I will stick with the example of the legs long in front, spread a bit apart.

Own Your Pelvic Position

In order to really own the position, you need to be able to hang out there. If simply sitting with your legs long in front of you is a challenge with your pelvis not rolled back, then start there.

Remember to prop yourself up on something if you don’t quite have the strength to prevent the pelvis from rolling back.

Set a timer for three minutes. Play with movement. You can roll the pelvis back and forth a little bit, roll the knees in and out, point the toes away from you and towards you, throw a ball, reach your arms in different directions. The possibilities are endless, but the goal remains the same: stay in the position.

Once that becomes comfortable (and it will if you practice this regularly), begin to explore the possibilities of folding forward. Remember, the movement initiates at the pelvis.

In the video, you see I start with my torso fairly vertical. As time goes on, I become more horizontal with the ground. The way I do this is by revisiting the idea that the movement comes from the pelvis.

Once the pelvis rolls forward a little bit to a new position, I stay there, either statically, or doing something. At the end of one minute, I am a lot closer to the ground than when I started.

References:

1. Banerjee, P., & Mclean, C.R., (2011). Femoroacetabular impingement: a review of diagnosis and treatment. Current Reviews of Musculoskeletal Medicine, 4(1), 23-32.

2. Kaya, D., Yosmaoglu, B., & Doral, M.N., (Eds.), (2018). Proprioception in Orthopaedics, Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. Springer: New York.

The post From Pelvis to Hamstring, Mastering Seated Forward Folds appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Photo by Bev Childress

Let’s say you have been working out for a long time, by yourself. You are extremely self-disciplined and feel confident following programs that use basic movements you are familiar with, but you aren’t sure how to learn new skills. You are worried about your form, you don’t know how to figure out whether you’re doing it right, and you are unclear about timelines. You don’t have access to a coach, either because you live in a place where coaching isn’t available, you aren’t in the financial situation to pay for a coach, or you simply don’t like being coached. How can you learn skills on your own confidently, without risk of injury?

Learning can be broken down into three stages. Stage one is the awkward stage. It’s kind of like puberty—nothing is easy, everything feels like work, and you feel like you are going to be stuck there forever.

Stage two is kind of like college. You feel a little more confident in your abilities, you still make the occasional snafu, and even though once in a while you think you have it all figured out, something happens to remind you that you really don’t. You contemplate quitting once in a while because it’s harder than it seems like it should be.

Stage three is kind of like nearing retirement. You have attained a level of confidence you never actually thought you would have, you are well practiced at the skill, and you are fairly certain you could actually perform it on demand under almost any circumstance.

To get from stage one to stage three requires making mistakes, learning from them and trying again. However, it’s easy to get discouraged and feel like you aren’t making progress. Maybe you abandon the skill, or you stop exploring new ways to approach it, or a nagging irritation/pain occurs that deters you from working on it with the same enthusiasm you had in the beginning. How do you successfully maneuver your way across the stages?

Let’s use the L-sit as an example. The ability to L-sit can come in handy for a variety of bodyweight skills, but there is technique involved and it can be difficult to feel whether or not you are actually performing the skill in a way that would be considered technically proficient.

So what do you do?

• Break down the skill into mini skills. What steps do you need in order to eventually L-sit?
• Periodically film yourself performing the mini skills and watch the playback.
• Give yourself honest feedback regarding what you see. Does what you are doing feel like what you are doing? Is there anything you could do to make the skill more efficient?

If you aren’t sure what you see, watch others performing the skill and see if you can identify what they are doing. If you really want to improve, you need to take the time to understand what is happening.

The Mini Skill

To continue with our example, a mini step for the L-sit requires straight arm pressing, scapular depression, and hip flexion. In less technical terms, you need to be able to push the floor away from you, your shoulders and shoulder blades need to move down when you do this, and you need to be able to sit with your legs straight in front of you. If any of these pieces are missing, you won’t be able to execute the skill efficiently.

Right about now, you might be thinking, “that’s a lot of thought to do a (relatively) basic skill. I don’t want to think about all of those things, I just want to be able to do it.”

Fair enough. But if you want to be your own coach, you need to think like a coach. Part of thinking like a coach means you are able to troubleshoot and figure out the weakest link.

Video Your Skill

Let’s say you feel like you understand how to press down, but you aren’t exactly sure where your shoulders are and you don’t have the mobility to extend your legs out in front of you so you are currently working on the tuck position. Unless you are participating in a tech revolt and refuse to have a smartphone, chances are high you have the ability to video yourself with your phone. I totally get the irritation with filming—you have to set it up, if there are other people in the gym you have to carve out a little space to do it where you aren’t in anyone’s way, you have to remember to hit record, and you can only cross your fingers and hope that you actually end up in the frame. I promise it’s worth it, and it gets easier.

For those of you thinking, “I will just look in the mirror,” research and my own experience suggest mirrors don’t work.¹ In fact, research on motor skill learning actually shows less feedback is better for learning, so looking in the mirror on every single skill attempt isn’t going to speed up the learning process.²

Pure and utter blasphemy in a culture that’s obsessed with appearance, I know. The thing is, if you want to get better at a specific skill, you need to reconcile what you feel like you are doing with what you are actually doing. Mirrors take you out of what you are experiencing by making the skill more reliant on your eyes rather than your inner sense of what’s happening. They also don’t fully show you what you are doing, unless you turn sideways and crane your head in a weird position to see what’s going on, and what does that feel like? Video keeps you honest and allows you to watch the feedback after the execution and before you try again. The lag time is important for processing and learning. When you try it again after you watch the video feedback, your image of what you look like will be more clear and whatever feedback you gave yourself, you will be able to apply.

You don’t need to film yourself every single set. I usually film twice a week, I pick one of the middle sets so I’m warmed up, and I watch the feedback between sets. I try to internalize what it looks like and how it could be better and I don’t film the next set—I simply work on implementation. The following week when I film, I will be able to see if the feedback I gave myself is working.

Sometimes what I see on my videos is something I need to work on separately to make the skill better. For instance, let’s say I’m not pointing my toes, and when I do point my toes, my feet cramp. This is not a matter of “do more of the same thing in the same position.” Instead, I need to work on just pointing my toes strongly in lower level positions so I can build up the strength to do it successfully. Only then will the carryover to the L-sit be successful.

Since I started this conversation using an L-sit as an example, I will stick with that theme, but I have done this on a variety of skills, including deadlifts, rolling variations, and handstands. The thing that separates people who perform a skill masterfully from the ones who are more average is the willingness to work on every aspect of the movement.

Cue Yourself

Other than filming and watching myself after the set is over, one of the most useful ways I have found to give myself feedback over the years is to write down a couple of words when I am finished. The next time that particular skill is in my program, I glance at my notes from last time. It triggers what I need to work on and gives me a focal point.

Let’s say for the L-sit I could feel I wasn’t getting my hips off the ground as much as I wanted. I might write something like “hips stayed low. Press more next time.” These cues will help me focus my attention during my practice.

Making notes also enables you to monitor improvement. For instance, if I struggled during my last round of tuck holds last week and I noted that in my training log when I do tuck holds this week if I don’t struggle with my last round, that indicates some form of improvement. If I happened to film myself, I can see whether the quality of the movement looks a little bit better this time or if it just feels better.

What if you aren’t sure what you are looking at or what you are feeling? Go to YouTube and pull up video of people that are competently performing the skill. If it’s a tutorial, listen to what the instructor says and pause the video to see if you can identify visually what he means. Can you imagine yourself performing the movement the same way? There is research that suggests if you spend time visualizing yourself successfully performing a skill, there is a learning effect- imagining helps you learn how to do the skill faster.³ If you can’t visualize it, you haven’t internalized the movement yet.

Don’t just watch video of one person; watch video of several people. Observe the similarities and observe the differences. Mimic the ones that look like they are performing the skill efficiently by identifying how they perform it. How do they place their hands? Where are their feet located? How wide are their hips?

The Work Is Worth It

Learning how to identify inefficiencies that are holding you back from performing a skill requires a little bit of work, a lot of self-reflection, honesty, and a fair amount of patience. However, the gains you make and what you will learn about yourself along the way make the extra effort worth it.

References:

1. Swinnen, S.P., Schmidt, R.A., Nicholson, D.E., & Shapiro, D.C., (1990). Information feedback for skill acquisition: instantaneous knowledge of results degrades learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 16(4), 706-716.

2. Schmidt R.A. (1991). Frequent Augmented Feedback Can Degrade Learning: Evidence and Interpretations. In: Requin J., Stelmach G.E. (eds) Tutorials in Motor Neuroscience. NATO ASI Series (Series D: Behavioural and Social Sciences), vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht

3. Lacourse, M.G., Orr, E.L.R., Cramer, S.C., & Cohen, M.J., (2005). Brain activation during execution and motor imagery of novel and skilled sequential hand movement. Neuroimage, 27(3), 505-519.

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A few years ago, I went to a workshop for a system that was gaining a lot of traction with well-respected fitness professionals. The workshop began with the anatomy of the diaphragm and ribs, eventually segueing into potential influences on the pelvis and femur.

As we went through the tests the system used, it became evident I was failing. By failing, I mean the relationship of my pelvis and ribs was less than optimal or, to borrow their terminology, pathological. As the instructor talked about all of the horrible things associated with this particular pattern, I found myself perplexed. I didn’t have any of the pain he was describing, but I clearly lacked a “neutral” resting position.

I went home and did what any good type-A-overachiever would do. I read the manual and began applying the techniques to myself, curious if I could “fix” my pathology, despite the instructor’s warning that if you were as messed up as I was, you needed a professional to perform manual techniques.

After quite a few months, several additional workshops in the system, and a couple of mishaps that involved deep internal bruising caused by repeated forceful exhalations and an irritated left hip from using a specific re-positioning technique because when I am told to contract I contract very hard, I found myself able to do movements and skills that had not been available to me previously. I no longer failed the system’s objective tests: I was passing, or “neutral,” as they described it. And though I felt different, I didn’t necessarily feel better, but again, I hadn’t really felt bad before.

Awareness Through Movement

In the midst of all of this, I began using Awareness Through Movement lessons, auditory lessons based on the work of Moshe Feldenkrais. Of all of the things I had tried and studied (and by that point, there were quite a few), the influence of the lessons on my body was profound. I began playing with concepts from both the lessons and other systems, as well as implementing things I was learning about motor control theory, gait, and nervous system activity while working with my clients. They began to feel better than they had in years and their movements changed. I could tell I was figuring out how to deliver what I was learning in a way that worked in a training setting.

However, the hip that was angered by the initial attempt of self-improvement was still an irritant and occasionally I felt like something was off. I have always done yoga and strength training, but I needed to stop over-coaching myself. Instead, I put my programming in someone else’s hands, followed the program exactly, and not only did my hip pain clear up, I began to feel a little bit like superwoman because I had developed the efficiency, proprioception, and back mobility to support the work I was doing and develop strength in a variety of ways. I could tolerate a fairly high volume without feeling vulnerable to injury because I had done, at that point, four years of preparatory work.

So what, exactly, did I do? I just want to remind everyone reading this I didn’t have any pain when I began my journey, so I am not offering a solution to pain. I became more efficient by changing my pattern, which opened doors to more mobility. I also had less sympathetic tone because my proprioception had substantially increased. The only way to get physically stronger is through repeated exposure to a stimulus that’s more than you are accustomed to, so I didn’t make myself stronger, exactly, though it could be argued I became stronger in a different way than I was before. Before we dive any further, let’s talk about what my pattern was.

The Role of the Ribs and Pelvis

I lived with my ribs flared and my pelvis tipped forward. For women, this is the typical “athletic” posture gymnasts have when they finish a routine, arms up, chest lifted. For men, this resembles the look many athletes have—the dip in the low back with the lower ribs lifted. It’s rigid in nature, and society rewards it because it looks pleasing to the eye. It indicates a powerful presence or, in my case, made me feel like I was standing up tall (at 5’1” the more height I can get, the better).

What happens when strong patterns are adopted is it becomes difficult to move the other direction? Movement options become limited, and when the area that’s become locked, for lack of a better word, is the center of the body, it’s going to affect mobility at other joints, since the upper and lower extremity attaches to the torso and pelvis, respectively.

The easiest way to change a strong pattern is to slowly introduce other options and make sure the person in question feels both different parts moving. It will feel like work at first because your muscles aren’t used to keeping the joints in these different positions.

When you are working on the ribs and the pelvis, there are a few ways to get things to move more fluidly and to be most effective, it requires integration with the breath. The diaphragm and the lungs are positioned so that the ribs can move during the inhale and exhale. If the ribs don’t move during breathing, that’s going to affect how the thoracic spine moves. Additionally, the diaphragm and the pelvic floor work together. When you inhale, both your diaphragm and pelvic floor move down. When you exhale, both move up. So we can also say that breathing allows the pelvis to move a little bit, except it doesn’t when the pelvis stays in one position and never deviates.

Assess the Movement of Your Ribs and Pelvis

Here is what my adventures (and misadventures), taught me—the ribs and the pelvis can move in a variety of ways. The breath is an instrumental part of experiencing the sensation of work in the abdominals which increases a person’s sense of stability. Isometric contractions are important but are best taught after the person has had a chance to move in and out of the position a few times.

Different techniques have different places they like to start (and the rationale for all are legitimate). I like to start at the ribs because for most people the rib area seems to feel less vulnerable than the pelvis. An easy way to feel the ribs moving is to lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Take your right arm up in the air and the left hand on the left rib area. Begin reaching your right hand towards the ceiling. You will feel your right shoulder move away from the floor and your left ribs move towards the floor behind you and towards the pelvis. Do this 3-5 times.

Did you feel your ribs move? If the answer is yes, you are ready for the next instruction. Is this subtle? Yes, but that’s the thing—our current fitness culture has moved away from the basic principles of movement. Things like reaching in a relaxed manner should incorporate rib and shoulder blade movement and fixates instead on cues that feed into a more rigid posture. When you are lifting a heavy weight, you need rigidity otherwise you aren’t going to have the structure to support the load. However, when you are reaching for a glass on the top shelf, you need less rigidity and more give. Like all things, there’s a time and a place for maximizing intrabdominal pressure and a time and a place for letting your body just move.

Back to the instructions. This time, do the same thing, but as you reach, exhale and as you lower the shoulder back to the mat, inhale. Does that make the rib movement more clear?

On the last reach, with your right shoulder off of the ground and your left hand feeling how your ribs move down and back hold this position for three breaths. With each exhale, see if you can let your exhale be a little bit longer. With each inhale, try not to let your ribs pop forward. Repeat the entire sequence on the other side.

There is video of this below. It doesn’t look like much, but if you aren’t used to the position of the ribs, you will feel sensation in the abdominals. You can also add a ball between your knees, not to squeeze, but to gently hold so your legs don’t flop open (a common tendency for people with a more extended pattern).

Another way to do this in a hands and knees position. The video below shows a yoga egg horizontally across my back, right under my shoulder blades. I move the ribs that are located under my shoulder blades towards the ceiling and away from the ceiling three times, exhaling as I lift my ribs up and inhaling as I relax down. On the last one, I hold the rounded position and imagine my breath is going right across my back into the yoga egg. This encourages the muscles located at the bottom of the sternum and directly underneath to contract against gravity and hold the position. (This is the area I bruised with breathing way back when. It hurts just to think about it).

Next, let’s look at the pelvis. As mentioned above, a rigid pelvis doesn’t help with breathing mechanics. During the gait cycle, the pelvis (which operates as two halves when you walk) moves in a variety of ways—forward, back, sideways, and up and down, depending up which leg is swinging forward and which is on the ground. If your pattern is to walk around with a pelvis that has very little movement any direction other than anteriorly, you are limiting mobility in your hips. Since the hip socket is located on the pelvis, this should make sense. A pelvis that can move translates into hips that can move.

The exercise below is one of many ways you can isolate movement at the pelvis. I begin with a forearm and knee position with the yoga egg at the base of my sacrum where it connects to the pelvis. I like to pretend I have a tail (weird image, I know, but bear with me), and I am moving the tail between my legs. I feel the egg move up. Now, I move my imaginary tail up towards the ceiling, moving the egg down. After 4-6 times, I hold the tail between the legs position and I reach one leg out at a time, coming into a hollow body plank (just a fancy way of saying a plank position with the pelvis posteriorly tilted). I hold this position for six breaths, imagining that when I inhale, the breath is expanding the back of the rib cage and when I exhale, the ribs are moving even further away from the floor.

The final piece of this puzzle involves resting on the floor. When you are truly able to relax, your middle back will rest on the floor when your knees are bent and you are lying down. Below is a short guided body scan. I direct attention to various parts of the body, using the movement in the beginning to improve your sense of contact with the ground.

Posture Is a Reflection

The goal isn’t to walk around with a tucked pelvis and slouched posture any more than the goal should be to walk around with a military posture. You exist on a continuum of emotional states, physiological states, and biomechanical states. Posture is simply a reflection of that continuum. When you no longer find yourself remaining on one end of the spectrum and instead inch towards the middle, you may be able to move with more control and fluidity. And having more controlled movement options available makes endeavors in athletics and life a little bit easier.

The post How to Self-Assess Your Movement Pathologies appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Flow. An elusive idea, one that evokes images of people lost in a moment, completely immersed in the task at hand. Time falls away, the world disappears, and there is only you and the activity.

From a fitness or movement perspective, flow is often used to describe moving from one skill to another, almost effortlessly. While flowing movement is certainly a way to access a flow state, as Kellen Milad, founder of Movement Parallels Life, points out, flow can be achieved in a variety of ways. “I look at a practice like weightlifting as still being an activity you can access a flow state in.”

Most of us have experienced a sense of flow at some point in our lives. According to Milad, “the way that I understand it is it’s a state that can be accessed through pretty much anything, but the circumstances surrounding it are where your skill level and your external demands are evenly matched, so you are kind of on the edge of your skills, but you are performing competently.”

How to Approach Your Flow

How many times have you found yourself going through the motions during your workouts, not truly working at the edge of your comfort zone, either mentally or physically? Maybe you occasionally challenge ourselves to learn a new skill or to achieve a goal, but once you attain the skill or achieve the goal, you return to simply doing your program. If you want exercise to mean something more, to enhance your life in the same way that a hobby you are passionate about would, you may want to alter your approach.

For those of you that engage in activities like martial arts or trail running, chances are high you experience flow somewhat regularly. You are forced to engage, either with the other person or with the unpredictability of the trail. Your moves can’t be exactly the same because every opponent is different or your stride responds to meet the demands of the environment. There is no zoning out, only a sense of focus on the task at hand.

One of the leading experts on flow state, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, writes in his book, Flow, that in order to achieve a flow state, you must be participating in an activity that is challenging, requires skill, and you find enjoyable in some way. While many extracurricular activities meet this description, if you workout in a gym setting, it can be difficult to find the right balance between challenge, skill, and enjoyment.

Program Your Flow

Flow can be accessed through any physical practice with a bit of thoughtful programming. When Milad first began playing with the idea of flow, he had a foundation built from his work in the gym. “I had building blocks. So the building blocks were really exercises that I had been doing in a really structured way. In its essence, a movement flow is taking these more manageable pieces of movement and getting to know them very well, inside and out.”

Skill development, of any kind, takes work. It’s honing technique. It’s trying things a different way or from a different perspective. It’s spending a lot of time practicing.

What if we began to view the purpose of our fitness as something different, as a way to access a sense of play, to build resiliency through overcoming challenge, or to, as Csikszentmihalyi suggests, reclaim experience? When asked, Milad says, “We do have these tendencies ingrained in our culture about being very performance oriented, being very goal oriented and to me, how I conceptualize flow is a shift towards the process.”

When you shift your mindset around exercise to being more about the process rather than the outcome, you will find yourself approaching movements with more curiosity. You may find yourself thinking, “what happens if I…” instead of, “I have five more reps to complete.” Not that there is anything wrong with focusing on the numbers, the work is necessary to support the ability to move freely. But stepping back occasionally, and instead of focusing on sets and reps for a particular movement, moving from a place of curiosity can begin to shift your experience of exercise and movement.

You Don’t Have to Be an Expert

Perhaps one of the problems with the Instagram culture of fitness is our view of what it means to flow in movement is shaped by what we see. Milad points out that flow is usually expressed on social media by advanced practitioners, ones with practices that reflect more complex movements or skills from the world of Capoeira, gymnastics, or yoga. This can make the idea of introducing a sense of flow into your practice seem daunting, as though there was some imaginary barrier of ability necessary. So how can you feel more confident introducing flow into your practice if you feel you don’t have the adequate flow skills?

Workouts tend to follow a specific structure—warm up, workout, cool-down. Less structured movement may feel a bit of awkward. “There’s always going to be some growing pains. But if you can start with pieces of movement that you are already familiar with and start to maybe take some of the structure that has developed those pieces and just loosen the reins a bit, just to see what happens. If you know a push up very well, you can start to branch out into different variations of push ups. Or if you are used to doing a squat, a standard, bilateral squat, start to play around with different expressions, or ways into or out of that squat. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate—take pieces you are already familiar with and give yourself permission to play around a little bit,” Milad suggests.

One of the more challenging aspects of what Milad is suggesting is it requires letting go of the idea that there is a “perfect” or “right” way to squat or perform a push-up. Certainly, when you are moving a heavy load, there is a specific form required to move the bar in a way that will generate the maximum amount of force. But when you are simply moving your bodyweight through space, particularly in a thoughtful, explorative way, your brain (and body) will work together to self-organize based on joint position, current sympathetic tone, and current strength. We are designed to move in and out of a wide variety of positions without risk of injury. As long as you approach this kind of work inquisitively, without over-efforting to get into a specific position, you can let go of traditional alignment cues and just move.

A potential benefit to exploring a well-grooved pattern like the bodyweight squat once or twice a week for 10 minutes is you will gain better control over the position and become stronger and more mobile at different angles which carries over into other aspects of performance and life. You may also develop a more intuitive sense of what your body needs—often moving without an agenda allows you to move into the places or need a little extra attention.

How Do You Integrate Flow?

Still, the question remains how? How do you integrate the concepts of flow? Remember that to achieve flow requires a challenge of some sort that matches your skill level and reclaims experience. Milad says, “Maybe it’s just, ‘I am going to play with these movements and I am going to sit in the struggle of that for ten minutes.’ And there’s your structure, right there. You don’t place any expectations on it outside of that, but I think when we shift away from judging the practice to setting an intention and observing what happens in that space, I think that shift becomes very important in creating more flow in your fitness, but also as a way to re-calibrate, re-balance how we approach life.”

If you can find a way to approach the smallest aspect of your physical practice in a less judgmental way, your relationship to your practice will change. It will become less about “working out” or waging a war on the body you inhabit and more about re-connecting with your physical self.

It doesn’t necessarily even have to be in the gym. Walking, Milad points out, can be done in an experiential way. “If you’re a person that’s in the gym and you’ve got your routine, maybe just try going for a walk. And instead of just drawing the line there, be open to any opportunities that might come up along the way. To balance on something, climb over something, crawl, sit on the ground… I am looking to nature to drive some of the flow, but that could really be [done] anywhere.”

At this point you may be thinking, “okay, fine, but isn’t this a lot like mindfulness? Being present and all of that?”

Yes, in a way. The only way to truly experience is to be present, which is really all mindfulness is. But flow is a little bit more—it’s looking for ways to engage with your surroundings and challenge yourself unconventionally. It’s creating opportunities for gameplay in unusual environments. “Maybe you’re playing with a kid in your life,” Milad says, “or you’re playing on the floor with your dog, and you just make that your challenge. I am going to play on the floor, without using my hands, and I am going to avoid getting licked to death if it’s your dog.” You use your physical capabilities, developed from hours spent in the gym, to be present and engage with the world around you. “It’s space in my fitness and my life to try less hard and just be. Flow is about getting the opportunity to experience yourself a different way. We all have our roles and our habits, and the ways that we are just kind of called to show up, but we’re more than that. There’s more pieces to us.” And the only real way to begin to explore these other pieces is by opening ourselves up to the opportunities present in the world around us.

Don’t Worry About Doing It Wrong

When you begin playing with some of these ideas, at first you may have a difficult time experiencing anything other than, “Am I doing this right?” In a culture driven by aesthetics and technique, letting go of an ideal and just experiencing might be the initial practice. But if you keep practicing and opening yourself up to opportunities to experience movement and, by extension, your environment, you may find it becomes a welcome part of your life.

The post Finding Your Flow: Challenging Bodyweight Orthodoxy appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I was chatting with a colleague at a workshop a couple of weekends ago. He was telling me about the torn labrum in his hip that used to bother him. The labrum is a thin, cartilaginous film that lines the rim of the socket in the pelvis where the head of the femur sits. “I used to feel like I needed to stretch, but when I stretched, the feeling would only go away for a little while. It always came back.”

Do you ever feel like your hips are tight and need to be stretched? When I was going through yoga teacher training, the teacher would ask for requests during the public classes. Invariably, at least one person (and often more) requested hip openers, presumably because of “ hip tightness.” But is it tightness? Or is it something else?

The Decisive Nervous System

Tightness is a sensation, dictated by the nervous system. Sensory receptors embedded in muscle, tendons, and joint capsules let your brain know what’s happening at the joint and what range of motion is available in the event someone comes running in yelling, “fire” and you have to jump up from reading this and sprint out the door.

The nervous system is constantly seeking ways to keep you, the organism, safe. One of the ways it does this is to limit range of motion in a specific area if the information it’s receiving from the sensory receptors suggests it would be harmful to move past a specific point. There are a number of factors that cause this feedback loop to occur. Let’s pretend the last time you successfully bent forward in a seated position on the floor with your legs long to touch your toes, Miley Cyrus was still a wholesome adolescent with her own television show. A lot has happened since Hannah Montana went off of the air, and while deep in the recesses of your brain where movement occurs there may be a faint memory of what it was like to touch your toes, for all intents and purposes, your nervous system no longer recognizes forward bending as a movement you do. As a result, if you were to try the movement right now in our hypothetical scenario, your nervous system would put the breaks on, stopping you before you moved into unknown territory.

If you practiced folding forward to touch your toes regularly for three weeks, you would notice it getting easier. You would not feel the sense of stretch as quickly, and you may find the discomfort that was originally associated with the movement feels less like discomfort, and more like a “good” stretch. Were you really tight, a word that is thrown around to describe a muscle that is taut, like a rubber band? Or were you simply experiencing a sensation designed to keep you safe while your brain assessed this “new” position and decided whether it was an okay place to be?

But what if your hips feel tight all of the time? That’s different than the sensation of stretch associated with bending forward, so maybe the sensation of chronic tightness is a little bit like chronic pain; the information your brain is getting from your hip joint and muscles isn’t painting a completely accurate picture of what is happening at the joint.

Try this. Think about your shoulders as you sit here, reading (or skimming) this article. How do they feel? Now, raise your right arm overhead until it comes to a natural stopping point. Lower your right arm down.

Many people will experience a stopping point slightly before or as the arm approaches a vertical position. (And for those of you that didn’t feel a natural stopping point before vertical, kudos to you for having excellent shoulder flexion). If you did feel a stopping point, one could argue your shoulders have a more limited range of motion. (There are lots of potential reasons your arm isn’t going all of the way overhead, but we are looking specifically at the concept of the sensation of tightness, so there will be no tangents about shoulder mobility. This time). One might even say your shoulders are “tight.” But do they feel tight to you as you go about your daily life? Probably not. So the sensation of tightness doesn’t always correspond to a joint expressing a limited range of motion.

If the sensation of hip tightness doesn’t actually mean that you are tight and you need to stretch, what does it mean?

The Value of Strength

The thing about the hips is that they are designed to withstand load in a variety of ways throughout the day. Yes, there are genetic differences within the hip joint that may prevent deep squatting in some people (and when I say deep, I mean butt almost to the ground squatting. In my experience, everyone is able to bodyweight squat past 90 with the right progressions. The hip socket is designed for movement). However, we also live in a world of convenience, which is both wonderful (streaming music, takeout food), and movement limiting (there are very few reasons you have to move throughout the day). So the hips, while they might be in a passively flexed position much of the time, are only getting challenged when you work on hip dominated movements in the gym.

Now, ask yourself this: even if you squat and do high step-ups regularly, how much total time, in minutes, each week do you spend actually strengthening a flexed hip position? How often do you load the hips by actively moving in and out of various flexed hip positions,? I am going to guess that for most people, a surprisingly small percentage of time is spent actively working on hip flexion. Yet, your hips feel tight. Can you see my train of thought?

Maybe what you are experiencing is actually hip weakness. Remember the colleague I mentioned in the first paragraph? The way he made his hip stop feeling tight was to do lots of front scales, which is a straight leg hip flexion strengthening exercise. When his hip became stronger, he no longer felt the need to stretch it. It’s a completely counter-intuitive thought, but let’s look at it a little bit further.

In a paper published in 2017 by Stanton, et.al, the authors concluded that feelings of back stiffness did not correspond to actually having a stiff back.¹ They also suggest feeling stiff may be protective in nature- people with chronic low back pain overestimate force applied to the spine when compared to people that don’t have chronic low back pain. If you look at this another way, the person with the sensation of a stiff back and chronic low back pain doesn’t feel strong enough to handle a change in force, so lack of strength is potentially causing the sensation of stiffness.

If you are still with me, I am about to make the leap that maybe the sensation of chronic stiffness isn’t purely muscular; maybe, like with chronic pain, it’s multi-faceted and one way to combat it is to improve proprioception and a sense of resiliency through loading the area in a variety of ways.

Strengthen Your Hip Flexors

Below are five exercises that strengthen the hip flexors. By incorporating a variety of positions, the muscle gets strengthened at different angles and in different positions. Being strong in many positions makes things better.

You will notice some of the exercises are open chain (the foot of the leg that’s being strengthened isn’t on the ground), and others are closed chain (the foot of the leg that’s being strengthened is on the ground). The muscles that control the hip not only lift the leg up; they also lower the hips towards the floor. To fully strengthen the hip, you want to make sure you strengthen it using both open and close chained exercises.

If you incorporate stretching and it makes your hips feel better, that’s great. It’s not that you should avoid stretching the hip altogether; you simply want to make sure you are also strengthening it if you truly want to alleviate the feeling of chronic hip tightness.

The Role of the Pelvis Position

There is another factor that can contribute to the sensation of hip tightness, and that’s the position of the pelvis. If you consider chronic tightness a type of nociception, then the following train of thought may make sense. Nociception is simply the nervous system’s response to a potentially harmful stimulus. It is not necessarily good or bad. For instance, the burning sensation you get when you lift weights or run up a steep hill is nociception, but the context dictates it isn’t actually causing harm. When you roll your ankle on a rock, on the other hand, the intense sensation from your ankle is also nociception; the immediate swelling of the ankle tells you something is wrong.

Nociception can be complex. How it is experienced is partially dependent upon how much control you think you have over the sensation.² When it persists for long periods of time, your sense of control feels diminished. Doing things like altering position to reduce sensation helps you regain control over your experience.

If your pelvis remains fairly rigid at all times, you aren’t going to be using your hip through its full range of motion. Yes, the hip moves in the hip socket and this is a form of hip mobility, but the pelvis also moves around the hip. If your pelvis remains rigid, you are going to reduce the amount of options the brain perceives it has for hip movement, which may increase your sensation of tightness.

Below are four awareness exercises to improve mobility through the pelvis. They are meant to be done gently, without forcing any of the movement. See if you can feel how moving the pelvis causes echoes of the movement in other parts of the body. The last one looks like I am resting, with my feet flat on the wall. I am focusing on breathing in through my nose for a count of four and out through my mouth for a count of six. As I am breathing, I am feeling the connection of my feet against the wall and the weight of my pelvis and ribs against the floor. Breathing also influences mobility in the pelvis and how your hips feel. It is, after all, all connected.

Put the Concepts to Practice

The next time you experience tightness in your hips, before you go to war with your hip capsule, attempting to stretch it until it’s a Jello-like consistency, consider the other reasons your hips might feel tight. Hip flexion isn’t bad, and being strong in hip flexion only serves to make everything else a little bit easier.

References:

1. Stanton, T.R., Moseley, G.L., Wong, A.Y.L., & Kawchuk, G.N., (2017). Feeling stiffness in the back: a protective perceptual inference in chronic low back pain. Nature.

2, Garland, E.L., (2012). Pain processing in the human nervous system: a selective review of nociceptive and biobehavioral pathways. Primary Care, 39(3), 561-571.

The post Help for Tight Hips appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Efficiency is something Kevin C. Moore, founder of the Reembody Method, has thought a lot about. He believes efficient movement is available to all of us if we take the time to consider our natural tendencies.

Moore grew up studying Chinese martial arts, but always believed he would be a scientist. It wasn’t until he began working in a laboratory that he realized it might not be the best fit. “I wanted to move more, I wanted to be more social. The idea that movement could influence my career didn’t occur to me until after I got fed up with sciences.” After being introduced to a personal trainer that was both a powerlifting coach and a Pilates teacher, he realized movement could be an actual study that was approached in a systematic, thoughtful way.

After studying and teaching Pilates for several years, Moore began managing a well respected Pilates studio in Hong Kong. Throughout his Pilates career, he frequently found himself thinking outside of the traditional Pilates system, developing techniques to improve the way his clients moved through quality and efficiency. He found the techniques he was developing and the skill set he was utilizing outside of the traditional fitness methodology wasn’t received in a welcoming manner by his colleagues because “the kind of dogmatic approach to fitness kept getting in the way.”

Letting go of being a “good” Pilates instructor allowed Moore to begin noticing movement pattern relationships at a much faster rate. He began keeping records of things that he noticed, particularly how clients used the left and right side of the body. Then he used the techniques he developed on his clients, observing how they responded. When people performed things differently on each side based on their particular side dominance, did it yield different results? As he honed the application of movement based on the idea that we are not symmetrical beings, the idea of Reembody was born.

While Reembody was founded on the principles of side dominance, or laterality, the underlying principles are rooted in physical properties. “The immutable laws of physics act on all of my living tissue exactly the same as it acts on everything else,” Moore says. “And if a practical intervention can’t be made to make mechanical or physical sense then it probably doesn’t make sense biologically either.”

The Role of Side-Dominance

When was the last time you thought about how the two sides of your body moved, either together or separately? Unless you’ve been injured, I suspect you ignore the fact that one side of your body performs certain movements or skills a little bit better than the other side of your body. Interestingly, just because you are right handed, it doesn’t mean that your right side will be good at every single thing—the left hand side of your body will excel at different things than the right side. And that’s the point. The two sides of our bodies compliment each other and enable us to move forward, lift heavy things, and contort ourselves in unique positions, just not in exactly the same way on each side.

Instead of viewing the two sides as completely separate entities, it’s more likely they are partners, working together to cooperate and negotiate whatever movement skill you want to accomplish.

To clarify the idea of how laterality can be thought of in the fitness world, Moore says, “It’s really on the forefront of emerging research that the way the brain talks to the dominant side of the body and the non-dominant side of the body is radically different. In fact, in many cases, it’s opposite. We waste a lot of time in the health and wellness industry doing assessments that I don’t think we need to be doing. We can make predictions rather than assessments and speed the process along for the client and take a lot of pressure off of the practitioner.”

If you have ever been to a trainer, you may very well have spent your first session going through a series of movements, with the trainer fervently making notes about your movement quality, and then giving you a set of corrective exercises to fix whatever inefficiencies he noted. The problem with this (well-intentioned) approach, is it takes away from what the vast majority of the population needs, which is to move. By moving in various ways, the things you need to work on will become pretty clear, and whether the issue is you just don’t know how to do that specific thing or you can’t do that thing because you aren’t strong enough/flexible enough/mobile enough becomes evident fairly quickly.

Another aspect that many athletes and trainers struggle with is where to begin. What magic part of the body will unlock the key to movement happiness? Does training the core fix the back? Or maybe improving neck position will improve stability. Or perhaps the answer to everything starts at the feet.

Moore takes a more pragmatic view. “I don’t buy into the idea that there is one part of the body where everything begins. In fact, I know that for a long time, especially coming out of the functional fitness craze this idea of ‘ah, yes, this part is the one part that means everything.’ It used to be the core, then it was the feet, then it was the cranium. The truth is they’re all correct. Every part is as important as every other part. What Reembody methodology is very interested in is how they are all related.”

Researchers have been trying to tease out the best exercise modality for non specific low back pain for years. What they are finding is that one exercise type doesn’t appear to be better than another for long term pain relief.¹ In fact, the most effective exercise for non-specific low back pain appears to be a general exercise program. Why? Perhaps it’s because, as Moore says, one part isn’t more influential on the body’s position and the nervous system’s perception of movement than any other. However, how they interact with each other can dramatically improve overall movement quality. “The brain is constantly trying to build these internal maps of how all of our parts are related and then again, how those parts are related to our environment. The more robust that map is, the more likely we are to make smart choices, unconscious choices, to maintain mechanical advantage within our environment.”

This doesn’t mean there is a perfect alignment, or one way to perform a specific movement. What it means is that if the body has a clear, internal image of all of its parts and how they work, when the time comes where you have to decide how you are going to scale the very large downed tree that is clearly standing in the way between you and the trail you want to access, you will have a mechanically efficient way to get over the tree. If you practice things like climbing over oddly shaped objects, you will be even more efficient because you have a frame of reference for how to do a version of this particular movement.

The Role of Your Breath

Perhaps the most important aspect to human movement (or life, for that matter), is the ability to breathe. Oxygen nourishes every cell in our body. It enables us to function. Without it, we perish, faster than we do without food or water. As Moore says, “Oxygen is the most essential resource. Every single structure we have, from as far back as we can see, has been based around the idea of I need to make sure I can get enough oxygen. Period. Everything else plays second fiddle to that first need.”

Yet, our ability to breathe in an efficient manner is often ignored. The breath is influenced by a number of factors, including our emotional and psychological state, as well as our physiological state.² How we breathe affects how we hold ourselves, our ability to move freely in the ribs, and our ability to efficiently adapt to the external environment. Have you ever tried rock hopping while holding your breath? Were you successful? What happens if you take a long exhale before you begin? Is it easier?

“When we find that breath is optimized, we should also find that everything else is optimized,” Moore states. “So if we buy into that initial premise, if I am breathing in a way that is optimized, it means I should be stronger, I should be faster, my digestion should work better, my stress levels should be lower. Everything can and should be improved by the way that I breathe.”

Breathing can feel tedious. It’s a little bit like performing corrective exercise drills; a little bit goes a long away. If you start with the basic idea that your exhale should occasionally be longer than your inhale, you will begin to notice you are holding yourself differently. You will feel more freedom in your movement and less over-effort, creating a more balanced movement approach.

If you add 2-3 minutes of supine breathing in at the end of your workout, where you inhale for a count of four and exhale for a count of eight, observing the effects your breath has on your body, you may even find a general sense of relaxation as you leave the gym, rather than feeling mildly fatigued and slightly beat up.

The Role of Balanced Intensity

Moore’s message is not only one of efficiency, but one of balance. When it comes to movement and general fitness, Moore says, “We excel at low stress level, low to mid intensity level, repetitive tasks—walking around, bending down, reaching up, fine motor tasks that are deeply repetitive and you can let your mind wander while you are doing it. Human beings get enormous benefits out of moving in those ways.

We are also really good with our fight or flight or freeze responses, responding to extremely stressful situations with a high degree of power. We can suddenly take off in any direction in a very high run. We can fight fiercely and ferociously whenever we need to. We have it within us to work under high stress. We can be trained to work very well under high stress. One of the biggest ways in which the modern, current movement environment differs from, say, a hunter gather movement environment is that movement of the first type, that repetitive, low level, daydream-y type, is almost gone. We do very, very little of that anymore. And, the only time we engage in exercise is typically exercise that falls much more into the second category, exercise that we think of as being intense and stressful. Even most yoga classes, I would argue, are physically stressful. They are physically challenging.

Now, we invite that stress in because it does feel good to use the body in a stressful way. We do get chemical feedback and neurological feedback that says, ‘Hey, good job. You’ve accomplished something.’ We get the endorphin rush, we get the sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing wrong with any of that stuff. That system is designed that way for a reason. What I want to see for a well-balanced, fitness lifestyle that is aimed at well-adjusted social behavior and longevity, we need what I’ll call an 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the movement that they do should be low to middle level, repetitive, unstressful, daydreaming. It’s long walks in the park, it’s playing with your kid in the pool, it’s stuff like that. And then 20 percent should be, okay, now it’s time to pick that weight up, whatever the cost.”

Like all things in life, the ability to move well and respond well to a variety of situations is predicated on a degree of balance. What Moore is referring to is the elusive idea of using movement and exercise as a way to recover and prepare for high intensity work. When I talk to amazing movers who seem to rarely be injured, their dirty little secret is that they don’t spend large amounts of time in the red zone. Instead, they hang out in doing more moderate level work, sprinkling the high intensity work in periodically. As a result, they recover well and move more.

Employ Balanced Movement and Exercise

Many people allocate exercise into two categories: beast mode and everything else. Everything else is considered an afterthought, a waste of time because it doesn’t improve 1RM deadlifts or 5K times—except it does. And here is the conundrum. A well-balanced outlook to exercise and movement supports all intensity levels. If your concept of exercise is that you have to always go hard to get any benefit, I encourage you to reconsider, not just for your performance, but for your longevity.

References:

1. Wang, X-Q., Zheng, J-J., Yu, Z-W., Bi, X., Lou, S-J., Liu, J., Cai, B., Hua, Y-H., Wu, M., Wei, M-L., Shen, H-M., Chen, Y., Pan, Y-J., Xu, G-H., Chen, P-J., (2012). A meta-analysis of core stability exercise versus general exercise for chronic low back pain. PLoS One, 7(12).

2. Paulus, M.P., (2013). The breathing conundrum-interoceptive sensitivity and anxiety. Depression & Anxiety, 30(4), 315-320.

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What is posture, exactly? And what does it mean to have good posture? Can it help you eliminate pain? Or move differently?

These are just a few of the questions surrounding posture and its close relative alignment that Steven Low and Jarlo Ilano aim to answer in their new book, Overcoming Poor Posture. Posture, they point out, is actually more complex than “muscle x is tight, so we should stretch it and muscley is loose and weak so we should strengthen it and voila! You will stand up taller!” Rather, posture is a conversation between your neurological system and your musculoskeletal system. The outcome of that conversation is based on factors like habits, adaptations in the body, neurological reflexes and time spent in specific positions.

Posture Versus Alignment

Posture is frequently thought of as a static position. My posture right now as I type this is me, seated on the ground, with my legs long out in front of me. My ankles are crossed, with my right ankle on top, and my back is supported against the wall. This is one of several postures I utilize while writing.

Alignment, on the other hand, is how the joints are positioned in relation to each other. When you think of specific fitness skills and how to best perform them, it is alignment you are considering. Alignment is based on a number of factors, including available strength and mobility to perform the task and starting position. I think we can all agree that to set up for a deadlift, there are certain starting positions that are more effective than others. What exactly that posture looks like depends on a variety of factors and tissue adaptation—there are people that have performed heavy deadlifts with rounded backs, and there are power lifters with scoliosis whose set-up positions would make most of us cringe, but it works for them, and they don’t have pain.

Finding “ideal” posture and alignment becomes less important than improving strength, endurance, and control at specific joints and then using that strength, endurance, and control in dynamic movement. Posture and alignment, then, are individualized, with no two people having postures or alignment during movement that look exactly the same.

This Book Is Worth Reading

Overcoming Poor Posture does an excellent job re-framing how we as a culture are obsessed with aesthetics and discusses how we view posture and alignment. It uses current research to debunk various myths surrounding posture and pain while helping you, the reader, explore ways to build systematic strength, mobility, and coordination throughout the body. At 126 pages, with over 30 pages devoted to exercises and pictures, the book is very readable, not overly technical, and offers excellent ideas on how to address specific areas, including the feet, back, and hips.

This book is also educational. You will gain insight into how and why the body holds itself in specific ways and why pain is more complex than simply how you look while standing. For a well thought out, effective way to improve your movement quality, I highly recommend this book.

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