Do you suffer from excessive anterior pelvic tilt, where your bum sticks out, you have a sway back,
and your belly hangs forward? If you're struggling with anterior pelvic tilt and looking for ways to
correct it, this video is for you. Hey, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher and a teacher trainer.
I help people with posture pretty much every day and excessive anterior pelvic tilt is one of the
big ones that we try to address. Most people have no idea where it came from and if you don't know
the source of the problem it's very difficult to fix. In this video we'll look at the why behind
anterior pelvic tilt, where it comes from. We'll talk about footwear - one of the most important
things you can choose to fix this problem. And lastly, we'll look at a couple of stretches that
can correct what is very often years or even decades of imbalance. Before we go any further,
it's important to note that there's no such thing as perfect posture. In the same way there's no
such thing as a perfect body. We're all different. Some people have big butts, small butts, long
arms, short arms. If your anterior pelvic tilt is not causing you any problems, stop watching
this video. Go do something else. If, however, your excessive tilt is causing or contributing to
lower back pain, to hip pain, to knee problems, or movement dysfunctions, then this video should be a
great help to you. Let's get started by looking at the history of posture, so we can understand
where this came from. In order to understand where anterior pelvic tilt comes from you have to look
back in history. If you go back 500 years, or even more, you'll find oil paintings of royal
families and military leaders with this chest out, butt back position, this regal position,
holding guns and fox in their hands, and the lay people started to mimic this posture,
at least in portraits. The problem, however, didn't really become a reality until shoes, until
footwear changed, and the big change that came is men started wearing work boots with an elevated
heel and women started wearing heeled shoes, high heeled shoes or various heel lift shoes,
and that started to change the way that we move. But again, this was still while they were working,
or during parties and special occasions. We have to zip, zip, zip forward until the 1900s and this
is when pretty much everybody starts wearing heeled shoes. I know what you're thinking,
you're thinking "I never wear high-heeled shoes". Oh but you do. If you go to your closet and you
open up your closet and take a look at your shoes I can guarantee you almost every single shoe,
whether it's a sneaker, a hiking boot, or a dress shoe, or anything you might have, the heel is
higher than the ball of your shoe, and what that means is, this is exaggerated but it'll help you
to see what happens. When you look at the history of your posture, you've probably been walking
around with your heels lifted for most of your life. For me, it started around the age of 12.
Prior to the age of 12, I wore Converse All Stars, they have a flat sole. I also wore Vans, they also
have a flat sole. At age 12 I got my first pair of Nike Airs and they had an elevated heel and they
were so squishy, I loved them. But this began a decade journey of walking around in high heels and
that was probably a four or a five millimeter lift heel drop from my heel to the sole of my foot,
but that is enough to start to reorganize my body, so my chest is out, my butt is back, and my lower
back is sway. What happens at age 12? What happens at age 20? What happens at age 30 when you're
wearing shoes like that? Well, very specifically, your calf muscles get short and tight,
very specifically your hip flexors, specifically your psoas muscle, gets short and tight as well.
Rule number one in terms of fixing anterior pelvic tilt - you've got to remove the source of the
problem, which is those shoes. You need to move to a zero drop shoe. That means the heel height and
the ball of the foot height needs to be the same. This is a pair of Altra shoes. This is not a brand
endorsement. I like these, but there are lots of different brands you could choose from - Lems,
and Merrells, and Vibrams, and lots of different barefoot shoe options as well. This is an optical
illusion because this heel looks higher than the ball of the foot, but it's not. This is called a
zero drop shoe. You need to get yourself into a zero drop shoe as well, at least most of the
time. If you don't, it's like tying rocks around your ankles and trying to walk up a hill. It'll
be very, very difficult to fix this problem. The second thing that you need to do is stretch. We
need to fix those tight calves, fix those tight hip flexors, and little by little over time we can
make some changes. With the shoes out of the way, let's take a look at some stretching exercises.
The first stretch we'll do is a runner's lunge for your calves. Stand right next to a wall and lunge
your right foot forward, your left foot back. It's very important that your left heel is flat against
the floor. Again, make sure your heel connects. Your right leg is just there as a placeholder, so
don't worry if you're up on the tips of your toes, or if your leg isn't doing much. Drive the weight
from your hands on the wall back to your heel on the back leg. With the straight leg version we're
doing here this stretches your gastrocnemius, the upper bulbous muscle of your calf. We'll do
a second version later with the knee bent to work your soleus. Inhale through your nose for four.
Exhale through your mouth for eight.
This breathing helps to turn off your myotatic stretch reflex and allows you to go deeper into
the stretch. Your calves are strong muscles and they will resist. Let's now bend the
knee ever so slightly. You might need to adjust a little bit like I've done here.
When you bend your knee the stretch moves down into your soleus muscle,
which is below the bulbous gastrocnemius, a little bit lower. Both of these will help to
restore dorsiflexion to your ankle. Inhale through your nose for four.
Exhale through your mouth for eight.
Let's now shake it out. I'll reset my timer and we'll switch sides. We're
doing two minutes on either side - one minute with a straight leg,
one minute with a bent leg. Let's start off with our straight leg gastrocnemius stretch.
Drive your right heel down into the ground. Remember your front foot is just a placeholder,
so adjust as you need to, but weight from your hands all the way down to your
heel. Let's move back into our four/eight, nose/mouth breathing. Here we go. Inhale.
Open your mouth, exhale.
Your calf muscles are incredibly strong and when we're walking, and especially when we're running,
they have to be very, very resilient and take quite a lot of abuse in terms of weight,
and pressure, and storing kinetic energy. So to release these, especially after decades of funny
footwear, it takes some pretty intense stretching. Let's bend our knee now to
move into the second part of the stretch, moving the stretch from our gastrocnemius
down to our soleus muscle. You can see I need to adjust - my bum sticks back,
my back knee is bent again. The front leg is just a placeholder, so do whatever you need to do to
keep yourself positioned here. Heavy into your hands, heavy down into the heel. Inhale four.
Exhale eight.
Do your best to hold tension throughout the entirety of the pose.
And slowly release and shake it out. That was two minutes per leg. Let's switch to a psoas blaster.
You need two stools or two chairs, ideally if they're the same height it's helpful. I've
got a cushion for my back knee, so that I don't feel pressure pain with my knee into the stool.
My right leg lunges forward. Option one, lie down flat with your arms across the stool. Option two,
on your forearms. Option three, straight-ish arms, and option four is straight arms.
When your arms are straighter there will be more pressure.
Our goal here is to work on hip extension on your back leg, your left leg, stretching specifically
your iliopsoas muscles and your rectus femoris. These are your three primary hip flexor muscles.
Your iliopsoas muscles are sometimes referred to as your iliopsoas collectively. These are
your flank muscles, your tenderloin muscles, your filet mignon muscles,
and they're unique, specifically the psoas is unique, in that it starts at your lower back,
crosses your pelvis, and then attaches to your femur. When we walk around with
elevated heeled shoes, when we walk around with our pelvis pitched, tipped forward,
our psoas over weeks and months and years begins to shorten. When our psoas is shorter,
it quite literally pulls our lower back forward and exaggerates that anterior tilt. To correct
this, we need to stretch out our psoas muscle, so we call this pose a psoas blaster. Inhale four.
Open your mouth, exhale eight.
Inhale four.
And exhale and release. Slowly make your way all the way back up. I'm adjusting my stools here,
they're slightly at an angle, so the back stool is slightly to the right of the front stool. I'll
place my right knee on that cushioned back stool. Option one: lie down. Option two: maybe onto your
forearms. Option three: maybe straight-ish arms. And option four: arms all the way straight.
Don't worry about where you're at in the pose, just find a stretch variation that works for
you and we'll breathe here. Our goal is to load the back leg disproportionately. If we
imagine about 80 percent of the intensity of the stretch is on the back leg, your front leg again
is just there as a placeholder. If you start to feel your front leg quadriceps fatiguing,
play around with heel toeing your foot a little more forward, play around with
resting your knee against the stool in front of you, and try your best to relax completely.
Your psoas muscle, specifically on that back leg, that right leg in extension,
it needs quite a lot of intensity of stretching to open up. But I'd like you to think about a
seven out of ten intensity, which is a moderate intensity for stretching. Not so intense that you
have trouble speaking or that it's almost impossible to hold, but at a comfortably
uncomfortable place where, if you wanted to, you could talk in a normal voice like I'm doing now,
but it would take some concentration to do so. Inhale through your nose for four.
Exhale mouth eight.
Allow the weight of your body to stretch those hip flexors,
most specifically of interest is that psoas muscle on your back leg.
Slowly release, make your way all the way back up, and shake it out.
I hope you found that video helpful. Remember to get yourself a pair of zero drop shoes
at least to spend eighty percent of your time in. Do those two stretches we just looked at,
do those every day, after not before any kind of other training that you're doing,
and hopefully you can work to fix that anterior pelvic tilt pretty quickly. If you'd like more
science-based yoga videos, hit subscribe down below. I always love to hear your
questions or your feedback down below in the comments. You can find my teaching calendar
at yogabody.com. And lastly, I put a PDF down below of everything that we've covered today,
you can find that in the description. Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next video.