Is this your posture?
Do you have lower back pain?
What is Donald duck posture?
Donald duck posture is typically referred as the famous “anterior pelvic tilt” or the “selfie butt pic”.
Anterior Pelvic tilt…
This is a hot topic in the fitness industry today. Tight lower back and hip flexors muscles and weak overstretched hamstrings and rectus abdominus (ab muscles) . Do you have this, or think you do? Lets find out!
Low back pain is normal with an anterior pelvic tilt due to tight hip flexors, quadriceps, and erectors. Typically many go straight for the erectors, but sometimes they are not to blame. My first thought would be to ask what they do for a hobby or for a living and then start from there.
Here is a test to see how our hip flexors are doing.
Thomas test to assess your Anterior pelvic tilt.
So you follow the youtube and fitness industry and you decided you have an anterior pelvic tilt. You think your hip flexors are tight and you stretch them daily. Back still hurts! Dang!
If this is true, this test will show you for sure If your hip flexors are tight.
As you can see from the angle of the top of the leg, it elevates, which indicates a tight hip flexor. The bottom angle of the leg points out which indicates tight quads. Stretch the quad to see if its not a false positive from just having the hip flexor be a positive. Later we will go through a protocol to help this.
Seeing this picture, the leg isn’t lifted. This will rule out your anterior pelvic tilt.
Looking in the mirror may not be enough to determine an anterior pelvic tilt. Just because you have a slight tilt does not mean it’s an issue
This is where people go wrong. They see a slight tilt and diagnose something that’s not even there. Naturally our pelvis does tilt. Most anterior pelvic tilt doesn’t come from sitting. It comes from getting fat. As the belly grows out, the pelvis tilts down due to good ole’ gravity! That’s not to rule out sitting completely, its just people blame it on sitting and sometimes thats not the biggest issue. Anterior pelvic tilt can also come from being an athlete with a sport doing excessive hip flexion and not enough stretching.
So now if we do have it, what do we do?
First things first, were going to foam roll.
Were gonna roll out our quads and hip flexors.
When you find the “Ouchie” stay on it for a couple of seconds to a couple minutes (until the ouchie gets lessened) then go to the next one. After we address those areas, we will then roll for 15-30 secs a leg.
Next we’re going to stretch our quads and hip flexors. Hold 3-5×15-60secs.
Pick one of these variations of stretches. One size may not fit all so try them all and see what works for you.
- ^This is called the couch stretch, this works well if you have the flexibility for it. To get the illiopsoas complex, the stretchee should lift his left hand up and slightly rotate his torso
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2. ^This is a partner assisted hip flexor stretch. If the partner were to pull the “stretchee’s” heel towards her rear end, she would get a quad stretch too.
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3.^Here is one if you enjoy the partner assisted stretch, but don’t have a partner handy.
After we inhibited(foam rolled) and stretched we need to strengthen. We’ll keep it simple.
Plank with a posterior pelvic tilt
Glute bridge
To give our erectors a rest we will lay in child’s pose in a restorative setting. Sometimes in restorative yoga you will hold a stretch for up to 8 minutes! Heres how to do it. It’s effective easy and relaxing!
keeping your legs together will target the erectors more. Opening up the legs will give more relief for your hip flexors.
recap
- foam roll quads and hip flexors
- stretch quads and hip flexors 3-5×15-60 secs
- plank with ppt 3x 15-60 secs
- glute bridge 3 x30-40 secs
- Childs pose 4-8 min
Good luck guys!
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