Standing with a neutral pelvis.
Posture is the position in which you hold your body while standing, sitting, or lying down.
For me, the idea of good posture starts with a neutral pelvis. From there the pelvis can move in multiple directions but we want to start from neutral.
This is because standing successfully with a neutral pelvis makes initiating efficient movement patterns much more likely.
So what is a neutral pelvis? There are a lot of different cues that I use to help people feel when they are standing with a neutral pelvis.
Those are three ways to feel when you have a well-aligned pelvis when standing still.
Not that we stand still all that much. We are dynamic creatures that are always moving– as long as the heart beats– but we have to start somewhere.
Anatomically, having a neutral pelvis means the ball at the top of the leg bone (femur) aligns well into the cup of the hip (acetabulum).
Aligning well means that it is neither externally rotated nor internally rotated.
It finds a happy medium.
As soon as we move in any way we leave the neutral pelvis behind… but only momentarily.
For the rest of this post, I am going to stick with looking at standing. This is where I start with all of my classes and clients.
It is a rare day that I don’t see someone standing and telling them to stop tucking their pelvis under. But that doesn’t mean that the pelvis shouldn’t ever tuck under.
Every successful step we take involves the tilting and rotating of the pelvis. This means the pelvis tucks and untucks with every step.
But the key part of this is that the pelvis has to move through a neutral position while it tucks and untucks with each step.
The question is how your pelvis is aligned when standing?
If you can answer this question you will also know what your pelvis is doing when walking. This is because your walking patterns follow your standing patterns.
If you are someone that is habitually tucking the pelvis under, your femur heads are not going to be able to find a happy medium. Instead, they will always be slightly externally rotated (not neutral).
And not everyone tucks under. Some people stick their butts out too much into an anterior tilt. Those people are going through life with the femur heads too internally rotated.
The benefits of standing with a neutral pelvis are all about successful weight transfer through our bones.
You can read many of my other posts about walking— where the pelvis is constantly moving — but when it comes to standing we want to align the bones so they can best bear and transfer weight through the skeleton.
We bear and transfer weight best when standing with a neutral pelvis
And we owe it to ourselves to understand the alignment of the pelvis and develop ways to feel when it is well situated.