Rethink Your Position by Katy Bowman

Author:Katy Bowman [Bowman, Katy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781943370245
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Let’s say your hip has a total range of 100° in the front-to-back direction. How that range of motion lines up with the ground is important. If your pelvis is tucked, that places most of your hip’s range of motion in front of your body (see right side of image). You could do a high kick, but then the back of the hip joint would stop the leg from going behind the torso where the butt workout begins. That means the distance over which you can carry your body while walking, i.e., how long your butt can work with each step, or your stride’s “glute zone,” is short.

So a neutral pelvis (left side of image) sets up the hip joints for maximal butt work. You just have to make sure the hips are loose enough to extend, which is no easy task. Ironically, not only does all that sitting fill up the day so there’s no time left for steps and butt contractions, but the way our body adapts to sitting—the cementing of our pelvic tilts—makes the butt unable to work fully when we finally take some steps. This is why we need to stretch the parts pulling on the pelvis (see pages 51, 102, 108, 171, 183, 193), and we need to get up more often and walk around.

A neutral pelvis is great for standing and sitting (it sets the stage for better spinal loading and abdominal leverage, and unloads your weight from your sacrum while sitting). But what the glutes do while you’re walking gives the pelvic floor, which is always contracting under the load of the abdominal and pelvic floor organs, the constant resistance to generate the eccentric force it needs to keep from shortening and helps to stabilize the pelvis and lower back as a whole. Thanks for assking.

HOW FAR CAN YOU EXTEND YOUR HIPS?

Lie face down and get your ASIS and PS on the ground (or, if you’ve got a belly in the way and/or if you’re prego, you can do this standing; just start by aligning your pelvis to neutral).

Without tipping the pelvis (which is tricky because the pelvis will tend to tilt forward), lift your leg as high off the floor (or behind you when standing) as you can—again, without taking the pelvis with you.

Make sure you’re not bending your knee (use a mirror), which is common when your hip-flexing muscles are tight.

Measure the angle between the thigh bone and the pelvis to get the number of degrees you can extend (the average hip has the structural potential to go 20° to 30°).

P.S. The amount your leg goes back behind you in this exercise is the amount your leg could potentially go behind you, contracting your butt, with each step when you’re walking. I say could because in order to use your glutes through this range of motion, your pelvic-listing muscles have to be able to carry you the entire time on the standing leg, and your heel has to stay connected to

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