Finding Your Posture From the Bottom or From the Top

I  spend a little time finding my posture  most days.  My usual method is to start from the ground up.  I start with my feet, feeling weight under all 4 corners of the foot:  under the big and little toes and the outside and inside of the heel.  From there I usually squeeze the balls of my feet and heels toward one another isometrically, waking up the arch of my foot.  With the arch of my foot doming up, I find my pelvic floor and engage.  Now I have two arcs doming up, my foot arch and my pelvic floor. I line them up. Now I go to my solar plexus, the top of my diaphragm and add that to the mix.  The final dome is the roof of my mouth, or the top of my spine.  When I have all my domes lined up and lifting I am usually in a solid posture:  strong, active, connected and vibrant with energy reaching up through the crown of my head and supported by my legs and feet.  I learned this technique from Wendy Leblanc-Arbuckle.

Today I tried a different technique.  I closed my eyes imagined myself suspended from the ceiling.  My body drifted around for a little while.  I thought about my organs and where they were in my body.  My body stilled and I found myself in alignment.  It felt completely different than the first technique, much floatier, more spacious and quite effortless.

I like both techniques and can see how on any given day I might prefer one to the other.  It's great stuff to play with and find out which technique works best for you, or if you are like me you might find them both useful.

SITTING

We do a lot of it in modern living and mostly when we are sitting we aren’t paying much attention to how we are doing it.  We slouch, we cross knees, we splay, we slump.  Think of all the time we spend seated:  in cars, using computers, sitting at work, watching television, eating meals.  We sit and sit and then sit some more.

Since we are spending so many hours on this activity it seems it would be a good idea to figure out how to do it so that we get some health benefits from it.

First things first:  Your chair!

The chair you are sitting in will have a big effect on your posture, so it is a good idea to find a work chair that has some adjustment devices so that you can set up a close to ideal scenario for your body.  Our Posture Keeps bones and joints in the correct alignment so that muscles are being used properly, so sitting correctly is very important!

Cueing

Ok, so back to my problems engaging the pelvic floor:  the point that I was getting at is that sometimes the wrong word or concept can completely snafu you in your attempt to engage in an exercise. 

The ‘concept’ of doming worked for me, while the concept of ‘squeezing my pee muscles’ did not.  Even the words dome and squeeze have a completely different effect on me when I’m working out.

Honestly, it still amazes me how a new or different word can unlock your movement potential.

About 6 months ago I discovered the cue:  ‘pull your armpits low’.  Until then it was always ‘keep your shoulders out of your ears’ or put your shoulder blades in your back pockets, or something else that never worked.  With this new cue, however, my chest immediately opened up and I discovered the elusively correct muscles to connect my shoulders into my back. 

My clients are also having a uniformly positive response to this new cueing.  So, try it out if you haven’t already.

Domes of Uplift

About 5 years ago I was at a Pilates Conference taking a mat class with a teacher from Britain. (unfortunately I can’t remember her name).  She had us do a standing meditation where we aligned the domes of our arches with the dome of pelvic floor, the dome of our diaphragm and the roof of our mouth.  (For those of you who don’t know this; the roof of our mouth is where the top of the spine ends).

Once we were lined up, the instruction was simply to root down from our pelvic floor through our feet and to pull up from our pelvic floor up and out the top of the head.

This is an alternative method to finding our posture and experience centering.  It creates a completely different feeling than finding our posture through placing every bone and muscle in its correct place.  The sensation it creates is oddly freeing, and floaty, yet you are still arriving at improved alignment. 

Personally, the great thing for me was the ‘aha’ moment when I started doming up from my pelvic floor.  I finally got the strong internal lift that I had been missing with cues that referenced using my ‘pee’ muscles.  Adding a little squeeze together from my sitz bones and I was finally on my way to feeling the root of my pelvic floor and connecting to my transverse abdominals.

Wendy Leblance Arbuckle talks a lot about the domes of uplift.  It’s pretty interesting stuff.  Here’s a link: http://pilates.about.com/od/technique/a/Good-Posture-and-Gravity.htm

The Mystery of the Pelvic Floor

Ok, I admit I never got it.  When I first started doing Pilates I would routinely be instructed to engage my pelvic floor, and I was just…what????

My instructors mentioned using my ‘pee muscles’ and doing a kegel.  Well, every woman who has ever had a baby knows a lot about ‘the kegel’.  But I wondered… what about the guys?  Here are 2 links that give good instructions for performing the kegel, one for men and one for women.  These links also supply more information as to the importance of having a strong pelvic floor.

Girls go to:  http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/kegel-exercises/WO00119

Guys go to: http://www.pelvicfloorexercise.com.au/formen.htm

Still, the kegel was not enough for me, or maybe it was too much for me.  Who knows?  It just wasn’t working.  Then I learned about doming and it all pulled together for me.

Tomorrow…more about doming and finding what works for you.