Postural Restoration: Anterior Pelvic Tilt and its Popular Compensations
Dennis Clifford
📜 | @bcmbb @albaberlin @nbagleague All Star 🏀 | Hoop PAIN FREE 🦿| Unlimited Legs through CLEAN Movement👇
Look at you.
All messed up. Chasing weight room numbers while ignoring your body. Progress is slow, and you’re walking around in pain all day. On top of all that, you have to spend 45 minutes to warm up just to do the exercises that are causing the dysfunction in the first place.
Look at you!
Why would you want to get stronger in ‘this’ position?
Now Look at Ya.
You rehab.
You do your exercises.
You do your mobility.
You ice when it hurts.
You isolate the shoulders and other areas that are causing problems.
You give up after about a month because you don’t see any progress.
Then you see a new exercise from ‘the gurus’ on Instagram.
Rinse and Repeat.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein
You can rehab rounded shoulders and forward all day with isolated rehab exercises, and your body will return to this position. We must understand that this position is not a local problem, it is a systemic problem.
Rounded shoulders and forward head is your body’s solution to other, more important problems. That’s why months of shoulder rehab and neck exercises haven’t worked for you.
If we find the root cause and fix those, the body won't need to compensate with rounded shoulders and forward head.
As you can see, there are muscles in the body that are short and tight (red), and other areas that are long and weak (green). It’s easy to look at this image and assume that we can just stretch the red areas and all will be well. Wrong. You’ve tried that. And by now, we should know that there won’t ever be a ‘magical’ stretch OR exercise that will fix the tightness in the red areas.
But why, DCLIFF??
The red areas are tight because of the green areas. The green areas are weak because of the red areas. This is a system of problems that must be rehabbed as a system.
Basically, do both - loosen up the red areas by activating the green areas. Simple, but difficult.
The DCLIFF Process
First, connect the exercise to your breath.
For multiple reasons:
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Phase 1: Release and relieve your body of ‘tension’. We cannot add muscle or correct your posture if your body has traffic jams all over. So, using the lacrosse ball and other myofascial release techniques, we will use these 2 weeks to get your body feeling ‘fluid’ again.
It is very important that you CHILL and let these adaptations take place!
Do not rush the process, take your time, even when it feels like you’re not working ‘hard’.
Do not go crazy in the weight room (yet), this is a proven system that requires you to start slowly.
If you are ‘starving’ for a workout. GO WALK MORE (as long as it does not cause pain or tension in the body)
Phase 1 is getting your body and mind to feel good and relax - only then can we solve the issues!
Phase 2: Replace Tension.
When you calm the nervous system and loosen up some of the fascia, you must replace that tension and put it in the correct places! If we don’t, our body will compensate the way it always does, and we will return to square 1 as soon as we start moving and/or training.
Let’s recalibrate your posture to ensure good regenerative mechanics!
We’ll continue building your foundation - diaphragm and deep core muscles.
Next thing to address is pelvic tilts and lateral shifts, which is likely happening in all of us. Hip shifts likely go hand in hand with offset shoulders, and compensations that lead to pain all over the body.
We will start progressively overloading our entire body, prepping it for functional movement and athleticism!
Healthy breathing mechanics and posture create an environment for REgeneration. Bad breathing mechanics and posture create an environment for DEgeneration.
As long as we are regenerating, we can live a healthy, resilient life with optimal performance!
Phase 3: By now we should be at 80-90% capacity (while still feeling better than we have felt in a while!!).
We use this last phase to increase the power, explosiveness, and cardio capacity that you will need to fully return to playing at your highest level. We want to increase these things WHILE STAYING HEALTHY, STRONG AND RESILIENT.
Our goal here is to get faster, stronger and more powerful while we keep the principles that we have learned throughout the program.
As you can see, there are aspects of every training program - massage techniques, warmup techniques, workouts, tissue strengthening, movement, etc... What people, trainers and athletes, have failed to do (in my humble experience), is look at the big picture and create a system that progressively takes you from chronic pain to ‘court-ready’ in as little time as possible, without skipping the vital steps.
DCLIFF, Who Made You The Expert? Cmon.
I tried all the other stuff:
Guess what? No changes. No improvements, just tons of time and energy wasted. Pain was still at an 8/10 consistently. A nail being hammered into my kneecap at every step, squat, or change of direction.
The one good thing is that I found out a whole lot about what doesn’t work. And sometimes that is just as valuable.
My life changed when I started to understand the body as a whole. And since then, my pain has subsided. For good.
And like I tell my clients, that journey has made my life that much more beautiful, now that I’m on the other side. My only wish is to help people do the same. To help people feel the same as I do now.
Pain-Free Athleticism.
Thank you for reading, and feel free to reach out to me whenever!
Also, big announcement! (Yuge). I’m giving the first two weeks of the 1 on 1 coaching program away to anyone who clicks (this link!) FREE.
If you're tired of the normal rehab hamster wheel, give these two weeks an honest try and see how you feel.
Athletic Administrator & Lover of All People
10moGreat read Dennis! Thank you for sharing 🙏🏻