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48: Alignment Dogma - Pelvis
1.3k Plays2 years ago
Welcome to Season 3 and Episode 48 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel and Sarah discuss dogmatic beliefs and myths around the pelvis from the yoga, Pilates, and strength training worlds. We also discuss how correlating pelvic position with safety or pain is not backed by research, and thus what value teaching pelvic alignment may or may not have.
You will learn:
- Natural variations on the AFAB and AMAB pelvises
- How there’s a variety of ideas on where neutral pelvis is, which tells us that nobody knows what a neutral pelvis actually is
- That anterior pelvic tilt is not a pathology and we need to stop acting like it is
- Alignment cueing has value - let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater
- What place does mula bandha have in our pelvis
- Literally, where is mula bandha as there seems to be no agreement
- Is “butt wink” a bad thing or an inevitable thing?
- What does “navel to spine” actually do to the pelvis
- Ultimately, how should we be thinking about our students’ pelvic alignment and how much do we need to be doing about it
Sign up here for the Live Strength Training Webinar on Sept 14th with 30 day replay
Laurel's Body of Knowledge Course
Movement Logic Hip and SI Joint Tutorial
Movement Logic Pelvic Floor Tutorial
IG post comparing Sarah and Laurel’s internal and external hip rotation
Matthew Remski’s Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond uncovers rape and sexual assault by Ashtanga Yoga’s creator Pattahbi Jois on his teachers and students
Study showing 75-85% of people have anterior pelvic tilt and no pain
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Launch
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to season three of the Movement Logic podcast. I am Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist, and I'm here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversorf, who is another person. I'm just a big nobody, basically.
00:00:54
Speaker
Dr. Sarah Cork physical therapist is it was drilled into us in PT school that you cannot use the doctor without also contextualizing it that you are not a medical doctor. Fair enough. I think that's good. Okay. Welcome to season three. Can you believe it? I really can't actually believe it. Like this is episode 48. Is it? Yeah. That's a lot of episodes. It's almost like a year's worth of weekly episodes. Yeah.
00:01:24
Speaker
I like our method. I do too. I think it works with our personality. It does. And also, I mean.
00:01:31
Speaker
It's like we have one single personality between us. Did you hear how I said our personality? Did you hear how I agreed with it immediately? I was like, yep. It does fit our personality. Well, because both of us also do other work. So it's like, if this was my full-time job, sure. I would do three episodes a week if this is all I was doing. Yeah. I mean, this is why I'm trying to hire a video editor. Yeah. Makes sense. By the way, everyone listening?
Seeking Assistance and Reflecting on Past Episodes
00:01:54
Speaker
Yes.
00:01:56
Speaker
if you'd like to video edit for me. Oh, do we have any video editors in the audience? Is there a doctor in the house? A doctor of video editing? So what have you been up to since last season ended? Which was not that long ago. A lot of video editing. A lot of video editing. Fair enough. Yeah, I've been traveling. Yeah. It's currently July, where we are in this period of our life. And I've been traveling with my family. Nice.
00:02:24
Speaker
June was a little easier than May. May was a little bit, lots of things were happening. We were still putting out episodes of the podcast. It's been good. I mean, definitely working more with you has been very rewarding on many levels, Sarah Court. So I'm Sarah Court DPT, Dr. Sarah Court DPT. But that being said, I'm currently in the phase of like figuring out how to offload some of the work that I'd rather not be doing in favor of work that I'd rather be doing. Like recording episodes with you.
00:02:55
Speaker
I have a dream. It's not as big of a dream as Martin Luther King, but it's a very specific dream to me, which is I have a dream of a future world where movement logic has an assistant.
00:03:12
Speaker
Ooh, hey everybody listening. If you would like to be assisted. If you would like to assist us, we need a lot of assistance. Yeah, we need help. So right now as people are listening, so for our last season, we recorded most of the duos together.
00:03:28
Speaker
in Yalapa, Mexico, which is this beautiful, tiny little remote town that you can only reach by boat. Five stars. Five stars on Yalapa. And right now it's probably 90 million degrees there, but I don't care. Yeah, nothing matters there. It's so beautiful. Nothing matters. It was a great, it was a great, great place to record. We're not in Yalapa right now. We're in, well, we were going to be in my closet.
00:03:56
Speaker
I talked us out of that. Laurel looked at the closet and she was like, why don't we be somewhere nicer? Like your bedroom. Like my room. We're sitting in my bedroom in Los Angeles. It's probably 90 degrees outside, but we have air conditioning, so that's also very nice. Yeah. I'm trying to think what I have been up to since season two finished airing. I've just been working my ass off. A lot. I've been working a lot. My clinic director has had her baby. He's adorable, but she is on...
00:04:24
Speaker
I was going to call it movement leave. She's on maternity leave as she should be. I absorbed a lot of her patience and so my life the past couple of weeks has just been like straight patience back to back and I'm a little feeling a little loony about that so I'm glad that's coming to a bit of a close.
Engaging with Audience Reviews
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, me too.
00:04:39
Speaker
So we are starting a new tradition in season three of reading out some of our reviews. Some of the reviews that we got on our podcast. So here's one. This is from someone calling themselves swim grandparent. And the title of the review is a great source to help clean up the myths. And they give us five stars.
00:04:58
Speaker
Listening to these podcasts, this is what swim grandparent said, listening to these podcasts have challenged me to be a more thoughtful teacher. They helped me be a better questioner about things I have been told over and over in my yoga training. Thank you. Nice. Thank you swim grandparent for a lovely review.
00:05:17
Speaker
Swim Grandparents summed it up really well, our whole reason for being. It's true. Wouldn't you like us to read your review online? If you were going to relieve a review of our podcast, what would it be? My review of our podcast would simply be, I give Sarah Court five stars. And Sarah Court has been a wonderful, gracious host. And she did basically all of the planning for our trip to Yalapa, so she's
00:05:47
Speaker
really good at finding cool places to hang out. And also I love doing the podcast. So I give the podcast five stars, but anyone listening, if you would like to leave an honest review, we're open to it. 100%. And I want to read some one-star reviews eventually down the road. Absolutely. I would love it if someone would leave an honest one-star review that we could then read on the podcast.
00:06:13
Speaker
I really would. I think it would be fascinating. Yeah. There's one thing that's in my head and I was like, where is this from? Because it's not an actual review that someone left publicly. It was a response to an email.
00:06:27
Speaker
from our mailing list. I'm not going to get it exactly right, but it was basically, do you remember this? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, maybe. It was basically, I really like your podcast, but I can't recommend it to anyone else because you
00:06:46
Speaker
There's too much random conversation. That was the review. Which reminded me a lot of the time someone said to me when I was hiking and they were walking down behind me and then I turned around and they saw my face and they said, oh, from the back I thought you were 20. So if you can write us a review that is both, it's a slap and a tickle?
00:07:09
Speaker
Right? In the way that those two reviews, one of my face and the other of our podcast, were a bit of a slap and a tickle. Like, apparently, I have the butt of a 20-year-old. You're not mad at that. But I have the face of a crone. That's not what they said. English was not their first language, so I am great at insulting that one in a big way. But it mostly made me laugh. Anyway, definitely leave us a one-star review. Or, however, maybe you're a three-star reviewer. You're like, it's not one. It's not total poo.
00:07:37
Speaker
But it's not a five-star experience for me. Anyway, I'm going to stop talking about that. The bigger picture is if you interact in some way, whether it is giving us any number of stars, writing a review, subscribing, it really helps us to reach more people. And that's what I want to do because the more people we reach, the more people we can piss off.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah. Or the more people will basically leave us reviews and stars, and then we can read them and ramble on forever about their reviews and stars. Oh, boy. All right. You can have some editing ahead of you in this one. Yep. That's all right. The first one is always full of drinking tires. Getting the wheels rolling. Getting the lead out.
Debunking Alignment Myths
00:08:23
Speaker
OK. So today, we are talking about alignment dogma.
00:08:27
Speaker
And specifically alignment dogma about your pelvis. So we're going to do three episodes in total on alignment dogma. We're going to in the other ones be talking about spinal alignment and then also shoulder alignment. But today we're talking about pelvic alignment. Now, Laurel, I don't know if you know this, but there are a bunch of myths
00:08:49
Speaker
myths out there about your pelvis. And people are definitely confused about where their pelvis is meant to be. Should they be tucking or untucking? And most of all, how to achieve the almighty neutral pelvis. It is the gospel of neutral again, isn't it? It's in Pelvis chapter four, verse 17, thou shalt neutralize thine pelvis. I've heard that one. Yeah.
00:09:16
Speaker
I would also add to this that there are also more people out there that have no idea where their pelvis is. More people than. Are like concerned about where their pelvis is. There's even more people that don't know where their pelvis is. Sure. Right. Definitely. But have you heard these ideas about, have you heard students or people come up to you and said things like, when I'm doing
00:09:43
Speaker
I don't know. Pose. When I'm doing a bridge pose, where should my pelvis be? Absolutely. The question is actually worded just like that. Where should my pelvis be? Yeah, people say that all the time. Ideally between your trunk and your thighs. Ideally still part of your body. Somewhere. You haven't jettisoned it. Right. That is ideal. Okay.
00:10:03
Speaker
But they mean like what alignment should it be in this? Yes. Yes, I have. And I've also gotten the feeling that they're concerned about where their pelvis is as it relates to the position it's in relative to the torso or spine and hips because they're concerned about safety. They're concerned about doing the pose correctly so that they don't injure, say, their lower back or doing the pose correctly so that they can kind of conform to
00:10:32
Speaker
what they think I want or what a teacher would want. Or if they're a teacher, a lot of times they're asking because they want to teach it correctly. They don't want to hurt their students. So this is why I think these episodes are important because hopefully what we're able to do through the conversations we have around alignment dogma is disconnect this idea that alignment or posture or movement quality, I think these are all interchangeable terms,
00:11:01
Speaker
are in some way predictive of injury or safety because as it turns out, and this is pretty counterintuitive what I'm about to say, it kind of flies in the face of conventional wisdom, posture slash alignment slash movement quality do not predict pain or injury. We cannot look at someone's posture, alignment, or movement quality and go, you are at a higher risk based on what I'm seeing of hurting yourself.
00:11:31
Speaker
And we're going to talk more and more and more about this because to just put that statement out there without having conversations about it and rooting it in real life examples, it's one of those things where people are just like, no, because that's actually not what I would have believed my entire life. Because what we believe for our entire life is that if you do things like move out of alignment in whatever that means,
00:11:57
Speaker
you could hurt yourself. It's coming from physical therapists, it's coming from doctors, it's coming from parents, it's coming from movement teachers. A lot of the alignment queuing is based around this idea of safety and what we're here to tell you people is that those things are not related. The other thing that I think people are just massively confused about is what is a neutral pelvis?
00:12:22
Speaker
Is this something that I'm supposed to be trying to do all the time? Like right now, Laurel, as you are sitting here, is your pelvis neutral? Listeners, is your pelvis neutral right now? And if it's not, how do you know it's not? And how do you know what would make it neutral? Like what would you have to do? And if it's not neutral, what if we've been fear mongered into thinking is going to happen? Yeah, what are the consequences of it being out of neutral? Right.
00:12:46
Speaker
And is that based on your anterior tilt versus posterior tilt? Should you be doing more of one or neither of both? And what about mula bandha from yoga? What about navel to spine from pilates? What about butt wink in weightlifting?
00:13:03
Speaker
So we're going to talk about all of these today and we're also going to discuss what actually determines your anterior or posterior pelvic tilt and how much you can realistically do about it if there's anything that you need to do about it. Before we talk about it, can we talk about the t-shirt that I want to create? Tell me more. There's a butt on the back and it's winking. Butt wink. No. And the front of the shirt says butt wink will happen.
00:13:26
Speaker
All right. Well, we're going to talk about all of these things today, not just butt wink, but also mula bandha, also navel to spine. We're also going to discuss what determines your anterior or posterior pelvic tilt and what can you or should you or do you need to do about it. And then the various concepts or dogmas that are specific to movement practices like yoga, pilates and strength training that impact what people think they are supposed to do with their pelvis. And then what are some actually useful ways to cue pelvic movement and when do we want to use them?
00:13:56
Speaker
And I'm also going to insert very important pieces of pelvis-related trivia.
00:14:01
Speaker
throughout the episode and I'm going to ask Laurel to drop the first one on us. It's very esoteric. Okay, here's one. Elvis was nicknamed Elvis the pelvis because of his gyrations on stage that nobody had seen the likes of before and that sent women into tizzies. When he went on the Ed Sullivan show for the first time, they only filmed him from the waist up because it was considered not family friendly to show his pelvic thrusts.
00:14:29
Speaker
So first of all, my question is, is anyone asking whether or not Elvis' pelvis was ever out of alignment in all of this gyration and thrusting? Was anyone concerned about like what Elvis'
Understanding Pelvic Anatomy and Variations
00:14:45
Speaker
pelvis like general postural tendency was? Won't anyone think of the pelvis?
00:14:51
Speaker
Would anyone try to correct Elvis to try to work his gyrations into a slightly more posteriorly tilted bias or anteriorly tilted bias for the safety of his lower back? Sure. No, I mean. Why?
00:15:05
Speaker
Why weren't they? Where were the pelvis people in the time of Elvis? Well, let's move it into current day. Are the current day pelvis people worried about Lizzo and her twerking? Or anybody else who does a lot of dance movement that involves anterior and posterior tilts? I think the yoga teachers and the Pilates teachers might be, and maybe even the strength coaches. But I think the people who are more interested in the aesthetics of dance,
00:15:32
Speaker
having these conversations as much. I don't think they are. It's interesting to step outside of your echo chamber and go, why does my community get really fixated on the minutiae of certain topics and ascribe a ton of importance to them where these other movement communities or communities of practice don't? Those people all seem to be fine. Yeah, something to consider.
00:15:59
Speaker
We're going to keep talking about that for sure. Let's back up and let's get a little anatomy in here because I want to make sure everybody knows what we're dealing with, what we're talking about. So the pelvis is made up of three bones on each side, the ilium, the ischium, and the pubis. And those three bones are fused together to make one half of your pelvis. And so each half is called the innominate. So you have two innominates that come together
00:16:28
Speaker
to make a pelvis. Inominant means unnamed. That's cool. I didn't know that. That's a piece of the unnamed bone. Also the coxal bone. Coxal means hip. Latin for hip. Coxa. There we go. In the back, your two inominant bones sandwich the sacrum at the sacroiliac joint.
00:16:46
Speaker
And in the front, they meet at the pubic symphysis, which is a cartilaginous joint. So if you are assigned female at birth, right, which is known as AFAB or assigned male at birth, AMAB, you will have a differently built pelvis, essentially because an AFAB pelvis is shaped for a potential pregnancy and delivery.
00:17:10
Speaker
However, there is still a ton of variety within these female and male assigned pelvis shapes. And there are actually four different named subcategories for the female pelvis based on the inlet, which is the diameter of the top of the pelvis. Laurel, do you know what these are? I know one of them is called an Android, like the phone. Okay. That's all I know. I mean, I looked it up because I saw it in the notes. I knew you were going to ask me this question.
00:17:41
Speaker
But I didn't commit anything to memory other than Android. No, Android's good. And I'm going to stick a picture in the show notes because they are actually wildly different. And the Android to me is the one that looks most like a heart shape. There's one that's super, super round, like a ball round, and it's called gynaecoid. There is one that's more shaped like an egg, but like a sideways egg.
00:18:04
Speaker
the top and the bottom of the egg or like the left and right side of your hips, that's called platypalloid, like a platypus. And then there's anthropoid, which is basically if the egg was facing front to back.
00:18:18
Speaker
Just kind of delving into the topic of structural variation here, just starting to kind of wet the whistle of the amount of variety that we see in the shape of people's bones, right? Exactly. Okay. So when we think about movement of the pelvis, we have to consider it in a few different ways. So if we're thinking about movement of the entire pelvis, we're considering it moving in one piece in relation to your femur bones and also in relation to your lumbar spine, the bottom of your lumbar spine.
00:18:47
Speaker
So that's one way of looking at how the pelvis moves, but then also there are movements of each hip, right? The femur in relation to the hip socket, the acetabulum. And realistically, you're never moving your hip without also moving your pelvis a little bit, but if we just conceptualize, you could in a conceptual way, conceptually,
00:19:13
Speaker
You could pin someone's pelvis down and just move the femurs around, like lying on your back, right? Or you can move the whole pelvis in relation to both femurs if you were doing like a forward fold. And can I give just a little bit of added context here? So the one where you're lying down on the ground moving your femurs around would be called an open chain movement. Sure. And then the one where you're standing on your feet.
00:19:32
Speaker
If you connect it to the floor, it would be a closed chain movement. So the distal end of the lower extremity is fixed to an immovable surface. That's closed chain. When you're lying down on your back, waving your legs around, your feet are not fixed to an immovable surface, so this is open chain. It tends to be in closed chain movements. The more proximal body part is the moving part, and in open chain movements, the more distal body part is the moving part. Proximal just means closer to the center of the body.
00:19:55
Speaker
distal means more distant from or further away from the center of the body. Right, and in those examples we also weren't talking about you can move your pelvis in relationship like when your pelvis is moving over both femur bones at the same time it's also moving in relation to your spine at the lumbosacral joint. I would say anytime your pelvis is moving over one or both femur bones it's probably causing some movement in the lower back spine. Definitely, okay.
00:20:19
Speaker
And so any of these movements is going to be dependent on the shape and size and angle of your hip socket, your acetabulum.
00:20:27
Speaker
acetabulum and also dependent on the shape and size and angle of the femoral head, which is on the femur going into that acetabulum. Right. And that connection right there is what we call the hip joint, but the joint is actually comprised of two body parts, the pelvis and the femur. Yes. And there can be a huge range of combinations which are totally normal. And there's this great website that Paul Grilly made where you can see comparisons of pelvises side by side and how much variation there is in all of these things that is considered
00:20:54
Speaker
totally normal. I also have a course on my website called structural variations of the hip joint.
00:20:58
Speaker
which I made when you made your motor learning course. I made my course called Structural Variations to the Hip Joint, and it looked at basically how different everyone's pelvis and femur bones are shaped and how movement at the hip is gonna be different based on those structural variations. Even looked at some research showing that there is no normal, that variation is the norm. Anyway, just wanted to plug that little course on my website. Absolutely. The other... Link in bio.
00:21:25
Speaker
I think you'll find it's not in the bio as much as it's in the show notes. I'm sorry, why do I always say Lincoln bio? Lincoln bio. It's like President Lincoln's bio. Lincoln bio. There's also an Instagram post that I made that shows the difference between Laurel's hip internal and external rotation and my hip internal and external rotation. They're essentially the exact opposite of each other. It's amazing. So as much external rotation as Sarah has, and she has
00:21:53
Speaker
Like this is a really technical term for it. Shitloads. I have that much internal rotation. Yes. And then as little internal rotation as Sarah has, she doesn't have much. Hardly. I have that much external rotation. I don't have much. That's right. And how do we know this is not just a flexibility thing?
00:22:08
Speaker
Because we can measure the position of the femur and discover if the femur is something called retroverted or antiverted. And that just has to do with how is the head of the femur angled into the hip socket. Yeah, and you did that. You did that where you did it, I mean. Yeah, so you feel for the greater trochanter. You feel where the greater trochanter is. And then you look for the point where you feel the greater trochanter the most is the quote unquote neutral for that person. Where the head is quote unquote neutral in the socket. In the socket. And then you look at, OK, well, how does that relate to the angle of their leg?
00:22:38
Speaker
as it's rotated. And so for somebody that quote-unquote neutral is actually a very rotated position, either internally or externally. And in my course, structural variations of the hip joint, which you can find linked in the show notes in the Lincoln bio, I show how that torsion angle is really coming from the twisted shaft of the femur. So it's really confusing because it's not actually that the hip is rotated. It's neutral, but the shaft is twisted. So that means that the toe is going to angle. That's right.
00:23:07
Speaker
away from what you would expect to see as a neutral hip. Anyway, fascinating topic. It is. We could go down a total rabbit hole of all the movement variety at the hip joint. That's just one variety, right? Then there's the neck angle, where the socket is positioned. Paul Grilly has all the pictures. Yeah. What I was going to say is it's not great podcasting material. Not really. Picture it. Picture it. And then you're like, I totally can't because I don't.
00:23:32
Speaker
because I don't have a picture. I don't like it. I have a picture because you guys are just talking. I think the better option is if we just all hold in our heads the concept that there is a wide variety of pelvis and femur shapes that are going to impact the available range of motion for the pelvis as a whole for the hips individually. Right. And you can go get Laurel's course or if you want to also give me some money, you could go and get our hips and SI joint movement logic tutorial
00:24:01
Speaker
in which I do a deep dive into all these variations, the choice is yours. I have some more pelvis trivia for you. The plural of pelvis, one of the plurals is pelvises, but the other one is pelvis, which I really love because written down it looks like P elves. Nice. I enjoy that. Let's talk about this elusive neutral pelvis.
The Myth of Neutral Pelvis
00:24:24
Speaker
The movement that most people are using to find this
00:24:27
Speaker
neutral pelvis is, and the reason I said neutral so weirdly is because since I don't actually think it's a singular place,
00:24:36
Speaker
I'm trying to imply quotation marks with the tone of my voice without having to say quote-unquote neutral. So let's just say that quote-unquote neutral is what I'm saying anytime I'm saying neutral. Can I just jump in here though because this is a really interesting point. It's not really a place. It's probably a zone. Yes. If you're trying to find this elusive neutral purpose, the movement that you're doing is probably anterior tilt, posterior tilt.
00:25:00
Speaker
for the most part, right? So, I mean, there's more things you can be doing, but that's basically it. We're going to focus on anterior and posterior tilt. And so just to make sure that everyone's clear what those are, anterior tilt is when the ASISs, which are the hip bones in the front of your pelvis, rotate down towards the ground. And posterior tilt is when the PSISs, the bones that are next to your sacrum in the back, rotate down towards the ground. You can feel these, like the two little bumps that jut out at the front of the pelvis if you stand up from a chair too fast and crack those on the edge of a table.
00:25:30
Speaker
You'll feel it. The PSSs are a little bit more subtle, but if you take your palm to the back, like right where the top inner corner of your back jean pockets would be and kind of palpate around with your finger pads, there's two little knobs there.
00:25:45
Speaker
And so the axis of rotation is a horizontal line through your pelvis as if your pelvis was a rotisserie chicken rotating on a spit. Right. So from like the side of one hip straight across the side of the other hip is the spit, right? Yeah.
00:26:00
Speaker
You said something about a bowl in terms of trying to remember which, because people definitely, when I teach this in yoga teacher training, people are like, oh, the one that you're calling anterior tilt, I want that to be posterior tilt because I'm sticking out my butt. It's like my posterior, right? That's the confusion that people get. It's very confusing, yeah. So there's the mnemonic that I learned, which makes no sense, which is like,
00:26:21
Speaker
spill the bowl of Cheerios forward onto an ant hill. Oh, do ants like Cheerios? It literally makes no sense. But somehow, if you have this image of an ant hill in front of you, then you can never forget anterior tilt. Because you're spilling the bowl forward onto the ant hill. Oh, an ant, like anterior. Yeah. OK. The ant hill has to be in front of you. If it's behind you, it messes you up. So don't ever think of an ant hill behind you, because it will just totally mess it up. It's a nonsensical.
00:26:50
Speaker
For me, when I learned that the top of a structure, like a pelvis, or a ribcage, or a shoulder blade, moves forward in space, this is called anterior tilt. When the bottom of the structure moves forward in space,
00:27:09
Speaker
said another way, the top of the structure moves back in space. This is posterior toe. So actually it's kind of cool because these body parts that are kind of embedded in the larger land mass of our body that are harder to spot, like the pelvis, is why I say like most people don't even know where the pelvis is because it's like buried inside. It's like close to your trunk. It's like kind of a part of your trunk blob, right? The number of people, your trunk blob,
00:27:32
Speaker
I'm not exaggerating. The number of people that tell me they have low back pain and I say, can you point to it? And they point to their butt is a lot. Yeah, exactly. And then also the rib cage. Right. It's in the trunk blob. Yes. The shoulder blazer in the trunk blob. It's just anything below your neck. All of this to say, when we get really fixated on pelvic tilt, which goes back to the first thing I uttered at the beginning of this episode is most people don't even fucking know where that is. Right. So we're getting really hung up on how it tilts. Right. But do people even know where it is? They sure don't. Yeah.
00:28:01
Speaker
So this concept of this neutral pelvis is this magical place.
00:28:05
Speaker
where your pelvis is not too anteriorly tilted and it's not too posteriorly tilted. It's this very Goldilocks idea, right? The cereal is not too cold. The porridge is not too hot. It's just right. But here's what we want to consider. And we're going to come back to this when we're talking about cueing the pelvis later in this episode because there is no clear agreement on where exactly this Goldilocks place is. So just for fun, I typed, what is a neutral pelvis into Google?
00:28:33
Speaker
And here are a few of the definitions that came up. They did tend to range between super specific to super vague. So the first super specific one that I heard was a neutral pelvis is where the ASIS and the pubic bone pubic symphysis are in the same plane, meaning they're lined up.
00:28:51
Speaker
You could press them both into a surface like the floor or the wall. Yeah, either vertically when you're standing or horizontally when you're lying down. I have heard that before. Have you heard that before? I have. I don't think that means that the pelvis is neutral. No. I don't either. Because it depends on the shape of the pelvis, right? Of course. But so there's one really specific one. So those people are saying this is neutral. And then a super vague one that I saw said, a position that best supports the curve in your low back. And that means nothing.
00:29:21
Speaker
To me, how do I know where that is? There's no way. How do you live a happy life? By being happy. How do you put your pelvis in neutral? You just support the curve in your low back. It's easy. Here's another really specific one. This one, because it's so specific, ends up meaning nothing at all. A position of the pelvis that maximizes the degrees of potential tilts and twists of the pelvis.
00:29:52
Speaker
I think I would need a PhD to understand what that actually would be. I think it depends on what you would... What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? You're maximizing the degree of potential tilts and twists of the pelvis. Are you Elvis the pelvis? Maybe Elvis wrote that. Maybe this is for Elvis. Maybe Elvis got a lot of hate mail about his pelvis and he said, you know what? Neutral pelvis is wherever I want it to be. It implies that neutral is the place from which we can maximize.
00:30:21
Speaker
Right. Potential. That could be the tagline for a college, maximize your potential at the College of Neutral Pelvis. Okay, so another one that was super vague. Well, the other thing, if I can just go back to this position that maximizes the degrees of potential tilts and twists of my pelvis, it doesn't make any sense. Why is there a position that then is going to maximize
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't get it. Okay. So this is a bullshit statement. Yes. Okay. Because maximizing degrees of movement, it forces it from the forces we're trying to produce. Thank you. Right. So if we're trying to produce force, different degrees of movement are going to do that more than other. We don't need to go to end range to maximize force. We sure don't. In fact, we probably shouldn't. So anyway, I mean, it depends.
00:31:15
Speaker
It makes no sense. Yes. I think we can move on. Okay. So the next super vague one was, it said, neutral pelvis is a position that is the most efficient and natural alignment.
00:31:27
Speaker
That one's almost worse than the one before it. Then this supports the curve in your low back or the twists and turns. The twists and turns. Then there was one that was like super about the male gaze. It said, a neutral pelvis will ensure flatter abs and more lifted and toned bum. Muscular balance, better core function, less pressure on the spine. I mean, the last three aren't necessarily true, but they're not as upsetting to me as the first two. Not just because who gives a shit about my flatter abs and more lifted and toned bum, but also,
00:31:57
Speaker
I don't know how to lift and tone my bum if I'm doing a posterior tilt that's going to contract my abs, and I don't know how to contract my abs if I'm doing a super anterior tilt that's going to... I'm like, I don't... Help me. Sarah's sitting down and doing pelvic tilts. I'm trying, people. Thinking hard. Okay, and then there was another one that was super confusing. Okay, so they said neutral pelvis means that the pubic bone and the sacrum are both parallel to the floor. Whoa.
00:32:25
Speaker
I don't understand what's happening. I don't either. Are they lying on their belly or back? They would have to be. So anyway, moving on. And then they said to do it, you do like a standing hamstring stretch, like a uttanasana, standing forward fold. And then when you come up, you'll be in neutral. Now, okay, in all fairness, I don't think you'll be in neutral, but I do think that there is something to be said about like if you're trying to get somebody to come into what they're
00:32:50
Speaker
maybe more comfortable resting posture is to have them move around a little bit and then stop moving because they haven't layered on top of what they're doing with their body all these ideas of what they think they should be doing because you distracted them for a moment. If we wanted to look at people's
00:33:08
Speaker
feet posture and the teacher trainings I used to teach, I would just have people mill about, walk about, and like distract them and then have them all stop moving and then kind of sneak in like some observations, right? So I think that's what that's going for, but the fact that like it means you'll have a neutral pelvis is total bullpucky. I also do, I have people like just walk in place and then stop walking and don't fix anything. That's what I'm talking about. Right, but that's for the whole body. Right.
00:33:34
Speaker
Versus you know because one of the first things I do when people come into the clinic is I look at how they stand and If they're a yoga person or Pilates person, they usually give me their best like Tadasana, right? So I'm trying to layer all this stuff on top of it and I don't want them to do anything so that's yeah, but no wonder people are super confused or because if those were the definitions that I found if I was not a Professional and I found all those definitions online and I was like, you know what? I hear about this neutral pelvis and I think I should be doing it I would be like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do now
00:34:04
Speaker
based on all of those. Yeah, but also they probably shouldn't even buy into the idea that neutral pelvis is something. Anything that's really going to help them in their life? They definitely shouldn't, but people are out there thinking about it. They are.
00:34:20
Speaker
there is no consensus on what it is or how to find it. No, no, no, no. So we're going to look now more specifically at yoga and at Pilates and at weight training to compare how each type of exercise either cues this neutral pelvis or like what kind of pelvis shapes or positions are valued by that group and why. Laurel, what are some cues that you have heard in a class
00:34:46
Speaker
that are aimed at finding a neutral pelvis. I'm not talking about cues that you use around pelvic movement because I'm sure at this point they're extremely different, but what are the cues that you have heard or that you learned maybe in your teacher training that were like, this is how you get someone into a neutral pelvis? This is where I launch into what I will try to make a very short story about how I used to teach people to cue the pelvis and of course how I cue the pelvis.
00:35:12
Speaker
People listening who did the yoga works teacher training, I know there's probably lots of podcast listeners who went through the yoga works teacher training program. One of our big things that we used to teach was this concept of counter actions, where you would give two cues that were meant to create effort in opposing muscles.
00:35:32
Speaker
So, to find neutral pelvis, this was not the only way, but one of the ways that we would teach. The first cue was to roll the inner thighs. If you're standing in Tadasana, just standing upright, roll the flesh of your inner thighs in and back. So, that's internal hip rotation.
00:35:52
Speaker
Okay, and when you internally, if you were to stand up right now and turn your toes in, which would of course also rotate your thighs in, you'd probably find that your pelvis would spill forward onto the anthill, right? Yes, it would. Then on the heels of that cue, you then say, as you, so do this cue as you comb the flesh of your buttocks. Now, I'm going to pause right now and just
00:36:18
Speaker
also insert this fact which is that i've said the phrase flesh of the buttocks or buttocks flesh about 80 million times in my life and yes it sounds like the blood of the lamb or the flesh of the christ or it's very religious in the flesh of the buttocks the power of christ compels you the body of christ the power of christ compels you there's something very um
00:36:43
Speaker
It's very Catholic. There's something very, I was going to say Protestant almost. Protestant is like a Catholic light.
00:36:51
Speaker
There's something very prudish almost, but also simultaneously, yes, I just said flesh. Well, and with the verb comb? Comb. Like with a comb. Like comb it, like slide it down. Like get rid of your butt. Like squeegee your buttocks. Like get that butt out of there. Well, it's a posterior pelvic tilt. Right. Cute. So the first cue is internal rotation of the thighs, which has this coupled movement, coupled motion of anterior pelvic tilt.
00:37:21
Speaker
So theoretically, we've contracted the adductors like a very small amount. And now we're also going to posterior tilt the pelvis, which, you know,
00:37:30
Speaker
Flesh of the buttocks is going to be like ischial tuberosity, sit bones in a downward direction, maybe hamstrings, right? Maybe some hamstring engagement. Anyway, oh my God. So can we just like, I want to pause for a second right now and step outside of this conversation, kind of like what we did with Elvis the pelvis and go, can you believe how many words I just used to cue a neutral pelvis? And is it maybe that like these counter action cues were a little micromanagy? Also interesting.
00:37:56
Speaker
I mean, I think it's interesting to know that you can effort in both of these directions and create no movement, an isometric engagement, co-contraction. That's actually really cool. And it's also cool to know that internal rotation of the thighs might produce some anterior pelvic tilt. And conversely, posterior tilt of the pelvis might cause a little bit of external rotation in your thighs. This is all really cool movement stuff to know. But it's all being delivered. These cues are all being delivered with the premise that
00:38:25
Speaker
Neutral pelvis is important. I think most people who went through in a Nyangar inspired yoga teacher training, which yoga works definitely was, had it in their mind that there was some safety component or injury prevention component to aligning the pelvis in this neutral way. I mean, we call the lower back a risk factor. We referred to the knees, the neck, and the lower back. They were called risk factors. Just having them. Not body parts.
00:38:54
Speaker
Just having them. Everyone was at risk by having a neck, two knees, and a lower back. There's this great Chris Rock joke, this is from a while ago, when he's talking about when there's an ad on TV for medication, and then it'll be like, do you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning? You need blah, blah, blah. Pathologizing normal.
Rethinking Alignment in Movement Practices
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah. I kind of think that we could also summarize this podcast episode and the other Alignment Dogma episodes as just basically like, let's stop pathologizing normal. 100%. I'm still a little bit stuck on the flesh of the buttos. I can't lie. If we're making t-shirts.
00:39:33
Speaker
And you want to make a butt wink? I want when it says, I want to misquote that terrifying movie, The Exorcist, and say, the flesh of the buttocks compels you. Oh, yes. I think that would be quite funny. The flesh of the buttocks compels you. I mean, it does. The flesh of the buttocks has compels you. It's very compelling. It is the flesh of the buttocks is the flesh that's launched a thousand ships. Yes.
00:39:56
Speaker
Well, listen, Sir Mix-a-Lot was right. Yeah. He likes big butts. He cannot lie. Yeah. So one of the things that happened to me one time in a yoga class that has to do with posterior tilt and the flesh of my buttocks is the buttocks of a 20-year-old. Yes. My buttocks, which at this current time still look like they're 20. At the time, I was probably closer to 20.
00:40:23
Speaker
than I am now, but I was in, this was before I was a yoga teacher, I was in a Jeeva Mukti class and we're in Warrior II and I remember the teacher came around and when I do Warrior II, it is very hard for me to get any amount of posterior tilt anywhere because I am generally an anteriorly tilted person and we're going to discuss why that's actually not a pathology or a problem, just it's who I be.
00:40:46
Speaker
But the teacher came up behind me and she goes, stop sticking your butt out. She was slut shaming me. She was butt shaming me. She was butt shaming you. Did your butt not wink back? I think she didn't. I think she felt uncomfortable. She wanted you to butt wink actually. I think she felt uncomfortable because the winking of my butt was making her question her own sexuality. Oh, are you serious? No.
00:41:12
Speaker
Okay. You definitely got me there. But what she was trying to get me to do in essence was do a posterior tilt of my pelvis anatomically. It said nothing to do with anything other than that. I remember in my head not knowing anything about anything, but knowing that I could not
00:41:32
Speaker
get my butt to do what she wanted it to do. I was like, I cannot not stick my butt out here. This is where I am. There is nowhere else for me to go. But the messaging is like anteriorly tilting is bad news. And then there's cues that aren't, they're yoga cues, common yoga cues that aren't, speaking of cues, you should go back to season two and listen to our three-parter on cueing.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yes. There are common yoga cues that aren't specifically about the pelvis, but that involve the pelvis because they're talking about the whole body, like the cue to put your body between two panes of glass for something like- In triangle. In triangle. In triangle pose, it's the big one where it comes up, which is going to force me to try to posterior tilt to get between the glass, which, again, personally, I have a very hard time with, and I probably won't succeed.
00:42:19
Speaker
You know, I want to also step outside this conversation for a second and go, even though that queue has been demonized and everyone's like, why would you want to be a
00:42:28
Speaker
fly between two panes of glass. That sounds like a terrible plight. There's nothing wrong with that cue in my opinion. Sure. There's nothing wrong with asking someone in however, whatever way you choose to cue it to do posterior tilt of the pelvis or anterior tilt of the pelvis or to even find neutral. Even though you're probably not going to be able to know whether they're neutral or not, it doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong
00:42:53
Speaker
with helping people find a shape or move in a particular way. And in fact, there can be a lot of benefit to it, like teaching alignment. In talking about alignment dogma, let's not become so dogmatic that we go, oh, alignment is pointless.
00:43:06
Speaker
and useless. There's a lot of good reasons to teach alignment, like patterning muscle engagement in different ways, adding some novelty, like having people have a different experience with their body in the pose. Even just like talking someone into a pose, like someone who's never done triangle pose, I'm sorry, you're probably going to have to teach a little bit of alignment. You're going to have to tell them where to put their body parts relative to each other.
00:43:27
Speaker
So all of this to say, in my opinion, teaching alignment has a ton of value. People who are really skilled at it can potentially help people more than people who are not very skilled at teaching alignment. It's knowing your audience and what language to use, but the thing that I think causes more harm than good is when we start using alignment
00:43:46
Speaker
As a way, a cudgel for control, like stop sticking your butt out, Sarah. There's some power dynamic issues there that are really problematic. Yes. Body shaming issues that are really problematic. But also, when we start saying, I'm going to use alignment to keep my students safe or to help them prevent injury,
00:44:06
Speaker
research doesn't bear that out, as we said. Despite what conventional wisdom says and what we've been brought up to believe about the role alignment plays in safety and pain, there is no relationship, actually.
Exploring Yoga and Pilates Cues
00:44:19
Speaker
Not only does it not cause pain, there's no relationship. But yeah, using alignment cueing is not illegal and wrong. I think it's good, potentially. It's the application, it's the context. It's why you're doing it and what you believe you're accomplishing by doing it.
00:44:35
Speaker
All right, so if we go back to movement practice specific things, ideas, concepts around the pelvis, a big one in yoga is Mulabunda. And here's where we go yet again into more territory where there is no clear agreement on what exactly Mulabunda is. Can I ask, so first of all, yeah, let's talk about what Mulabunda might be. And then also, do people believe that doing Mulabunda keeps their pelvis neutral?
00:45:01
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. Okay. But I just wanted to talk about it in terms of the pelvis. This episode is not only about pelvic neutral, although it's a lot about pelvic neutral because that's where people get obsessed. It's about like whatever other things we think should be happening with the pelvis. Right. So do you want to tell us what Moolabunda is? Do you want me to tell us what Moolabunda is? Well, so disclosure, like I didn't ever teach Moolabunda and I wasn't taught very much about Moolabunda, but I've taken classes where teachers seem really fixated on like this Moolabunda. It's called the root lock, right? So it's the idea basically
00:45:30
Speaker
from what I hear is that we're supposed to contract some part or all of the pelvic floor and not just like a dynamic contraction, but a perpetual isometric contraction of the pelvic floor. Some people focus more on the posterior pelvic floor, the anus.
00:45:46
Speaker
Some people focus more on the whole pelvic floor. It depends on how the cue is given, but the idea is actually this comes more from like esoterics rather than anatomy and biomechanics. It's more about creating some type of energy lock, which I think you could probably speak more to. Yeah. Like this was something we were, we were taught quite a bit. I was not. So yeah.
00:46:07
Speaker
Typically in a class, it might be referred to in part of a practice, but there is a tradition, and I don't know because I was never an Ashtanga practitioner, but I believe it might be from the Ashtanga practice where you turn it on and you keep it on for the entire length of a class, so like an hour, hour and a half, two hours.
00:46:26
Speaker
And I should also interrupt myself here and say my understanding of it is limited to how it was presented to me which is through this very westernized lens of Westerners who took an indigenous practice and kind of translated it to an American audience so there may be in the same way that that namaste doesn't actually really mean the light in me bows down to the light in you it means something more like hi and
00:46:48
Speaker
Hey, what's up? Which is my favorite thing now. So my understanding of Mula Bandha is through this lens. There's probably a lot more detail, a lot more esoteric energy-based that I don't want to trash talk either. So yes, it's this idea that you are maintaining your prana, maintaining your energy in your body.
00:47:11
Speaker
the way that you do it that's that's what's confusing is because there's there's you know like this how do you find a neutral pelvis how do you do moolabunda i googled because i was like well let's see what does the internet think is the way you do it and i found another bunch of descriptions that are real weird and so okay so one of them was if you're a man contract the area between the anus and the testes which is where your perineum is which is the tendon of your pelvic floor is it not called a taint it is called a taint and i was going to look up because i don't remember what it's called
00:47:41
Speaker
in England. Hold please. The one that I know from England is chode. That's definitely a word I've heard many times. Scooch is another one. Grundle. Apple fritter? That seems weird. Okay. Anyway, if you're a man,
00:48:08
Speaker
Contract your apple fritter. If you are a woman, contract them up. Well, listen, because this one's real confusing. If you're a woman, because at least I know where my apple fritter is. Like if somebody told me to contract my apple fritter and told me what it was, I know where my perineum is. If you're a woman, contract the muscles at the bottom of the pelvic floor, okay, behind the cervix. Please tell me where the fuck that is.
00:48:34
Speaker
It's, you know, it's down there somewhere. Down there somewhere. I got no freaking clue. Well, it's not a place because your cervix is at least six inches above your pelvic floor or so, roughly, right? Ish, maybe three, depending on how big you are, maybe four. I don't actually know. It is some amount
00:48:55
Speaker
Vertically above your pelvic floor. So if I'm trying to contract the muscles at the bottom of the pelvic floor It'd be like telling someone to to move their shoulder blade like behind their nose Move your shoulder blade behind your nose basically just cue around the gallbladder like right take the gallbladder and cue everything relative to that Yeah at that that would that would be about as helpful as telling someone to cue relative to the surface
00:49:20
Speaker
Well, any cueing relative to the cervix doesn't make any sense at all because you can't feel your cervix, so it's an imaginary place. And here's the thing, if you're describing it and you're like, you know what? I recognize this is not a place you can feel. This is a conceptual idea of where your cervix is. And some people say, two inches below your belly button, maybe? I don't know. Some number of inches in relation to something else.
00:49:43
Speaker
But already I'm confused and I'd rather try to do something that's actually a thing that I can do that exists on my body that I can feel like my pelvic floor. I was going to say I did feel my cervix at one point in my life, but then I was like, no, I didn't. I had a great epidural. I was going to ask, is it when you were having your baby? No, I didn't even feel it then. Fantastic. I'm glad. Yeah, me too. Okay. So the next one says, contract the perineum, fine, and lift the pelvis forward.
00:50:14
Speaker
I'm not sure where that is. So what I started to think of, Laurel just did this very interesting move where she lifted her whole self and her pelvis forward.
00:50:24
Speaker
I'm thinking of it like, for those of you that are fans of RuPaul's Drag Race, there's a drag queen named Bob the Drag Queen who's fantastic, and Bob the Drag Queen has a song called Purse First. In the song Purse First, she enters the room with her arm out in front of her holding her purse because you enter the room purse first. It's very entertaining. As soon as I saw Lift the Pelvis Forward and I tried to do it, I was like, oh, am I entering the room pelvis first?
00:50:49
Speaker
Seems weird. Okay. And then this last one that I read just said, firmly contract the anal muscles. So you get the idea. It's about as clear as finding a neutral pelvis, right? It's figuring out where the... About as clear as mud. Yeah. So why do you think people are interested in mula bundle? Laura, what do you think is really going on?
00:51:07
Speaker
Do you want my honest answer? Yeah, always. I think it comes from Ashtanga and Patabi Joyce, who raped his students digitally and humped them. I think he was obsessed. I think he was sick. And I think that whatever positive instruction took place in Ashtanga classrooms that was delivered in a positive way through his students came through as some type of focus on Moolabunda. But honestly, I don't think the origins are very good, in my opinion, because I find like
00:51:34
Speaker
schools that have been influenced by Ashtanga. I mean, Ashtanga has a very dark past. What I don't want to say, or come off as sounding like I'm saying, is that everybody who's had any amount of influence
00:51:50
Speaker
directly or indirectly from the instruction of Ashtanga Yoga, whether you were a student, a teacher, you trained in some Ashtanga-influenced style that you are doing harm by talking about Mulabunda. Not at all. In fact, Mulabunda, you mentioned that, you know, it's mentioned in the Hatha Yoga Pratiptika. So it goes, you know, deeper into the history of yoga than Ashtanga Yoga. But I do think that when we want to understand like where certain
00:52:15
Speaker
fixations on certain areas of the body where alignments or whatever it is come from, we should look to kind of where the source of that instruction may be originated. And I think that Stange has been enormously influential. And it has a history that the leader is a known sexual assaulter. Yep.
00:52:32
Speaker
I can't help but wonder if there's a connection there. And I've taken classes where, like I said, I was not trained to, even though my yoga works was influenced by a shtanga, but like the trainers I had just really didn't pay much attention to mula bhana. It wasn't like they were more ayangar influenced. I think that I've taken classes though, in the past where there was an enormous amount of attention paid to
00:52:54
Speaker
this constant contraction of Lula Bandha. And at baseline, I didn't feel uncomfortable. I didn't feel like this was an invasive cue or anything like that. I just was annoyed because I was like, I don't know why I'm being asked to pay so much attention to this area of my body that feels like it's really not all that relevant to the work that you're asking me to do, which might be like cropos. Can we talk about like the limbs?
00:53:24
Speaker
about the spine. Why the pelvic floor? Why Mula Bandha? As you said, I did. I went in the hatha yoga perdipika because I wanted to find out if there was an actual... This is when I was trying to figure out what are you doing in Mula Bandha. I went because I wanted to see is it described in any specific way. What I found from a cursory page through was that what it says there is less about how to do and it's more about if you do it, you will achieve this.
00:53:54
Speaker
And that's again, more into the sort of like spiritual aspect of the practice. I'm not going to get into that, but the way that I've seen it described by people who do teach these classes where you're supposed to just have it on for an hour and a half is that this lift of the pelvic floor creates a lightness in your body that makes things like a crow pose or a headstand or any inversion, any arm balance easier to do. And the more you keep this on, you're just going to float through your practice. That's sort of how I've heard it described.
00:54:21
Speaker
Let me ask
00:54:41
Speaker
more clearly through the limbs to the ground so that we can get more like maybe liftoff and handstand or crumbles or whatever. No, you don't. I don't because I have never heard the terms inter-adominal pressure or trunkle. Trunkle twisting? I don't know something. Trunkling. Trunkle dunkling. I never knew what inter-adominal pressure was until after I was taught yoga. I know, but I think sometimes people can happen upon
00:55:06
Speaker
the effects of certain actions without really knowing the concepts that explain the mechanism. That's how most people practice yoga. Yeah, so I'm wondering though... But no, I think it's more to do with... So I don't think... There's probably something to it is what I'm saying. There's definitely something to it. There's something to... I mean, look, ballerinas are told to like lift their pelvic floor. And so that they move lightly in their movements, right? It gives you the supposed lightness, lift, all of that kind of thing.
00:55:33
Speaker
I don't know. I think this is an entire different podcast about what does turning on your pelvic floor actually do to the rest of your body. We have a whole tutorial about it. We do have a whole tutorial about it. It's called the pelvic floor tutorial. That's right. As far as Mula Bandha goes, from a clinical standpoint, there is really no reason to
00:55:53
Speaker
override what is an automatic autonomic. Process for an hour and a half right so from a motor control standpoint.
00:56:05
Speaker
Your pelvic floor muscles have a resting tone that is supposed to be enough to deal with the various loads of being alive, and then they can also respond in the moment quickly to load increases like running, sneezing, jumping, all of those things. These are autonomic functions. They are supposed to happen without your conscious involvement.
00:56:25
Speaker
Now, if you have any sort of pelvic floor disorder, you may be working with a pelvic floor specialist and going in and doing some types of really specific exercises or stretches or manual work or all of the above. But apart from that,
00:56:41
Speaker
You're not supposed to be turning your public floor on any more than it's already on and trying to do that for that long of a period of time. It's going to be interrupting an autonomic process.
00:56:57
Speaker
Yeah. And as far as I know, there's also not any value to squeezing your anal sphincter, which one of these sites said what it was for long periods of time. Because again, this is an autonomic process that you don't want to mess with because your anal sphincter is actually really intelligent. Because not to put too fine a point on it, it can allow flatulence
00:57:20
Speaker
to leave without fecal matter also leaving. That's smart. I was going to add that I think it might not be the best to layer on top of an autonomic process with some form of control, hypervigilance or control.
00:57:38
Speaker
But what happens, I think, a lot of times with things like moolabunda, breath control, other examples could just be posture. Posture is an autonomic process, I think you could argue. Largely, it's controlled by neural tone. We don't ever need to think about breathing. We don't ever need to think about our posture. We don't ever need to think about our pelvic floor engagement.
00:58:01
Speaker
until we do and then we can kind of override that autonomic process. When we're asked to do it in a class, it may have value for mindfulness purposes, but what I think happens a lot of times is like people are asked to do something in a class and then they think that they're always supposed to be doing that thing. Yes, definitely.
00:58:16
Speaker
This would happen to me even with some type of postural awareness thing like say around the pelvis and finding neutral pelvis. I would spend a lot of time exploring the pelvis in a yoga class. Then I would leave that yoga class and I would spend a large portion of the rest of my day thinking about my pelvic position. I don't know if that was the best way for me to be directing my mental energy. It's almost like a way of dissociating from what's actually happening around you.
00:58:44
Speaker
yeah just choosing to focus on your pelvis i'm just walking around just thinking about my pelvis the whole day and look i mean i think there's nothing wrong with like being curious about your pelvic position and how it moves and like really kind of tuning it but i feel like if you feel if you leave a class feeling like now you always have to have this happen you always have to be breathing in a certain way i know you've gone off on social media a lot about like people's fucked up breathing patterns because they were taught to breathe in yoga and then they think that that's how they're always supposed to be breathing i think this is a problem you know and i think that it creates confusion
00:59:14
Speaker
And it's where we end up with these myths about all of them. Always needing to be in a neutral pelvis. Always be contracting. Or always breathe through your nose or something like that. Always be diaphragmatically breathing, which is my favorite. We have an episode coming up this season about breathing that we're going to talk about all of this in that as well.
00:59:34
Speaker
Again, it's not that these are not good practice. We're not saying that pranayama is not a good practice or even working on public position is not a good practice, but what seems to be missing in the communication between the teacher and the student is, hey, we're doing this right now. For the rest of the day, I don't want you to worry about it. This does not need to be something that you need to worry about.
00:59:59
Speaker
I think that it's being left out because I don't think teachers actually necessarily know that. No, I don't think so. So they think your pelvic position is something you should be thinking about all day. And I think when they think that, what they've been taught is to really operate outside of scope of practice. They've been taught that their job is somehow to take people's posture and try to change it or fix it, which is, again, I think outside of a yoga teacher's scope of practice to begin with.
01:00:29
Speaker
So it's possible that contracting your pelvic floor is going to impact the position of your pelvis. Sure. But probably not by much. So if we're talking about our neutral pelvis, Mulubanda is not going to have a really big impact on that. But it is definitely something that is in the yoga world. And I wanted
Pelvic Position in Strength Training
01:00:53
Speaker
to talk about it and just basically go for it occasionally and then don't do it all the time.
01:01:00
Speaker
I think that's true of most things. I would say, yeah. I have another piece of pelvis trivia for you. Did you know that the word pelvis is a direct lift from the Latin? It's not even like a root. It's that the word pelvis is the Latin word for pelvis, and it means basin.
01:01:17
Speaker
Nice. Bowl. That's why we call it a bowl. Pelvic bowl. Exactly. All right. So let's switch gears. And we're going to talk about strength training and CrossFit and where the bros think our pea elves should be. Laurel, do you hear cues in CrossFit or strength training around the pelvis? What kind of cues do you hear? My initial question at the top of the show is like, most people don't know where their pelvis is. And also, they don't necessarily need to know where their pelvis is to be able to do things like squats and deadlifts or like strength in their hip muscles, right?
01:01:47
Speaker
The pelvis is kind of an obscure body part to even cue around. And it's also like when you're telling people where to put their pelvises, you're probably using internal cues. So we have an episode on the difference between internal and external cues in season two. Also very popular episode. Did really well. The thing about cueing the pelvis is like you're going to lose a lot of people if you're, especially if you're teaching the general population. And so no, I don't hear.
01:02:13
Speaker
Any, no one says pelvis in CrossFit. No one says it. The word pelvis is never uttered. Neither is flesh of the buttocks. So,
01:02:22
Speaker
Do I think that the pelvis is important for strength training? Absolutely. But what I would hear a lot more of is things like how to set up for the lift, what is the general movement pattern, and then how to use the ground, and how to use the implement, how to breathe. These are much more common cues. Yeah. Well, so hang on. Okay. Because the one thing I have heard about my PLs is this thing called butt wink.
01:02:47
Speaker
Right, so buttwink is supposed to be something, according to some people, that you should avoid because it could potentially be injurious. Yeah, the first time I heard about it was like, do not buttwink. And I was like, well, shit, because I do. Okay, so buttwink is when, usually when you're squatting, you'll hear people start to talk about buttwinking.
01:03:09
Speaker
at a certain point as you move into hip flexion. So this is when your thigh is probably moving at your pelvis, your pelvis is moving at your thigh, right? And the angle of the hip joint is getting more and more acute at the front, right? The knee is moving towards your chest somehow, right? Those two areas are getting closer together.
01:03:32
Speaker
In a squat, your knees flexing, your hips are flexing, and you're basically descending downward. At a certain point in hip flexion, your pelvis will have to posteriorly tilt, so that means that the top of the pelvis is going to move backward in space. Wait, where's my anthill? Don't confuse people. The pelvis is moving, the top of the basin is spilling the liquid backward behind you, and this is going to
01:04:02
Speaker
change the position of your lower back and make your lower back move into more of a more of a position of flexion. So I think that with you know giving people the total benefit of the doubt here and like what would be their concern here is like losing trunk tension. So letting the pelvis move
01:04:20
Speaker
so much so that we lose tension and therefore maybe we're not able to support the load that we're squatting. However, when you look at the sport of Olympic lifting where they're taking a weight that's very heavy and ripping it off the ground, landing in a deep, deep squat, holding that barbell overhead, that's what we call a squat snatch or a snatch,
01:04:44
Speaker
Nobody's saying anything about buttwinking. So nobody cares in Olympic weightlifting, which by the way, confusingly is sometimes called weightlifting. But then when you step into maybe more bodybuilding contacts or powerlifting contacts, powerlifting is also a strength sport where you're moving toward like a one repetition maximum lift. They start to talk more about buttwinks and I think more and more people are getting
01:05:13
Speaker
influenced by the evidence out there showing that posture is not predict pain and you can't look at someone, watch their pelvis posterior to your tail and their low back flex in a squat and go like, you're going to pay for that. You just can't do that. I think there's probably a reason to not let a total beginner
01:05:34
Speaker
lift a really heavy weight and let their butt wink a whole lot. But at the same breath, I would say most people are rational, reasonable people. They're not going to overstep their boundaries by lifting too heavy of a weight to begin with. And I guess if they do, then you've got like maybe bigger fish to fry with like the personality you're working with. I just think we're making a mountain out of a molehill.
01:05:57
Speaker
or a mountain out of an anthill, and that we don't really need to worry as much about buttwinking. As the influencers and the bros would have you think, I think there's also an argument to encourage buttwink. In other words, to encourage someone to work deliberately a posterior tilt in a squat if they have, say, something like,
01:06:17
Speaker
anterior hip pain, right? If they have a pinching feeling at the front of their hip, we're going to give them maybe a little bit more comfort in the squat by reducing hip flexion, increasing lumbar flexion. So anyway, butt wink is much ado about nothing.
01:06:34
Speaker
But it's a cute image. I like the idea of a little butt cheek with a winky face. But here's also my question about the Olympic weightlifting, which has much higher speed than powerlifting. Part of what I'm wondering is like, are people not talking about buttwinking because it's like the whole thing just happens so fast, you can't even see it? It could be that. It's also that powerlifting, the sport of powerlifting has different rules.
01:06:57
Speaker
Olympic weightlifting. And in order to get a heavy weight over your head, you have to move quickly and you have to drop, like drop it like it's hot. Like you got to come into the deepest possible Astagrass squat because it's an illusion. You're not actually lifting the weight up as much as you're getting under the weight as fast as possible. So because they have to do such a deep squat, there's no way that you're going to not butt-wing. Yeah. So that's why everyone's like, oh, it's fine. Whatever. Right. But then in powerlifting, you only have to take your hip creases below
01:07:26
Speaker
your knees to qualify the lift. And also powerlifting the weight is so much heavier, right? So the rate of loading in Olympic weightlifting is higher, but the magnitude of load is lower. In powerlifting, the magnitude of load is much, much higher. The rate of loading is slower.
01:07:42
Speaker
I don't know what that even means in terms of risk reduction or anything like that. I'm just saying that for some reason, this whole category of strength athletes doesn't care about butt wink. In this whole category, some of them do a little too much in my opinion. I think we can let it go. I think if you're, again, working with someone who's a brand new beginner and they can't control their pelvis, maybe there's something to be said about helping them find more trunk tension. I'll just leave it at that. Definitely. I agree. Leave it at that.
01:08:12
Speaker
And so I want to talk a little bit about Pilates and cueing in Pilates. And I will say, I have only a few years of experience actually teaching Pilates at all, but I have been practicing regularly for the past five years. I've taken a bunch of different classes with different teachers.
Revisiting Neutral Pelvis in Pilates
01:08:27
Speaker
And so the kind of most famous Pilates teaching cue, I would argue, is navel to spine. And this is a cue that is used to activate your transversus abdominis.
01:08:41
Speaker
And this was kind of the shorthand cue. If you were cueing something, you'd be like, arms here, legs here, navel to spine, go, kind of thing. And if you try to pull your navel to your spine, you will tension your transverses of dominance. You'll also tension a bunch of other things potentially. But if I'm really going, let's say I don't actually know what that cue is supposed to be doing because I never had it explained to me more than just navel to spine. If I'm really going for it, I am potentially going to
01:09:10
Speaker
pull that navel to my spine so much, actually even try to start to use my butt and start to posteriorly tilt my butt and go into add a lot of contraction in my lower glutes and possibly my posterior pelvic floor. And that's what people refer to as butt grippers sometimes, people who are stuck in that end range of posterior pelvic tilt. Do we have lower glutes? That's where you feel it. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify. Because I think some people think we have lower glutes.
01:09:41
Speaker
We don't have lower glutes. The glutes have different fiber directions. Yes. And so you're gripping the lower fibers of the exterior. The more vertically oriented fibers. Thank you. Of your gluteus maximus. Gluteus maximus. God, sometimes the names are hard. Okay. So my experience of Pilates generally is that they can be more so than yoga, I think, a little more obsessed about the neutral pelvis neutral spine concept.
01:10:05
Speaker
slash combo right they want your your ribs in one place and they want your your lower back in one place and they want your pelvis in another place that are that are all quote-unquote neutral now the the more to be fair a lot of it likes more rehab focused Pilates education, which is what I have been receiving is not obsessed with that right and is much more about like
01:10:28
Speaker
Hey, you're going to put your patient wherever they are having the least amount of pain, which as we know could be anywhere. But there is also a position that if you're on the reformer and you're lying on your back and you have your legs up in the air, sidebar, Laurel has never done Pilates. Oh, I have done Matt Pilates and I did take Trina Altman's reformer Pilates teacher training.
01:10:56
Speaker
having never used a reformer. What? Wait, was this online? No, it was in person. When? Four or five years ago. She came to yoga works. Oh, in New York? Yeah, I kind of organized it or like helped promote it. Nice. So I have done Pilates. I just know jackal about it. Okay. I like it.
01:11:13
Speaker
i kind of want to stick laurel on a reformer and make her do stuff and tell her reform her i want to reform her no because like i i freaking love the reformer even the name of the machine i know is a real tell isn't it yeah well reformer oh yeah there's a thing called a spine corrector i'm gonna reform your spine we're gonna reform your posture but weirdly than the other things i think called things like a Cadillac nice
01:11:36
Speaker
And there's one that's just called a chair. So the naming is a bit weird. But anyway, when you were lying on your back on the reformer, and especially if your legs are up, if you cannot manage the weight of your legs without going into a position that is essentially lumbar extension, more anterior tilt,
01:11:54
Speaker
And I would say the only issue with that is if you're having then pain with that position, the cueing is then to do something that they call imprint, which is basically a tiny amount of posterior pelvic tilt so that the flesh of the low back, I just wanted to pull that in again. The blood of Christ. The blood of Christ of your low back is in contact with the carriage of the reformer. But again, this is something where people like over teach that as well, and people start to like,
01:12:24
Speaker
post your tilt and tuck really, really hard. But it's supposed to be a good alternative position when an exercise where you're lying on your back bothers your back. Yeah. And Trina did a whole section on this in our low back pain tutorial. Yes. Basically about how to have people do exercises without lumbar extension. Totally. Totally.
01:12:44
Speaker
Going back to what we were saying before, in yoga and in Pilates, I think there's not a lot of clear communication around when are you creating a pelvic position for the purpose of an exercise or a practice versus are people thinking that they're supposed to keep it on all the time and are they walking around with their abs on and their mula bandha on or their navel to spine and their glutes gripping and they're just desperately trying to be normal. Here's what I think. Not very many yoga and Pilates teachers are broadcasting the message.
01:13:14
Speaker
that people are just fine the way they are. No, they're not. Because, I mean, there is still a belief. When in fact, most people are just fine. People are fine. The way they are. And look, the way most people are, including me, the lot of people are anteriorly tilted in their pelvis. Something like 75% to 85% of the population have an anteriorly tilted pelvis but are not having pain or disability.
01:13:38
Speaker
I think that's going to blow people's minds. I agree. It is mind blowing. But stop sticking your butt out, people. But there is a belief still that an anteriorly tilted pelvis is a pain causing dysfunction, low back pain or something or whatever.
01:13:56
Speaker
But if 75 to 85% of us are walking around with an anteriorly tilted pelvis and they're not having any pain, like me, for example, then we can't, this doesn't hold up, right? There's another study that shows that it's not associated with low back pain. There's another study that shows that a neutral pelvis
01:14:12
Speaker
tends to cause back pain. And I'm going to link to all of these in the show notes. A neutral pelvis causes pain. Well, I would argue if most of the population have an anteriorly tilted pelvis, and now I'm trying to get somewhere else, now I'm contracting something all the time. Layering on all of these societal expectations. Right, and layering on all of this muscular contraction all of the time that probably is creating pain in and of itself, because I'm supposed to just be chilling where I am. It's basically like fear avoidance.
01:14:42
Speaker
You're avoiding letting your pelvis do what it wants to do because you're afraid that that's wrong. Or that that's causing pain. And therefore you're locking your pelvis down into some position where
01:14:53
Speaker
It's just not very efficient in that position, or that is not the position it wants to be in most of the time. Yeah, and from an anecdotal perspective, when I see people come into the clinic with low back pain, I see them coming in with all different pelvic positions. Some of them are anteriorly tilted, some of them are posterior tilted, but the greatest similarity most of the time is that they're all afraid of moving out of the position they're currently in.
01:15:18
Speaker
And that in itself is probably causing at least half, if not more of the pain that they're in, is that they just stopped moving completely. Fear avoidance. Fear of pain. So what yoga teachers and Pilates teachers and probably strength coaches are maybe failing to broadcast is that people are just fine the way they are. And instead what they're broadcasting is that there's something wrong with you and I have the answer
01:15:48
Speaker
And that's why you come to my class and give me money or give my studio money or give my whatever gym money so that I can fix you. And ultimately, we're not. We're actually creating problems. So when we pathologize normal and create fear avoidance, we don't help people. We may create an unhealthy dependency within them on us.
Promoting Movement Range Over Neutrality
01:16:12
Speaker
But that is not a very healthy relationship for anyone to be in. No. And we still don't agree on what this neutral pelvis is. This is the thing. Nobody knows how to cue it correctly. Nobody knows what it is. But we're all walking around trying to make it happen for people or ourselves. And a large part of my work, and this is where we can start to talk about how we discuss, how we talk about the pelvis. I don't teach people to
01:16:40
Speaker
find a single point that is a neutral pelvis and try to hold themselves there. But I do cue movement of the pelvis. I cue muscles around the pelvis for different movements depending on what the thing is I'm trying to have them do, what the requirements of that movement is. I'm much more likely to teach people about the
01:17:00
Speaker
whole rainbow of available pelvic positions that exist for them. Movement is medicine. The motion is lotion. That variability is the more healthy place than deciding that one spot is the spot and everywhere else is wrong. Also, the more we're able to explore the full breadth of movement available to our body, the more we're able or better we're able to map our body.
01:17:30
Speaker
within our brain, which is called improving proprioception. And the more we're able to accurately perceive our body in space, the less likely we will be to experience pain. Is that right? So if we're using alignment as a tool to enhance proprioception, to increase variability, we're wielding it well. If we're using alignment as a tool,
01:17:59
Speaker
to create fear avoidance and as a nocebo, as a way to create a negative expectation for an otherwise harmless thing like anterior tilted pelvis, we're creating more problems. What's interesting to me about this conversation around alignment is that it's not that alignment is bad or good, it's neutral. It's neither. It doesn't exist in this dichotomous world that we like to paint it within.
01:18:28
Speaker
I just had another t-shirt idea. Alignment is neutral. Oh yeah, neutral. Alignment is neutral. Your pelvis is not. Your pelvis is not. I mentioned when I'm working with people, predominantly in the clinic at this point, I'm not teaching them to be in one place. I'm teaching them a variety of places that they can be in regards to their pelvis.
01:18:53
Speaker
different population possibly, but the same idea conceptually. Is that what you do when you're teaching your movement classes in your online studio? Absolutely. My favorite way to teach pelvic position is to teach people how to move their pelvis through a full arc of movement, and not just anterior and posterior toe. Sure.
01:19:16
Speaker
Within that exploration, here's what it is. You go into a new clothing store, you get a peek into through the window at the clothes in there and you're like, I'm going to buy something there because look at those are beautiful clothes. So what do you do? What I do is I walk in and I kind of take a tour of the entire store.
01:19:38
Speaker
There's the sail rack, there's the pants, there's the shirts, there's the colors. And I figure out what I'm kind of drawn to. And I know the territory. I know what's in there. And then I can more carefully select, because I might only have 15 minutes. I mean, my daughter doesn't have a very long attention span for me to be looking at clothing.
01:20:01
Speaker
So then I choose what rack I'm going to go over to very carefully. And I know where it is, right? Yeah. I think ultimately, if we're going to teach people how to find a position, we should first teach them how the freaking thing moves, right? 100%. Move them through all the positions, and then go, OK. Now, if we're trying to find neutral,
01:20:20
Speaker
Maybe neutral is just kind of like yoga. It's the balancing of opposing forces. It's the union of opposites. So if you found anterior tilt to maximum and you found posterior tilt to maximum, where's the middle? Can you find that? And is it a place or is it a zone? And is it the middle or is it your middle? The middle for you.
Introducing a Unique Lifting Program
01:20:42
Speaker
I think we do the same thing, but I think we don't do the same thing. We conceptually do the same thing. Right.
01:20:48
Speaker
You know where else conceptually we do the same thing? What? When we filmed our bone density mini course. Yes. When we filmed our bone density mini course, we had like eight or 900 people sign up for it. It's wild. We got tons of great feedback. I was blown away. I know. And we're going to do something else now, right? We have another offering that we would like people to join us for, which is a free class. You can take a free class with us.
01:21:17
Speaker
And it is basically going to be a workout, a string training workout, utilizing a barbell if you have one, but if you don't have one, you don't, you can come with whatever weights you have, or you could come with a broomstick because we're going to be talking mostly about technique.
01:21:33
Speaker
And we're not definitely going to be teaching people to lift super heavy weights. However, if you have already worked up to lifting heavy weights, sure, put some plates on the bar or lift something heavy. But it's really going to give you a taste of what a workout looks like within our program that we've developed as a part of our longer course called the bone density course, Lift for Longevity. That's right. It's a six month progressive program, which is unheard of.
01:22:02
Speaker
that progresses you from maybe not knowing anything about barbells or lifting weights to over the course of six months, which is a long time, but it's also as much time as we need to be able to actually improve bone density because bone takes a while to build itself. We are going to teach you how to use and become proficient in lifting barbells and progress toward lifting a meaningful weight, which we'll call a heavy weight for you, right?
01:22:29
Speaker
If you would like to join us for this free class, which won't be happening for a couple of weeks, it's happening in September. September. So you have time, but you could join us on the special list that you need to be on. Yeah. So if you receive the official invite, you can do that via
01:22:51
Speaker
The Lincoln show notes. You almost said bio, didn't you? Which, hopefully there's a future president of the United States, Mrs. show notes. Then I can say, no, that doesn't work. I can't say show notes bio. No, it's all right. I'm going to let you work on that joke.
01:23:12
Speaker
More to the point. Workshop that joke. There will be a link in show notes for the landing page where you're going to go and sign up to take our free class. Yeah, and also this is something that you can take live or watch the recording. Of course. You get to rent it for 30 days.
01:23:28
Speaker
It's a good deal. Well, it's free. That's the best deal. You can't get any better than free. And if you're interested in, like, if you're like, I'm kind of curious about this six month program, but six months feels like a long time to commit to or something else about it. And I want to see like, what is it actually going to be like? This class is essentially going to be representative of the live classes that are going to be happening over that six month period every single week.
01:23:53
Speaker
And when Laurel said that this doesn't exist, or what did you say in the beginning? It's never happened before. It truly has never happened before. So typically, if you're not enmeshed in the strength and conditioning world, you might not know that typically the way programs are delivered are remotely and not live. So what you would usually get is a PDF with linked demo videos in Vimeo.
01:24:17
Speaker
you would get possibly great instruction that way. There is no live feedback component. If you're going to get feedback, sometimes you could submit a form check video, which we're also gonna make available to people who take the course with us. But you can also take live with us and get feedback in the moment, and that's what this free class is also gonna be represented above. And I teach live classes, small group strength training through my virtual studio, and what a lot of people who take my classes
01:24:46
Speaker
on demand, they don't come live, say is that hearing the individual feedback given to actual people in the moment or hearing the questions from live students is so valuable even though they weren't there live.
Encouraging Listener Engagement and Sign-off
01:25:00
Speaker
So you are going to have the ability
01:25:03
Speaker
to have that type of experience, even if you can not attend live and just watch the recording, there's still going to be a lot of rich information shared in the class. And you get to hang out with Sarah and I, which is always fun. It's the best. It's always a good time. It's the best. I mean, we think so. We're a little biased. I think we're right. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we have any bias, right? No. We're completely neutral. Facts. Oh, boy.
01:25:29
Speaker
Well, speaking of neutral. So neutral. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode and that it has totally cleared up how to find a neutral pelvis. I'm just kidding. You can check out our show notes for links to references we mentioned in this podcast. You can also sign up for our upcoming live lifting class with Sarah and Laurel at the link. And I was about to say Lincoln bio. Sorry. It's so hard. Lincoln show notes. Thank you. President Lincoln show notes.
01:25:58
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us on the Movement Logic podcast. And if you liked this episode, please subscribe and rate and review or any of those on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we will see you next week.