Most people these days suffer from low back pain but chances are they’re looking in the wrong place to fix it. More often then not the source of our low back pain lies somewhere else in our body. Enter Anterior Pelvic Tilt.
As you can see the alignment of the pelvis relies heavily on the balance of the muscles that cross the hip joint.
We’re in the age of technology, but it should also be called the age of sitting on your ass and getting weak. Sitting at work, sitting at the computer, sitting and watching TV. All that sitting tightens up the hip flexors (rectus femoris, iliopsoas) which lie on the front of the hip and create a downward pull on the pelvis. The pelvis subsequently tilts anteriorly pulling up on the muscles that cross the back of the hip (hamstrings). That may also be the cause of your tight hammies but let’s leave that for another post.
What does this all mean? Your lumbar spine (low back) being attached to the pelvis also tilts towards the front and voila! What if you don’t care about low back pain and just want to be jacked and strong? Well fixing your pelvic alignment will help you hit depth on a squat and get deep enough for deadlifts, two must haves in the quest for swole. So how can you fix it?
Stretch your hip flexors: Lengthening your hip flexors will relieve some of the downward pull on your pelvis, helping to restore the balance.
Activate your core: No this doesn’t mean doing crunches or hopping on the Ab Coaster (That’s a real thing apparently :S) Your abdominals are made to stabilize your spine not fold your body in half and they will pull up on the front of your pelvis when properly activated. Exercises that brace the abdominals and allow them to keep the spine straight work best so add dead bugs, plank variations, ab rollouts, and pallof presses into your routines.
Activate the Psoas: The psoas is part of the iliopsoas hip flexor which attaches to your lumbar spine. Activating it allows it to work rather than hanging on the lumbar spine and pulling it forward.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoTmddNl_pA
Activate the glutes: Chances are your ass is asleep but not in the sense that you can’t feel it but in that it’s not activated properly. Activating the glutes is HUGELY IMPORTANT for MANY things but in this case it helps re-align the pelvis from behind the hip. The classic glute bridge usually does the trick but a single leg version is a great variation.
Throw these into your warm up and your low back and hips will thank you.
Here’s a sample warm up:
Hip flexor static stretch 2 x 15 seconds each leg
Psoas Activation above 90 degrees 1 x 15seconds each leg
Dead bug x 10 each side
Glute bridge x 10
The next installment will look at thoracic mobility and how it’s affecting your low back pain as well as your go to upper body exercises such as the bench press and overhead press.
