I’m going to be talking about one of my favorite exercises for three different reasons.
- It’s an amazing self assessment tool that I give to clients, often to help explain why they have pain in a lot of parts of their body through compensations.
- It’s a great way to actually get rid of things like ankle pain, knee pain, back pain, hip pain, SI joint dysfunctions, a lot of stuff, all in one exercise.
- It’s a great exercise to help with anxiety, panic, and disability both physical and mental.
I learned the exercise itself from a guy named Moshé Feldenkrais who calls it the Hip and Pelvic Integrator. I have made a couple of modifications over the years, which I will walk you through. First, lie on your back and pay attention to your midsection. Notice if you have an arch in your back as you are lying down like a ragdoll. Then, push your foot straight into the ground and what should happen is the pelvis goes backwards (or posterior, for your nerds out there) and it starts to rotate. The reason that happens starts with the foot. Look at the anatomy of the foot. It doesn’t have a lot of structure or muscle other than just to react reflexively to the surface that we’re on and then tell the rest of the body what the flip to do. If everything listens well, then what you should be feeling is your spine is moving one vertebra at a time into rotation simply because things are listening appropriately. There’s ligamentous tension. There’s fascial tension. That’s appropriate. All of the muscles are in coordination with each other, and eventually that foot pushing down tells the body so much to roll over that you can actually roll over. Fun fact, this is the movement that should happen when we walk. Imagine I take one step forward, the heel hits the ground, the hip goes forward, the opposite shoulder goes back behind me, and then on the way back down, I’m trying my best to pull with the hip back down to get this opposing roll.
Let’s talk about how we can use this exercise to learn about compensations. Sometimes, your pelvis may go askew. For me, I can do my best to push my foot straight down to the ground on my right side, but my lower back immediately goes into extension and the pelvis goes anterior. That tells me my glutes aren’t turning on and listening to the foot properly. The problem that I see a lot of people, especially my clients over the years, making, is they try to go do clam shells and donkey kicks to isolate the glute to build strength. But, then they go and take a walk, and their exercise doesn’t translate. They don’t remember that the second we take a step and that heel hits the floor, that’s when the glute actually turns on. So you’ve got to include the foot in your glute training. Otherwise it won’t work.
Next, try pushing your foot down more with the heel and pick up your toes. Now, all of a sudden, your glute turns on a little bit more, but you’ll likely feel it in the bottom, not the inside or outside of the glute. So what if you take the foot to the side and load more onto the inside of the heel? Well, now you feel a little bit more of all the glute and pelvic floor muscles starting to kick in. Amazing! You can also start to put the outside of the foot down with the foot moved inwards and feel even more! You should feel more of an ability to rotate backwards with the pelvis. It’s a beautiful little compensation that we add. However, oftentimes I see my clients get stuck somewhere, and they’ll do a couple different compensations: 1) They’ll just start pushing the knee over, which does help rotate the pelvis, but it’s not from activation, it’s from yanking across. This can strain the lower back and over stretch some ligaments in the hip, leading to bursitis, or some problems in the knee. 2) The other compensation I see is that if their hip can’t rotate because they’re lacking some mobility, then their head and shoulder will start to try and come up first and they will try and pull themselves across. That ends up starting to lead to a lot of neck, jaw, vision, and hearing problems because the side of the head gets so tight. It could lead to headaches and migraines or shoulder dysfunctions, like rotator cuff or frozen shoulder, all because the body is not listening to the foot appropriately. The goal of this is not to roll over. The goal is to reintegrate the system, to get the rest of the body listening to the foot as much as we can.
Another thing you can do to help your body start listening to your feet, is find about one to three hours of your day to spend barefoot. In fact, it’s best to spend as much time as possible barefoot (without being weird in public). Going barefoot is so important because your sensor system in the bottom of the foot needs to actually feel the ground. When you put shoes on, it’s almost like you’re putting earmuffs on the foot, and the foot then has to hit the ground harder in order to feel the ground. If the foot slaps the ground harder, then you have more impact to the rest of your body, and your body can’t hear anything else.
Last thing I’m going to say is that if the pelvis itself is not symmetrical and has a left to right imbalance, then this could actually lead to mental stress. Your hindbrain is the subconscious and if it’s detecting this imbalance, then everything you’re doing in your life tends to be a little bit out of balance, especially with things related to safety. You may experience some low level anxiety or chronic tension in your system, trying to overcompensate for things. You might even find that you have a decrease in ability to make decisions because of the hip not being able to move forward appropriately. So working on your hips is a great way to start improving your decision making, getting some fear out of your life, some chronic anxiety out of your life, and just chipping away at this from the musculoskeletal system itself.
If you’re interested in these kinds of exercises to improve your health holistically, please check out my course Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress. It’s full of physiological exercises to go after specific mental health dysfunctions that I’ve used with hundreds of people (and myself) for holistic healing. You can also sign up for my newsletter to get all sorts of tips and tricks to live a healthier and happier life, or just go to my website to get a free consultation to see if we are a good fit to work with 1:1. I hope this information was helpful to you, and as always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day!