I
recycle. My son, like many people, has
some issues with low back pain. He knows
that much of the problem stems from a postural problem: he tips the top of his pelvis forward most of
the time, which brings the lower spine into too much extension. Pilates can help! He lives too far away for me to work with him
on the equipment, but I sent him some mat exercises to do. Here’s what I told him:
Obviously,
without seeing you move, I can only guess about what is happening with your
body. You will probably need to experiment to figure out what works best.
When you
are NOT specifically exercising, you will need to increase your mindfulness
about the position of your pelvis. Standing, you will want to think
occasionally about rotating the base of your pelvis forward. The Pilates
mafia suggests imagining you have a foosball handle at the side of your hips
and spinning it in the appropriate direction; this image may not work for you.
Sitting, you might find it helpful to scootch (how IS that word spelled?)
forward toward the edge of the chair so that you can feel your sit bones in
contact with the seat. From there, you want to lift your head toward the
ceiling (“lengthen your spine”) without jutting your sternum forward or
hyperextending your lower back (“excessive lordosis”). Some people find
that contracting the abs helps with that; I find that thinking about making the
lower back long works better, but you can experiment. Mindfulness is
annoying because you have to practice it a lot, but even if you fix your
posture a couple of times a day, it will help.
In yoga,
there are a couple of ways to approach forward bends and this is relevant to
your issue. One of the ways is the “peel down” method. You can
imagine (or actually try) standing against a wall and begin folding forward
from your head, moving one vertebra at a time off the wall as you reach toward
your toes. It is important to keep the weight toward the balls of your
feet because the hips naturally fall back to counterbalance the weight of the
torso and ideally you are keeping your hips over your ankles as long as
possible. This is easier as your hamstrings lengthen. Doing a
forward fold this way (in Pilates, it’s called a standing roll down) can help
you figure out where your spine prefers not to articulate into flexion (e.g.,
mine moves as a unit in the lower lumbar, which makes some stuff pretty darn
challenging). The second way of approaching a forward bend is more about
moving from the pelvis. It’s a variation of the “flat back” forward bend.
Instead of thinking about flexing each vertebra forward as you bend, you
bend forward by rotating the pelvis over the heads of the femurs and the spine
just goes for the ride. Because you are thinking about the hip motion,
you get a lot more awareness about how the pelvis moves, which you can use to
correct posture the rest of the time.
You are
already doing femur arcs/dead bugs and chest lifts, so I won’t go into detail
about those.
The
Pilates pelvic clock can be helpful for figuring out where the stuck spots are
and for improving general control. Doing it with Franklin balls or tennis
balls or yoga tune up balls on either side of the sacrum can also massage out
some of the pain while providing additional feedback about the movement.
You imagine that there is a clock with one edge at your pubic bone, one
edge at your belly button, and the sides toward your hips. I suck at the
clock number thing, so I never cue it that way, but you need to know the points
of the circle. You exhale and tilt the pelvis toward the belly button and
inhale, tilting toward the pubic bone. It is tempting to make this a big
movement and involve the powerful quads; don’t do it. Keep it small and
use the abs to do the work. After a while, tilt side to side. You
may find that the hips don’t want to press up and down without moving toward or
away from your head. The goal is to keep the distance between rib cage
and hips the same while one side or the other of the pelvis presses into the
ground. After you’ve done that a while, make pelvic circles. You
will probably find that one direction is easier than the other.
Next you
can do some bridging. In Pilates, bridging starts with a pelvic tilt
toward the belly button. Then the spine peels up one vertebra at a time.
(It isn’t just popping the hips up to the ceiling in one quick motion.)
At the top, take a big breath in. As you exhale, peel your spine
back down while consciously pulling your pelvis toward your heels. Your
butt will probably come down significantly closer to your heels and your spine
will feel like it has a little more space to articulate. If you have a
workout partner, that person can actually pull your pelvis away from your head
as you peel down; it feels really nice.
Bent knee
opening is kind of like femur arcs, but to the side. You begin with your
legs in tabletop position. One leg stays in place (this is harder than it
sounds) while the other leg opens out to the side. This trains pelvic
stability and you have to use your abs to keep both sides of the pelvis firmly
on the ground as you move. Sets of ten are good. Leg circles are a
progression of this exercise and give bonus points for stretching the IT band.
One leg is long on the ground, the other is straight up toward the
ceiling. Keeping the pelvis level (again, much harder than it sounds),
the lifted leg circles across the body, down toward the other foot, out away from
the body, and back to start. After about four circles, reverse
directions. And, of course, you need to do the other leg.
Try these
and see how it feels. It might be that you need to get more extension in
your thoracic spine as well, but this should be a start.
