Let’s try a little exercise here. If you are in a place where you can stand up, then do so, if not, then try this exercise later.
First of all, take a few steps in place, then stop. This will set you in a natural standing posture for you. Keep your arms down to your sides. I want you to begin to notice where your weight is on your feet.
Is it on the front of your feet, or more toward your heels, or is it balanced?
Do you have more weight on the inside of your feet, or the outside, or is it balanced?
Do you have more weight on your left foot, or your right foot, or is it balanced?
Interesting, isn’t it? At any given time, you can notice what your unconscious postural tendencies are.
Now, make sure your feet are straight ahead, and without doing anything else, I want you to begin slowly contracting your butt muscles by squeezing them together. As you do this, notice what happens to your feet.
Did you notice what happens? We’re going to do it again, but this time, I want you to put your hands on the center of your thighs. Now, squeeze your butt muscles again, and watch and feel what happens to your hands.
Now, if you did this as instructed, you will have noticed that your hands move away from your mid-line as your thigh bone rotates outward. That is called external rotation of the thigh bone.
So, you are probably wondering what the heck that has to do with anything. What you just did was move your pelvis by activating your butt muscles! If you put enough tension in them to cause your thigh bones to externally rotate, then your pelvis went into posterior tilt. When this happens, it causes your lower spine to flatten.
What is the significance of this? Stand up again. If you are currently feeling discomfort in your lower back, then this will be an interesting test. Rank your level of discomfort on a 1 to 10 scale, with a 10 being the highest level of discomfort. Now, perform the posterior pelvic tilt again by gently squeezing your butt muscles until you have about a 75% of full contraction in them. Now while holding that position, rank your lower back discomfort.
What did you notice? Has it increased, stayed the same, or decreased? In my experience this motion creates at least some degree of reduced discomfort, and in many cases, almost complete reduction.
This resulting reduction in discomfort through movement of the pelvis communicates to us that perhaps your pelvic position is not ideal. Now, the opposite motion, tipping the pelvis forward into anterior tilt, may create relief if you have the opposite pelvic position.
These types of assessments can deliver an incredible amount of valuable information on what is currently happening in your body that may be contributing to your back pain, and also, HOW to reduce or eliminate it!
Sam Visnic–