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The key to alignment is to align yourself in daily normal movement, primal movements, like standing and walking.
This is a change in paradigm, shifting from the medical paradigms of depending on specialists to changing your lifestyle and environment.
Various forms of body work: chiropractic, physical therapy, craniosacral, massage, yoga, and a countless list of specialties can help when you are in pain or stressed and don’t know where to begin. Some will show you how to move and change normal lifestyle movement but it is rare to do it comprehensively enough. Giving exercises is not necessarily to the point.
The major physical goal is alignment of bones and muscles of the entire structure from toes to teeth. It must be considered as a whole, not just the parts where pain shows up like the back or shoulders. Pain in the back can have multiple causes from feet to teeth.
MISALIGNMENT and the HIPS
The standard picture of misalignment suffered by most people when standing is forward hips and forward head with the chest sunken back. Alignment is bringing the chest forward and the head and hips back. That’s booty out, chest up, it’s sexier.
You cannot align yourself by “standing up straight.” You don’t know what to move and you can’t move even if you know until you have released tension of imbalanced muscles. People who “stand up straight” contract their lower back muscles, the erectors, and lean back with hips further forward, which reinforces the cause of the problem. That’s why they have to remind themselves to stand up straight. They are intervening where the symptoms show up and not in the cause that is lower down in the hips, legs and feet. Hip angle is the foundation that aligns the spine from below. The right hip angle allows the vertebrae to stack with less effort by muscles to put bones in place. With the wrong hip angle muscles have to work harder and create tension and vertebrae may pinch nerves on one side to create pain.
Major causes of hip misalignment include sitting on chairs and toilets, shoes, and falling on your tailbone as a child that you may not even remember.
Chairs and toilets impose a 90 degree hip angle that shortens through habit a funny pair of muscles called the psoas and illiacus that both attach to upper thigh bone or femur and then branch out to the lower back and hip bones respectively. These are called “the core of the core” abdominal and hip muscles. When you are standing these muscles can raise your knees. These muscles are responsible for aligning the hips continually as well. Proper alignment depends on these muscles being loose enough to let your hips fall back or have anterior tilt at the top, allowing you to tuck your private parts under for protection, so to speak, and stick your booty out.
Normal or ancestral primal movement includes sitting on the floor cross-legged and the primal squat with your knees up to your shoulders. These both stretch hip muscles to align the hips and allow the hips and sacrum to swing freely when walking. Tight hips and sacrum lead to the shoulders swaying like a cowboy. This may look macho and tough and take up space but these people are easier to knock over. It can take time to regain range of motion to do the primal squat or even sitting cross legged.
Normal primal movement is also standing and walking with hips back with an "anterior tilt" or top of the hip leaning forward.
5 Steps to Aligning the Hips
Release tension in passive positions. To release the illiopsoas complex involves lying down in the right positions with various techniques to put these muscles in neutral so they can rest and let go. I teach this in my Align Spine & Mind program. You can feel this up into your neck as the chain reaction of muscle tension releases. By relaxing the neck you also help the cranium expand as neck muscles attach to the temporal and occipital bones. People doing cranial and orthodontic work would do well to release hips to support expansion of cranial bones, which may be a secondary but significant obstacle to progress. Causation works both ways from top down and bottom up. The hips are that important.
By releasing the psoas the relaxing effect is stronger than you can imagine and it is easy to fall asleep or just feel blissed. Many people have emotional release from this for some reason that no one understands fully; muscle tension holds in emotions, and emotions can create muscle tension. You can start at either place and intervening from both directions is more thorough.
After releasing the psoas the hips will be pushed back and you can walk more smoothly.
Stretch muscles. Stretching before releasing can run into resistance that tears at muscle. If you are really sensitive you can just release and leave it at that. The muscles individuals need to stretch can vary but generally the posterior chain or muscles on the back side of the body: glutes, adductors, hamstrings, and erectors or lower back, will be underdeveloped and tight. It feels amazing to stretch these and get the hips further back.
Walk and stand properly. Normal muscle use will be different and can make you sore. It feels like you are massaging your whole body and spine when walking properly. You feel sexier with proper hip movement. People have no clue what they are missing. Joy in living can be found in these simple things, aligning with nature’s design.
Strengthen muscles with exercises, but this is not always necessary. There are many ways to do this. Yoga asana routines can help movement in a balanced way, but can also hurt if you skip the fundamentals because yoga was not designed to address modern causes of misalignment.
Proper shoes. Shoes with heels higher than toes misalign hips. Barefoot is great when practical. You need shoes with zero drop from heel to toe, as if barefoot in some ways. I recommend Altra, see my page Shoes here.
There are several foot angles that matter, but let’s stay focused on the hips for the moment.
This is what a proper solution looks like that addresses root causes as related to hips.
This is a change in paradigm, shifting from the medical paradigms of depending on specialists to changing your lifestyle and environment.
Various forms of body work: chiropractic, physical therapy, craniosacral, massage, yoga, and a countless list of specialties can help when you are in pain or stressed and don’t know where to begin. Some will show you how to move and change normal lifestyle movement but it is rare to do it comprehensively enough. Giving exercises is not necessarily to the point.
The major physical goal is alignment of bones and muscles of the entire structure from toes to teeth. It must be considered as a whole, not just the parts where pain shows up like the back or shoulders. Pain in the back can have multiple causes from feet to teeth.
MISALIGNMENT and the HIPS
The standard picture of misalignment suffered by most people when standing is forward hips and forward head with the chest sunken back. Alignment is bringing the chest forward and the head and hips back. That’s booty out, chest up, it’s sexier.
You cannot align yourself by “standing up straight.” You don’t know what to move and you can’t move even if you know until you have released tension of imbalanced muscles. People who “stand up straight” contract their lower back muscles, the erectors, and lean back with hips further forward, which reinforces the cause of the problem. That’s why they have to remind themselves to stand up straight. They are intervening where the symptoms show up and not in the cause that is lower down in the hips, legs and feet. Hip angle is the foundation that aligns the spine from below. The right hip angle allows the vertebrae to stack with less effort by muscles to put bones in place. With the wrong hip angle muscles have to work harder and create tension and vertebrae may pinch nerves on one side to create pain.
Major causes of hip misalignment include sitting on chairs and toilets, shoes, and falling on your tailbone as a child that you may not even remember.
Chairs and toilets impose a 90 degree hip angle that shortens through habit a funny pair of muscles called the psoas and illiacus that both attach to upper thigh bone or femur and then branch out to the lower back and hip bones respectively. These are called “the core of the core” abdominal and hip muscles. When you are standing these muscles can raise your knees. These muscles are responsible for aligning the hips continually as well. Proper alignment depends on these muscles being loose enough to let your hips fall back or have anterior tilt at the top, allowing you to tuck your private parts under for protection, so to speak, and stick your booty out.
Normal or ancestral primal movement includes sitting on the floor cross-legged and the primal squat with your knees up to your shoulders. These both stretch hip muscles to align the hips and allow the hips and sacrum to swing freely when walking. Tight hips and sacrum lead to the shoulders swaying like a cowboy. This may look macho and tough and take up space but these people are easier to knock over. It can take time to regain range of motion to do the primal squat or even sitting cross legged.
Normal primal movement is also standing and walking with hips back with an "anterior tilt" or top of the hip leaning forward.
5 Steps to Aligning the Hips
Release tension in passive positions. To release the illiopsoas complex involves lying down in the right positions with various techniques to put these muscles in neutral so they can rest and let go. I teach this in my Align Spine & Mind program. You can feel this up into your neck as the chain reaction of muscle tension releases. By relaxing the neck you also help the cranium expand as neck muscles attach to the temporal and occipital bones. People doing cranial and orthodontic work would do well to release hips to support expansion of cranial bones, which may be a secondary but significant obstacle to progress. Causation works both ways from top down and bottom up. The hips are that important.
By releasing the psoas the relaxing effect is stronger than you can imagine and it is easy to fall asleep or just feel blissed. Many people have emotional release from this for some reason that no one understands fully; muscle tension holds in emotions, and emotions can create muscle tension. You can start at either place and intervening from both directions is more thorough.
After releasing the psoas the hips will be pushed back and you can walk more smoothly.
Stretch muscles. Stretching before releasing can run into resistance that tears at muscle. If you are really sensitive you can just release and leave it at that. The muscles individuals need to stretch can vary but generally the posterior chain or muscles on the back side of the body: glutes, adductors, hamstrings, and erectors or lower back, will be underdeveloped and tight. It feels amazing to stretch these and get the hips further back.
Walk and stand properly. Normal muscle use will be different and can make you sore. It feels like you are massaging your whole body and spine when walking properly. You feel sexier with proper hip movement. People have no clue what they are missing. Joy in living can be found in these simple things, aligning with nature’s design.
Strengthen muscles with exercises, but this is not always necessary. There are many ways to do this. Yoga asana routines can help movement in a balanced way, but can also hurt if you skip the fundamentals because yoga was not designed to address modern causes of misalignment.
Proper shoes. Shoes with heels higher than toes misalign hips. Barefoot is great when practical. You need shoes with zero drop from heel to toe, as if barefoot in some ways. I recommend Altra, see my page Shoes here.
There are several foot angles that matter, but let’s stay focused on the hips for the moment.
This is what a proper solution looks like that addresses root causes as related to hips.
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Free Assessment
See how I support you fully:
Health Coaching Steps
I work over video: Facebook, Zoom, Google, from Michigan, USA
Hess.PaulC@gmail.com
Join me on Facebook where I blog post. FACEBOOK
