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Think Bigger Than the Kegel with Katy Bowman

Welcome back from break I hope you had a little snack I had my favorite fruit watermelon and of course I had a date with the bathroom coming up katie bowman bio mechanistic the queen ofthe all anatomy nerds this woman is about to unq egg the cable and about to help you to make sure that your extra soft abdominal tissues don't end up tearing and shredding while you're carrying your baby on the inside or the outside. So without further ado my sister from another mother miss katie bowman thank you for being here thank you for having me very excited to be here all of you lovely belize some are somewhere with some are was at last yes some are expert somewhere anticipating yeah, some replanting somewhere on vacation from the ones I've already had couple okay, great. Yeah, well should we dolphin yeah. Jump in. Okay, what do you know what you're gonna uncork on us? Well, we're going to try to cover a lot of concepts in a short amount of time when you introduce a few things. But first I want yo...

u if you're watching at home to kind of think about your pregnancy did it cause you any pain? So did you have pain during your pregnancy or after di stasis wrecked a pelvic floor pelvic pain and just let us know kind of about what your experience was and that will be helpful but we're going to start with I'm going to actually give you a little bit more space I'm a crowd a crowd you I'm going to be right over off here katie and if you want me to come up and share share in this space okay I'm there with you okay yeah what you khun well go ahead enjoy yourself and I'm going to start talking about where you wear your pregnancy weight so pregnancy weight oh this picture this ariel pregnancy way is an entire is an entirely natural thing and when I talk about pregnancy weight I really mean specifically the weight that is the baby and the placenta and and all of the natural kind of fat mass that comes to balance that load so that's something that your body is designed to be able to carry really without without undue quantities or amounts of pain but our bodies are not really in their natural state anymore we're no longer in nature and so we have kind of modern body adaptations that we have that come from chairs and shoes and low quantities of movement and so what I try to talk about it when I try to teach people is that where you're caring your weights your natural weight may or may not be in the most natural place and that something called load and when you have load that is carried in a non optimal way it can contribute to unnatural quantities of pain or injury during your pregnancy. And so that's what I'm trying to help everyone here understands, sir, just basic kind of whole body postural alignment makeovers as well as I'll be introducing some other concepts about the frequencies of movement in the ways that you should be thinking about moving right now that you can change the way pregnancy load your body, the natural occurring load of pregnancy I can go down and a whole bunch of different ways. So you are the vessel, but you bring along all of your habits, so we're going to talk about some of your habits today. There's a great quote from new holtz, which is it's, not the load that breaks down it's the way that you carry it, and so not all loads are the same. Well, the load is not the weight, so you have the weight or the mass that you're caring, but where that wait is kind of changes the outcome of your body, so if you just stand up for a second, if everyone just stands and I know that you'll probably address this already. But if you just stand with your weight and let's, think about kind of your pelvic bull right now and play with ok my weights back on my heels maybe you could move forward and now my weights on the front of my foot and you can find a halfway point between that now it's on the mid part of the foot and I go back again it's on the front of the foot and I could go back and it's in the heels and by experiencing that structural alignment change and how it distributes the weight differently, you can see how pregnancy if you weren't consciously thinking about where you could bear that weight optimally might create a lot of four foot pressure pressure down the front of the foot and then it's like why do why are my toes kind of aching? Why is walking so sore and you can say that it's pregnancy weight but if pregnancy weight can be carried in a way that doesn't cause those things then it's not really the pregnancy weight that's causing the issue it's the way you're distributing your loads did a foot sequence in the in the last sequence and there was a woman who has just crazy planet for shiite and so that would be something that could just spark up from not modulating your load correctly right and as your load you know you're getting heavier and heavier and heavier and you're probably going about your life in about the same way that you were before you became pregnant and then not really realizing that your habits, maybe they weren't so great before structurally alignment related, but now you have twenty or thirty or forty pounds on top of it, so if you had maybe a key feet at the end of a long we may be, if you, you know, ran a marathon, you're like I was my feet that kind of gave out, or if you go out for a long day of shopping and your feet hurt before you were pregnant, then you can kind of have understanding about the way that you loaded your body before the extra mass that those air probably going to be the areas that flare up, not because you're pregnant because of how you carry the load of pregnancy to different things and it's really hard, like semantics like it's pregnancy it's like, well, if you can carry your way load in a way that doesn't make those things and it's not the pregnancy. Pregnancy is not supposed to be a pain that's my what? I really like people to know and we get when things happen so frequently it becomes kind of natural it's like you go, you can talk to your friends like, oh, I had a lot of low back pain, I had pelvic pain, it's natural. Well there's a difference between what's become normal and what's actually natural so these things that we're talking about today are absolutely normal but it doesn't mean that they're not modifiable and changeable and improve a ble because they're not really the natural occurrence they are when pregnancy weight meets our unnatural body and are unnatural habits that's the equation so we want to change outcome all we have to do is kind of d modernize and all that's really the right word but we want to take out the modern stuffs more body and we'll talk about how you can take the chair out of your pelvis later I like you don't have to carry your chair around with you metaphorically speaking just because you sit in it so much you can open up your hips and carry that load a little bit better so if we're going to talk about is how you can carry your pregnancy well not just to endure it but actually thrive during it so much of you as a movement being so much about how you move during your pregnancy translates into your your cellular outcomes the chemical environments that are going on if you don't feel good then you want to fix that as soon as possible you want to be able to move and move comfortably and you know things like swollen feet are aching feet or painful back if they keep you from giving greater quantities of movement than we don't then you're khun b it physiologically at odds with amount of movements that you need amount of movements that make you strong enough to not only carry your pregnancy, but also when it comes to delivery, those mechanisms of delivery really kind of depend on the body state that you develop underneath the load it's kind of like a ultimate training session, so you want to make sure that you're optimizing this long period of training that you have because that's, what gives you that athletic prowess when the time comes? Because the time will come? All right, so the first thing I would have everyone d'oh is super simple it's reduced your pelvic thrust, so if you are it's kind of what we just did right now, you when you let your weight go all the way forward, what you were doing was you're backing your hips up, you're backing your pelvis up your center of mass is in your pelvis and so it's a good indicator of where your weight is and when you carry it way out in front of you, which is common because this is the path of least resistance, right? Just kind of hang don't go all the way forward and hang you can feel how you can stay upright without having to fire a lot of muscle. Right this is your resting position and we go into it naturally for many reasons but we'll just say right now because it's easiest for you when you back yourself up in a way from the toes you should be able to lift the toes up then you can feel a lot of muscular support systems kick in they have to kick in if they're not kicking in then you're going toe back over and it's ok if you don't go all the way back at first, right? Because if you were back there then you would have a lot more hamstring and glute mass toe toe hold you there. So even though the end kind of point that we want to get to is that vertical leg that you talked about where your hip joints are over the line of your ankle if you feel like going back though I don't have enough strength to hold me up then that you have ah target for where you want to go and you're gonna go step wise just a little bit at a time until you can comfortably hang out all the way back there and immediately takes that pressure off the four foot but even even better what it does is it takes the tension off of this so as muscle when you're here you're using if imagine like a long rubber band that goes from my pants up to my rib cage e I don't even have to imagine a rubber band if you just have our this is great. We just have this here as I go forward, what happens? I increase the ten style or tension load when it comes time to turn from the baby's perspective. Now the baby has to work against this ten sile low that you've created via your posture. So it's really cool. I'm just gonna start fidgeting with this right now. It's very cool to think about. You know your your uterus is a container for your baby, but you are the container for the uterus. What you do affects the loads or the pressure's on the uterus. So what? By changing or reorganizing your structure so that there aren't these arbitrary kind of modern habit things being placed on the baby, you reduce the workload for the baby so that they are able to move and change positions, which is important when it comes time to engage. You want to make sure that you're optimizing not just the space but the forces, the external forces that are being placed on the uterus. You want to optimize those. So if you back up to this point that we're talking about, see if you can feel the tension come off. I don't know whether or not you can feel your so as right now, but you should be able to feel the stopping point when you go forward and I and I'll have you just practice is over and over again because on lee, when you get a feeling for how you don't want it, do you trigger how you do when you're standing around like I'm at the bank, I've been standing in line forever it's like why does my back her? Why does my feet hurt? O that is your signal to remind you that there is an instant solution that you can do to change the position, so reducing your pelvic thrust uber important the second super simple tip is understanding where you wear your rib cage, so if you put your thumbs out this way and see if you can tuck your fingers underneath your bottom ribs is you're going for like the lowest but still in front of you portion of your rib cage, we don't even need to get anatomically specific. You can just make super subtle modification if you can get your thumbs underneath your ribs, then there too far up so what? After you've backed your hips up, you've got this nice kind of marker if you put your hands in the front of the pelvis, you can find what we call your hip bones even though it's really not your hip bones, but you know what I'm saying when I talk about that, you're gonna bring your ribs down until those points stack up. Now, when you're pregnant, the feeling of the sensation is, if I bring my ribs down, then I'm going to be squashing my baby, and that one of the reasons we do this when we're pregnant is because it gives us, like, the illusion of space visually, right? I feel like I have all this height now on, but also it takes some of the pressure off, so over time is a presence that gets larger and larger. If we weren't thinking about it, the pelvis goes farther and farther out, we left a ribs higher and higher, but what we've done in this situation is again fix my rubber ban, we've increased at ten sile load, so if going forward wasn't enough tension than lifting the rib cage is just more, and what you're doing is really reducing this space of your baby container by doing this and it's. Not that you've changed the forces or move the uterus out in front of you. I mean, those are definitely important things, but let's, talk about dia stasis wrecked e has anyone had dia stasis directly here, or did anyone in the chat rooms say that they had it or mentioned there was mention of some pregnancy issues but not not die stasis ready? I think someone said speak english, speak english and nice days is directing is actually latin, but it's a separation of the abdomen away from the midline. So if you draw a midline from you know, like this is a midline your nose, your mouth, your throat or on the midline in your belly button is also on that midline it's gonna hold my pumpkin here and it goes all way down to your pubic synthesis when you're pregnant, there's a natural widening of that, but you can increase an unnatural or place an unnatural load on that natural widening of the linea alba, which, when you're done being pregnant tends to not go away. Then you're left with abdominal muscles that have separated more than what is natural, and so therefore, when you remove the pregnancy, load them coming back doesn't happen as naturally either. And so then there's women post pregnancy who are dealing with this separation? If you go to do a sit up, your abdominal contents can poke up in between your muscles and it has a lot to do with pressing your baby weight forward into the tissues so almost gonna carry this on my shoulder here for a second you've got this here and you can imagine the ten style load if just standing like this didn't do it, then as you get a growing baby and press it into this tissue, what you do is you end up over thinning the connective tissue beyond the point of it's, not really beyond the point of repair, and unless you know how to repair it. But it becomes a problem that most women I have to live with because they don't know what else to dio, and they've never stopped the rib thrusting habit when they're actually finished. So we're trying to keep this ten sile load from becoming too great because of unnatural pelvic positioning. So when you drop your ribs, you are going tio bring your sums down where they were hooked under until they lined up with the front of the pelvis, which will feel very you know, you've got usually extra weight in your chest now and now I've just told you that you have to bring everything further down, but one of the reasons that we tend to lift the ribs in the first place is because the tension between our shoulders and our ribs, or so great and that's where so much of the work with the balls come in and understanding that you can mobilize and actually change your shoulder, that you don't have to change at the abdomen. Any longer to deal with tight shoulders that just don't open. So it's a it's a two part process? I wouldn't want you to just drop your ribs without doing something about your shoulders, because you're going to find it pretty, limiting it's like, I can't move my arms here, it's like, ok, well, be relaxed about it, it's like all this stuff I feel is like right away when you're driving, you want to take it, but you never want to insist upon it, right? That's a good kind of way for youto drive your body around is to think about, you know, this doesn't really feel right for me or this full extent doesn't feel right for me that's like, then do a step. We'll go step wise just to a little bit, but if you're working on shoulder mobility at the same time as you're dropping your ribs, what you do is you actually increase the strength of your abdomen while you're pregnant, meeting that you're actually becoming stronger relative to the mass instead of over taxing and kind of destroying the strength that what should be the strength maker because of how you're carrying it. So dropping your ribs is essentially what we do, we do a sit up right, or if you're doing a crunch. That's where they should just be all of the time that's where they go so if you just keep them down and work on your shoulder mobility you'll be giving you'll be positioning your precious goods your uterus and precious cargo in a way that optimizes the other forces when it comes time for delivery so there's all these other side effects outside of just pain management and improving conditions there's also when it comes time for delivery all of those mechanisms that happen naturally our position dependent they all depend on the way that the mass of your body parts interact with the gravitational force and so if your uterus is slightly tipped because of the way you hold your body, then the force that the fetus head places on the cervix during delivery is also reduced in if that force is driving the dye elation process then there's all these physiological markers that can't be hit without kind of some structural norms and that's what we're trying to do is restore back to these structural norms all right? Any questions? So is the external rotation that jill was reminding us does that helpful for the rib dropping because you kind of feel yeah from or in europe and we're gonna talk about that extra rotation peace and where it fits in especially with pelvic floor I mean as it's like you're like a puzzle piece when one things out everything that stacked upon it has to go with whatever was out just below it so as you begin to put little things back into place, what you find is a piece on top or above if you just try to close your ribs without adjusting the feet or as we're going to talk about in a second footwear then you're always kind of working uphill because you're working against forces and that's why we're talking about shoes lose the shoes I was hoping yeah what I started the keg of shoe where's right with feet I was like, well, maybe I'll just toss that one top say shoes sure and look at this yeah so this is this is about you as a platform you was a column it's really easy to think about yourself in a particular position of being a column it doesn't mean that you walk around in a column all the time it means that you're able though to structurally get yourself into a position that has all of these optimal forces and that when you're walking you're not carrying these things over into your game so we use a single position for your evaluation purposes because if you can't achieve these structural markers when you're standing still then there's no way that they come over into walking and walking around in your regular life so this is a picture of footwear and when I say lose the shoes I really mean lose the heels there's there's a lot of different aspects of a shoe that you can you can start to slough off, but of all the things um of all the aspects of the shu so there's the hell there's the narrowness of the toe box that jill talked about earlier there is that the stiffness of the soul the hell during pregnancy really cause is the greatest amount of structural deformity to allow youto wear the hill and still be upright, so this is a picture of just a vertical positioning of the body, so your ankle access is at ninety degrees, right? That's just you standing on the ground and what this graphics showing is when you put on a shoe if you didn't if you were like a two by four and couldn't adjust any of your axes, your ankle or your knee or your pelvis or your neck to offset this change that this is how far your body would be pitched forward so one or two inches can really really push you forward and the taller you are the shorter your foot, the higher the heel, the greater this deformation is, but you obviously don't walk around pitched forward because you cannot so you make some sort of what's called counter torque positioning you have to go backwards at some axes, whether it's your ankle or your knee or your pelvis and so that's where pelvic floor and high heels that's why I really link the two of them up, because most people, in order to facilitate the geometrical changes of their hell, there's no way you can have your pelvic floor underneath the weight of your baby. So then we end up with this weakness and not really recognizing that it comes from the footwear. And then now we have a weakness with the low that's just slowly increasing all of the time with with no structural, all the natural mechanism of adaptation for your pelvic floor is kind of turned off by the height of the hell that all but I also like to say that if you are a hell where, it's, not really a good idea to go like, hey, I'm going to slough off my heels and go right into my minimal shoes that you want to think about it in terms of progression, and you want to think about in terms of adaptation your foot, and your calves and your ankle have adapted to your footwear of choice. If you've been wearing a positive, he almost must have been wearing a positive hell, and when I say positive, I don't mean, like, good job positive, I mean, like, degrees above the ground, well done, he'll what I'm talking about is any time the hell is higher than the ball of the foot, so if you've adapted to that, you want to make sure that you're doing a lot of the foot on the ball work that you're stretching your calves, that you're strengthening the feet because a lot of the literature, you know, pregnancy if you've got all this extra weight and you're like, my feet are hurting and I remember katie said I should wear flat shoes just jumping in the flat shoes might not be the solution, but definitely reducing over time, definitely, but if you could do it before pregnancy, even better, but any any positive or negative change you make to your heel will have a positive improvement to your structural integrity. So you want to make sure that you don't just go for the product swap but that you actually put down in your calendar, that there's work to be done on the body, because that's, even more important than just switching the shoe your fleet have been like in casts, basically for your whole entire life. And so in the same way that you wouldn't take your bare feet out and to go run a marathon, you don't want to just jump into a minimal shoes, so I would like to put that out there because in pregnancy were usually carrying more weight than what's natural for us. One of our chat room members kelly's and so barefoot and pregnant is actually a good way do have some questions coming in and you might touch on it later if so, you could just let us know but mother wild love says katie how can I stabilize my tailbone post baby I can feel it shifting around during certain movement okay we'll get to let's we'll get to that kind of more towards the pelvic floor stuff any foot questions in a foot book sure katie's isn't all about the foot would go ahead and I mean it is incredible yeah it's every woman's guide to foot pain it really should be kind of re titled to every person should just remain indefinitely it's really about the axes it's about it's about you're trying you're going to the chiropractor to fix your back and you're going to physical therapist for your pelvic floor and you're you're taking medication for your chronic headaches and your have osteoarthritis that's developed in the knees and the toes and no one's looking south of the ankle all of those things that you're doing without recognizing that what you're putting on your feet every day are actually contributing to it like you're just spending money in time and not actually looking at the act of the operating axes of the body so it's just a really simple primer really inhuman movement in an introduction to alignment it starts with the feet and all the corrective exercises that you need to do to re strengthen kind of what's been lost in the flat, right? Well, I guess I do tiffany who we had in the early segment had some some major issues with her fate she has got a question I'm not a doctor so you can tell me whether this is to do with the foot but tiffany says is this good for a bone on bone sam say joint so it's a joy egg it's got the bite on buying thing but I think she's moved up the leg a little um well it's just kind of one of those things where positive healed footwear is creating higher than normal load so mobilizing and reducing the load reduces the low to whatever is bone on bone right? Right so a lot I'm not a doctor either, nor do I know tiffany nor have I actually seen any of her paperwork or her foot or what not but what I have tried it teaches there are real simple mechanical positions that increase or decrease load and I can tell you that if you're in a positive heeled shoe there's probably a greater than normal load unless she's got you know some other cool levitating skills and I'm unaware of but yeah, I mean it's just it's a real simple place to start he notes can you move your toes individually can you spread your toes away from each other like these? Aren't there's basic human movements? Not even specific physical therapy? This is just what your flight should be able to do. I have a question about the feet, so when I was pregnant, I felt like my heart is just fell down, right? And my he also grew like a size and a half was going on there what's going on there is you want to come up if you kind of face this way with your feet. Jill talked a little bit about that internal and external rotation, right? Right, right. So if you look at my foot here, yeah, as I internally rotate my foot, can you see how it might the height of my arch decreases? Yeah, so the arch of the foot is directly related to what's going on with the hip and and really the pelvic floor when I talk about external rotation like I'm going to and also like I'm talking about right now, we'll talk about how this extra rotation is a function of the pelvic floor. You want to make sure that you're not steering it with your hamster with your quadriceps or your hamstrings or your glutes, it really is something that comes from the pelvic florence shouldn't require much leg, but as you move around, you can see how the haif of your arts changes and you could bring it back down again so that happens a lot as we get pregnant and our pregnancy mass is stacked upon a body that doesn't move very much and even for regular exercisers I'm talking about comparatively speaking to populations and you have all day long so it's not about hey, I exercise, I'm not sedentary, I'm talking about if you sit more than six or seven hours a day, you're you're in that group of sedentary population when you change the position of your arch, the toes will actually move away. So as this comes out longer, this distance gets greater so your foot becomes longer but not because the bones have grown longer, but because of what I call shamir you have foot shamir you have ankle it's a try plainer distortion so it's rotating this way but it's also getting lower but it's also moving in so your ankle actually goes off its axis in three different ways because of the rotator and the net result is because your foot stuck to the ground that it smears over which collapses your ankle. But the foot becomes longer by doing so because you've just I don't know how else to say you actually distort the parts that could be taken arch hyde and push it down on the ground it pushes the toes away from each other so you've just lost the heights that's in your heart just kind of like when someone measures at a certain height, but as they stoop forward, they get shorter, but they haven't actually lost the mass that makes them higher, it's just distorted out in front of them. Okay, so same thing with your foot, so in pregnancy, your foot will get longer, but it's not growing that's helpful it's just an indication of how of how much you've compressed and smushed or smeared your tissues, so they're entirely in a different position. They're in a different position in three different planes, and the long story short is you're still into get longer shoes, but that you wouldn't necessarily have to get longer shoes if you maintained your hips, strength in your glutes strength and your pelvic floor strength, as you were putting on the weight of pregnancy. Ok on that, though, so in terms of the sort of soft tissue deformation, the loss of the tony city of the small ligaments and fascist of the foot, when you're constantly compressing in this smear position, it's collapsed art position, eventually the soft tissues that are a part of the the bony network is the most bones of any sort of region of your body, or in your foot, I guess it's number, maybe your mouth. Unless somebody plucked all the weight bearing like is it exactly I'm bearing weight on my good? The amount of load going into that smear effect is enough over time with, you know that constant pressure repetition and add heat to this because your feet get superhot, it just starts to elongate the the contract all elements within the soft tissues, and you just start to lose your elasticity. You start to lose the rebound in there, and that is that that extra link that you gained on dso but it's preventable, if you're negotiating your loads correctly from from the get go and also the strength in your feet like all your muscles are positioned dependent, they work in the plane that they work. And so if, if here's your let's say your foot muscles do this, this is like the most simple foot muscle ever so here, like they do this, but if you're here on their side and you're still pressing down on top, these muscles air over here. They're no longer working in their appropriate plane of action, meaning they can't contract against this load any longer when they're no longer in this plane. So that's why external rotation is so important because without it, your foot muscles are over here when when they lift or contract, they don't do anything about it the normal or the gravitational load that's placed on your body, so muscle function is positioned dependent when you change the axes of your body, you take with it its ability to generate force, which we call leverage take away its leverage. I think they are coming up sharing your feet yet that you have an opinion on those shoes that there supposed to be or economically sound, that they're kind of like on on on a sloped wedge, you know? And you have to, like, position like a rocker. Bottom shoes. Exactly. Well, I do have an opinion. Uh e yeah, I don't mind. You know, when you get into a rocking chair, why do you sit in a rocking chair? What a rocking chair allows you to do is get a lot of movement for very little energy output, right? You get more momenta, mo mentum is some that you create once, and then it rocks for you. So when you walk in a rocker bottom shoe in allow of you too, do very little work and still be able to move ahead, which is why I let people like him for reducing its like, oh, I don't have to have my back doesn't hurt when I move it's like, because you no longer have to really move your legs to be ableto work, but I mean, I don't think it be be a challenge to make an argument for how a rocker bottom is a natural human function of the foot play a role in that same conversation massage so vast your opinion on our thought it well or thought extra kind of the same thing orthotic are a temporary way of getting you external rotation. A lot of times you go in it's like my ankle hurts, my knee hurts or let's talk about pregnancy because we're on this pregnancy show my back pain might my weight of my pregnancy is really exacerbating my knee and my hip, my foot swollen and you go to your podiatrist and and when they tell you it's like we had a real we have to change the way you're loading right now this load is too great on these tissues, so will support this structure with an orthotic and it's a it's, a it's a viable in the moment corrective but it is external to you and it doesn't help you become stronger. It just reduces during that period of time, damage from the load. And so, like anything if I hey, you know, I having a hard time, my bicep isn't working very well and it's like, oh, well, let me sling it for you and now I don't have to worry about my arm flopping around my elbow hurting, but what happens to my vice up over time is it promotes more atrophy, so there's a difference between what's a viable short term solution and what is the long term changes that we're trying to make in our body? Right and that's that's really what we're here to talk about? Because you can piecemeal and spot treat and it's very expensive and time consuming and you don't really ever get the level of the illness that you want because in the end it's just the work it's just get on the balls it's strengthening your feet, it's choosing more minimal shoes and walking in the more frequently and that's that's the one I want to say the unfortunate solution it's unfortunate for time management but it's wonderful that it's actually that simple. All right, so let's talk about some correctives for I talked about getting the chair out of your pelvis so want to do that now and I actually need a chair if someone wants to bring it up and I will need a model. So this is when you sit a long time most people set tennis it with a slightly tucked pelvis relative to their femur, so it does someone want to come up in do my forward bend, modeling anyone, anyone all right, so I'm gonna have you come forward and you're gonna put your hands on here now when most people go over and you can try this at home, it helps if you have someone else to watch you when most people go over and reach to the chair, what you'll tend to see is this. You'll tend to see roundness here you'll see. Ah, lack of lumbar curve. They see this here. How it's round. And I know what this means is when you hinge forward where your hinging forward from is right at the naval usually it's on the opposite side of the belly button. And when you hinge forward, what should be happening is that hinge happens at the hip joint and that lets you know really what? The mobility of your pelvis is relative to your femur. If we just say, oh, I can touch the floor no problem where I could get to the chair. No problem and don't look at how you got there. What you miss is if this is mobile on you are not so it's. A really cool test to be able to see how much you can move, but you can see as tia moves her pelvis what's also moving. Her rib cage so we don't want to move our rib kids I'm gonna have you come back up and usually see how these two pieces of kind of confused they all moved together. Ideally, what should happen is your rib cage should stay up as your pelvis on tux mind freeze like it's just really hard to figure out how to get there because we're so used to this or this we're not used to bringing the ribs down stabilizing the rib cage and this is a really good sign of your abdomen being able to support your weight in a lot of people asked what if I have die stasis directly should get down on my hands on my knees because when they get down on their hands in their knees where they d'oh, they drop the rib cage too and in that case they're creating an unnaturally high load and it has to do with that muscle positioning thing their muscles are now no longer geometrically to generate this upward support. So if you do go on your hands and knees and I strongly recommend that you go on your hands and your knees as long as there's no country indications for you to do so that you release your pelvis while you're there as you bring up the rib cage to support it's a very nuanced so quadra pet or just getting down on your hands and your knees just got a little more persnickety for you, there's more more ways to look at movement than just what are the hands of the knees doing? You're going to start, especially when you're pregnant, what's my pelvis doing and what's my rib cage doing those air you two extra markers that you're just going to keep thinking about. Does anyone else want to come up and try to be nice to see if someone who didn't have a lot of pelvic mobility so people could see at home? But no, you want to come on up, you know, you're tired. How far along are you? Thirty seven weeks? Oh, lovett, congratulations. There you go. So all right, so before you try to fix your rib, so just let it go because it's a go, so what I'm going to dio is I'm just going to apply just a little bit of guidance here, and what I'd like you to do is let this go a little bit more, yeah, so you see that little bit of movement and then go back and tuck where you were before so there's just that that is a it's, a mental program, it's, a way of supporting this mass all the time, and it lets me know something about when you stand that this is just kind of a preferred stance, so if you can let this go a little bit more and I won't make her do this for a very long time because that's just not fair I was just here I remember what it feels like bring this rib cage up at the same time so you imagine your baby container here uterus staying vertical you don't want to let the ribs go down just one second if you wouldn't mind you don't want it to tip this way but nor do you want to tip this way you just wanted to stay as vertical is possible, but it really helps if you can relax the back in the hamstring so this is just a great self test and you go and come on up beautiful. All right, thank you for that if when you're doing the exercise, I'm going it's gonna change and I'm gonna use myself as a model if when you're doing the exercise, you really feel that the backs of your legs are resisting this forward motion, then the solution is to do this more often. If you feel really uncomfortable with this load when you're really, really pregnant, you could put books or yoga blocks up here it doesn't it's not about really the forward bend it's about the kentucky and you can also come down onto your hands and knees and do it on your hands and knees to what you're practicing is how much you can just let go of your pelvis because letting go really comes in handy when it's time to give birth this is a great you're like a laboratory for yourself right now how well do I let go and I imagine that on camera it would be less than what it will be you know in your regular life but if you can just practice or cultivate relax station and there's so many ways of working relaxation into you know your mind and you're doing meditation but sometimes the physical practice of can I physically let this area go without a sense of panic these air great habits to cultivate now and not you know when it's go time all right soni pits aligns I need a marker and someone who will allow me to write on the backs of their legs to demonstrate that right and left um discrepancy and well one of you are figuring out who that wants to be that person what I'll talk about is when it comes time for vaginal delivery if you're doing the vaginal delivery route one of the things that tends to stall the delivery is that both the right and left half of your pelvic floor don't yield equally you have one side of your vaginal wall that's tighter then the other and this test is a really great way for you to see why or how that can be no volunteers yet. No one, no, come on, you. And if you could roll your pants up above your knees for me, look at all the everyone's feats are great. You guys are all super great students when I'm going to do is I'm gonna highlight to make it easier for you to see at home where these tendons air coming down so you can get a sense of where the femurs are. So if you imagine this knee is a hinge, where would you want your needs to hinge? Like, if you're moving forward, where should the lower leg be hinging? And if you answer directly back behind you, then that would be the right answer, but you can see that these hinges aren't exactly symmetrical. So what this lets me know is the muscles that attach to the head of the femur at the pelvic floor are also not symmetrical, that one side is under greater tension compared to the other side. What you want to do is before you adjust your back of your legs, you want a line up your foot so that it is for the most part, pointing straight ahead, so I'm not going to have you go by your toes, because your toes or too much under the whiplash effect of your gate patterns so instead I want youto line up the structure of the foot and if you have a yoga mat or if you have a book or if you have a block see what I've done here how I folded this over can you bring your heel out a little bit closer yes right there so you can see that when your feet you want to make sure that everyone on the same max is just a little bit out with the hell does the scotia diego that one side is a little bit more rotated than the other so I'd like you to externally rotate for me both legs so it's this motion is going to be like this and don't worry about keeping your feet down if you're at home and you're externally rotating let your foot go we most of us do not have the four foot mobility to extremely wrote it and keep the feet down and when you insist upon keeping the foot down and extremely rotate the thigh then the monkey in the middle becomes your knee so for this we're going to really keep the ball of that foot up and so we can see can you feel the difference one side to the other now go back to where you were before all right try that again and the one thing I'm gonna have you dio is back your hips up for me keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. There you go. And that should help people. You should be able to rotate a little bit better. So have someone write these lines on the back of your lay there's, usually a nice indentation. Go stand in front of a mirror with your backside to the mirror always superfund and then you're going to bend forward and you gonna look between your legs and you're going to evaluate your meat pits and you want these four lines to be more or less pointing straight back behind you when your feet or straight you have to set a grid before you start measuring parts. So the foot straight is just a nice way. It's an easy way for you, teo. Make sure that you're always measuring from the same place and it has tried that a few times and you can try that at home. You don't have to go run and get a pen or a mere right now, but that's where you want to go, you don't want to just arbitrarily externally, rotate as much as possible. You just want to get the knee hinge to the point where it's operating straight, and that gives you information about what's happening at the head of the femur thank you for making model I appreciate that.