Hi, welcome to Balanced Body Podcast.
My name is Ada Wells.
I'm a physical therapist and owner of ProBalance Physical Therapy in Pilates in Alameda, California.
Joining me today is Roxanna Cohen, and she's going to be our model today.
And what we're going to talk about in this segment is pelvic motor control and its relationship
to golf.
So pelvic control is important because you need to have a good sense of where your neutral
spine is to be able to stabilize the spine and what we call its neutral spine and around
the primary spine angle.
So when that golfer is going into their swing, if they start coming out of their swing, they've
lost their angle, and it's going to be very difficult for them to stay on their swing
path.
So therefore, this is a great thing that we can work on as Pilates instructors.
So I'll show you a quick test for it, and I'm going to have Roxanna stand, let's stand
sideways here.
Go ahead and cross your arms across your chest, and you're going to assume what I call a
five-iron position, so you're a dress position for golf.
And from here, I'm going to have you first arch your low back and flatten your low back.
And what we're watching for is we're just assessing the mobility that she has in the
pelvis, and also how smooth she's able to move.
You'll find that if some people will end up, let's pretend that you don't do this
really well.
You might see them substitute too much with a thoracic spine coming through.
You might also see them straightening out their legs to try to get the motion.
So we're basically assessing quality and quantity.
So let's pretend she didn't have a good ability to control that pelvis, and I'll show you
a great exercise, a couple great exercises you can do.
So let's go ahead and lie down on your back.
And I love using these little green mobilization balls.
They're a fabulous way to bring awareness to the area.
So I'm going to have you, Roxanna, you're going to place these two balls on either side
of your sacrum so that it basically gives you a little fulcrum to rotate around.
And from here, what you're going to do is I'm going to have you take a breath in, and
as you exhale, go ahead and rotate your pelvis towards your head, and inhale as you bring
the pelvis towards your feet.
And we're just doing a basic pelvic tilt, but being able to have the feedback of the
balls underneath you really helps you get the feeling of what should occur.
Now this time I'm going to have you, let's relax a minute, now this time when you do
that pelvic tilt towards your head, I want you to keep your glutes off, and I want you
to feel your internal muscles kicking in so that we can get our pelvic floor to kick
in.
So exhale, there you go, inhale back to the feet, and exhale, try to use the internalist
muscles you can find, there you go, and inhale back to center, good, and then we'll just
relax there.
So what I try to do on the second version was to have her really not go in, because
sometimes you'll have those people that are the butt grippers and they will be really
going in through their glutes a little bit too hard, and I wanted her to feel the subtlety
of the pelvic floor and those internal and the transversus in that connection, and a lot
of times if you just can have them tilt that pelvis with their breath, they'll feel that.
Let's go ahead and remove those balls for me, and let's go ahead and have you come
up to sitting, and we're going to now do another exercise, I'm going to just place
these right here, to be able to work a little bit on reinforcing that pelvic tilt.
So we're going to now do a short box series, and it's more of a short box prep that we're
going to do to help with this, and I'm going to have you go ahead and sit on the edge here.
Now usually with short box, you may do this with the springs fully loaded.
We like to use a light spring, so I have one red spring on here, and what we're going
to start out with is just go ahead and cross your arms across your body here, and we're
going to try to maintain your same height.
I'm going to have you slide that tailbone, go ahead and straighten your legs, thank you,
and slide that tailbone underneath you, good, and then let it come back up to neutral.
So we're trying to have that pelvis do that tilt, but with her maintaining her height.
Now this is going to be important when we start that roll down, good, one more time.
Now this time go ahead and now let's go ahead and continue on with our roll down, peeling
down, inhale at the bottom, exhale, curling up, coming forward and stacking up nice and
tall.
One more time, we're going to initiate with that pelvis coming down, rotating back, exhale,
curling forward, good, and inhale nice and tall.
Let's do a rotation, so I want to have you rotate towards me, and you're going to start
with that, sliding that pelvis down, rolling back, good, exhale, come forward like you're
going to listen to your knee, and then come up nice and tall.
Let's rotate the opposite direction, inhale and then exhale, roll down, good, and exhale,
peel up, listen to that knee, and then stack yourself up nice and tall.
So that's just a nice, those are two nice preparatory exercises to work on that pelvic
control, and to get them on their way to having a neutral spine.
