Movable Pelvis

Conventional approaches to improving posture typically emphasize alignment of head, shoulders and spine. But however carefully tutored the upper body may be, uprightness is not sustainable when the pelvis, which provides foundation for the torso, is oriented posteriorly.  We most commonly experience this position when we sit with our weight resting behind our “sit bones”. Adopting this “tail tucking” posture may be recommended by teachers of Tai Chi, ballet, and other movement disciplines as a way of stabilizing the pelvis and straightening the lumbar spine. The advice works, but at a cost.

Life is Movement

Advice to confine any of our moving parts—and every part is movable!—backfires in the long run. When any place in the body is held still, another place in the body may compensate by moving beyond its capacity. Or an immobilized part becomes solidified by dehydrated fascia until movement is no longer possible.  Living creatures and all their “parts” are designed to move. 

Pelvic Design

Shaped like a gently molded figure eight, the pelvis encircles the lower body like a girdle worn in ancient times as adornment and as receptacle for tools and weapons.  It receives the scaffolding of the upper body through the sacrum.  Legs and thighs rise from the ground to suspend the ilia on two spherical studs. The highly mobile hip joints combined with plasticity between sacrum and ilia, afford the upper body a dynamic relationship with the ground.

Contemporary sedentary lifestyles all but eliminate the essential role of the pelvis in the design for human movement.  Tight and immobile pelvic girdles curtail movement of the hips, spine and of the entire body. 

Ancestral Pelvises

Looking through the lens of evolutionary development, we learn  that limbs and girdles evolved eons after the central bodies of our oceanic ancestors. The appendicular body parts evolved to assist the central body when ocean creatures ventured onto muddy shores and rocky terrain. Movement through the girdles (pelvic and shoulder) gave the spine the ranges of motion needed to negotiate with gravity. 

Our hominid ancestors transitioned from moving through the world transversely on four limbs to upright locomotion on two. They moved from horizontal to vertical through the pelvis. Over the eons pelvis shape adapted to the body’s upright orientation.

Human infants’ rocking motions integrate the spine with the shoulder and pelvic girdles in preparation for uprightness.

Humans make the same transition as they crawl their way out of infancy to toddlerhood and upright walking.

Sedentary Pelvic Girdles

Over recent millennia, human life has required less and less movement. When we had to forage and hunt, livelihood demanded large full-body movements that involved partnerships between the axial body and the girdles. But the need for such broad actions diminished as we passed through the agricultural and industrial eras.  Today we can manage much of life by pushing buttons while seated in chairs, and without being aware of anything much beyond the immediate focus of our attention.  Sometimes there may be awareness of the pain caused by, but not always attributed to, our immobility.

Contemporary humans, it seems, may be evolving backwards. The girdles that are designed to augment movement are increasingly involved in curtailing movement. When we spend much of the day with our pelvises and hips flexed to 45 degrees, the pelvic girdle solidifies its relationships with legs and spine.  Rather than being a girdle that enhances and empowers the axial body, it compresses and immobilizes it. In time we lose our embodied sense of our bodies’ multi-directional movement potential.  We move less often and more awkwardly.

Reverse the Reversal

What can we do?  Embrace big movements that demand use of the multidimensional movement potential of your pelvis and hips:  Taichi, yoga, Aikido, rock-climbing, kick-boxing. Many dance forms tap into the expressive capacity of the pelvis—try a salsa class, a Middle Eastern dance class, hula lessons.  Also, the advice to stand up from your computer and desk every hour has become a cliché by now, but it’s still a good practice.  

The recorded video of my 2022 online workshop entitled “Pelvic Alignment” is available on Vimeo.  By learning more about the amazing relational world that lives within our bodies, you take a first step in reversing the regression of human uprightness that our devotion to electronic devices has generated.

 © 2024 Mary Bond