Here’s a fun fact: it turns out fixing years of terrible posture is complicated.

I told you a month ago about my big posture realization and my resolution to fix it. After a lot of research and trial and error, I’m realizing that it’s not enough to say I have bad posture, because there are a lot of ways one can have bad posture. So rather than throw everything at you all at once, I’m splitting this subject up into several posts, each on a different problem that I’m researching. Today’s topic is:

Anterior Pelvic Tilt

The Problem:

At the top and front of your hips are two bony protrusions that signal the edge or your hip bones (the iliac crest). Below them and in the center is your pubic bone. If the way you’re sitting right now these three bones form a triangle that’s perpendicular to the floor, congratulations. Your pelvis is just fine. If your triangle is tilted with the iliac crests further forward than the pubic bone, then you’re in Anterior Pelvic Tilt.

The Cause:

Muscles can become tight and short by being kept in a shortened position too often. So if the muscles on the front of the hips are shortened, they are inclined to constantly pull your thighs and belly closer together to keep themselves shortened. This is most commonly caused by sitting too much.

In addition to shortening muscles, sitting all day can force some muscles to start slacking while other muscles are overworked. If your abs and glutes aren’t doing their fair share, the back muscles might try to compensate by working too hard in ways they weren’t designed for. You end up tight and stretched and weak and tense in all the wrong places, and the more you reenforce the position with sitting the more your body fights to stay in it. After a while your pelvis tilts every time you sit, then when you stand, then when you walk, and eventually the tilt is there all the time.

The Treatment:

To fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt you have to retrain the muscles through both strengthening and stretching exercises. The primary muscles to stretch are the psoas (which runs along the front of the hip) and the quads (the front of the thighs). Just reading about Anterior Pelvic Tilt makes my hips feel like they’re encased in cement, so I’ve decided to stretch all the muscles in the hip area. My favorite video for this is from The Yoga Solution with Tara Styles. It’s only five postures so you can do it really fast, but you can linger in them for a long time if you want to get a deeper stretch.

The next step will be to strengthen my glutes and abs, two muscles that should be doing more work than they are currently. I haven’t set up a routine yet, but unsurprisingly there are a million suggestions online for how to tone your butt and give you great abs. I’ll probably start with the basics like lunges, leg lifts, and crunches, and maybe move on to others as the routine gets boring.

After the first post a lot of people told me they also struggle with good posture. So, do any of you think you might have Anterior Pelvic Tilt? Is your tilt bad enough to join me for several weeks of bicycle crunches?