The Amazing Stickie and Pelvic Clock

Today the Amazing Stickie is working on her Pilates exercises.  One of her favorites is one of the simplest because it increases her proprioception, helps her maintain a neutral spine in her daily life, and releases any tension she has from prolonged sitting.  She’s demonstrating the pelvic clock.

She begins by lying down on her back, arms at her sides, knees bent so that her feet are flat on the floor.  It is hard to see in the picture, but her spine is maintaining its natural curve in the starting position.  That means that there is a little bit of space between her lower back and the floor, enough for a ladybug to crawl through like a tunnel, but not enough for a badger.  (No, I don’t know why ladybugs or badgers would want to crawl under Stickie’s back.)

 

Stickie is going to do three variations of this exercise, but there are certainly more out there and she encourages everyone to experiment.

 

First, she is going to rock her pelvis up and down her body.  As Stickie exhales, she uses her abdominals to tilt her pelvis back toward her belly button.  (This presses her lower back into the floor and would squish our ladybug friend.)  Then she inhales and tilts her pelvis forward toward her pubic bone.  Working with the breath on this exercise is very useful.  She keeps the movement small to minimize the engagement of her powerful thigh muscles.

 

After several reps, Stickie shifts her attention to moving her pelvis from side to side.  When she does this, she tries to maintain the distance between her ribcage and her pelvis.  She knows that many of us, when we shift our weight from one side of our pelvis to the other, tend to hike our hip up toward our ribcage.  This might look slightly sexier, but does not help.  We want to be using our obliques to practice keeping our pelvis level even as we press one hip bone and then the other into the ground.

 

Then Stickie combines both movements.  She makes pelvic circles by pressing first her belly button, then one hip, then her pubic bone, then the other hip toward the floor.  Some people do this by envisioning a clock lying on their pelvises and pressing down the various numbers (thus the name of the exercise).  Alternatively, Stickie can imagine that she has a shallow bowl of water on her belly and she is swirling the water around.  Of course, she makes circles in both directions.

 

After she is done, her lower back often feels much nicer.