Many exercises can help you improve your core. One of the most simple yet effective ones is the pelvic tilt exercise. This movement helps strengthen and balance your abdominal muscles, which will increase your stability, strength, and mobility.
Pelvic tilt exercise comprises gentle movements of the spine, which strengthen the body core. In addition, it helps to improve stability around the lower back and the abdominal muscles. Also, pelvic tilt exercise is excellent for those who want to get rid of back pain. This is possible as the exercise helps to give a back massage.
Pelvic Tilt Exercise- Steps to Perform
You can perform the pelvic tilt exercise with these simple steps:
- You need to first lie on a flat surface with bending knees. Your feet should be flat on the ground. Now, extend both the arms along your torso, and your palms should be down. The backside of your head needs to be touching the ground. Also, you need to make sure that your neck is in alignment with your body’s spine. Enable yourself to get a natural curve for your back. Furthermore, you need to leave the space between the ground and the lower back. Finally, slide your hand into the area.
- Now engage your ab muscles as you exhale. Also, allow the action to tilt your tailbone to the upward position. Finally, close your space between your ground and lower back. Resultantly, you will feel a brief stretch of your lower back.
- Now inhale a bit and enable your pelvis and spine to get back to the initial position.
- You need to do 5 to 10 reps of the pelvic tilt exercise.
Muscles It Works
As the name shows, the pelvic tilt exercise mainly targets the muscles of the pelvis. You get a stronger pelvic core from it. As a result, you get better urinary bladder control and support. This is especially helpful for aging people who find it hard to have smoother bladder control. This also helps with urinary incontinence. Also, scientific evidence explains that the pelvic tilt exercise also helps with two abdominal muscles as well. One muscle is the multifidus muscle that extends and rotating the spine. Also, the other muscle of the abdomen is the deep muscle transverse abdominis. It provides stability as it wraps around your spine.
Physical Skill It Improves
The body core comprises different muscles, making the sides of the torso, back, front. With a stronger core, you get better support for your body. It helps to prevent any instability and postural imbalances which may contribute to different body injuries and pain. When the body’s core muscles get weak, the overall alignment of the posture gets weak. This results in a lack of sufficient support.
When you do pelvic tilt exercise routinely, you improve your overall body health. Ultimately, including this in your routine improves your stability and balance. This is especially important for doing different exercises, such as performing swimming or rope skipping. Also, it helps you to train for strenuous exercises, which come with more challenges. These are all the skills that get better as you include pelvic tilt exercise in your daily routine.
Incorrect Ways to Perform
There are incorrect ways to perform pelvic tilt exercises. These include:
It might be possible that you are holding your breath as you perform this exercise. If you do this, it results in an unsatisfactory gain of stability. In addition, you don’t allow your abdominal muscles to work if you hold your breath fully.
It is also possible that you are sticking out your belly as you perform this exercise. Therefore, it will not tighten your ab muscles, which will eventually do you no good. Consequently, it is essential to take care of this aspect if you want to attain the full benefits of this exercise.
Also, you may lift the hips from the ground in a bridge position.
This is a wrong way of doing this exercise as it can lead you to have incomplete benefits. Instead, be sure to keep your body muscles in the correct form as you perform the exercise. For example, you need to take care of your hip muscles to do the pelvic tilt exercise correctly.
Also, consider rolling the pelvic region in the right direction. Many people accidentally roll their pelvis in the wrong position that disturbs their movement. It might even lead to injuries if you don’t take enough care of your body in that aspect.
You can apply some techniques to avoid these mistakes. First, you need to feel the correct muscles under contraction as you perform the pelvic tilt exercise. Exhale your breath slowly. Do it as if you are blowing a candle.
Then, you need to be blowing the air when you run out of air. This is the point where you will feel the tightening of your transverse abdominis muscle. This body muscle comes as the deep ab muscle in your body, which plays a role in bracing the spine when you are moving.
Variations of Exercise
1. Kneeling Pelvic Tilt Exercise
You need to perform this on a comfortable surface.
- Take a breath and exhale with your abdominal muscles. Then, round your back and press it into your arms.
- Slowly exhale and go back to the starting position
- Repeat for 5 to 10 times
2. Sitting Pelvic Tilt Exercise
Use an exercise ball for this exercise. Get a ball big enough that you can use to sit on.
- Sit on the exercise ball and set your hips slightly above your knees
- Inhale the air and make your feet go shoulder-width apart. Try engaging your core to keep your balance steady.
- Exhale out and tuck the tailbone. Roll forward on your exercise ball.
- Deeply Inhale as you press the tailbone away, bringing it to a neutral position.
Final Words
These are the basics you need to know about an essential pelvic tilt exercise. It is also important to remember the correct form of your body to gain maximum benefits from pelvic tilt exercise.
The pelvic tilt exercise is a great way to strengthen your core and lower back. It also helps with urinary incontinence, which can be especially helpful for aging people who find it challenging to have smoother bladder control. In addition, scientific evidence has shown that the pelvic tilt exercise strengthens two abdominal muscles- the multifidus muscle responsible for extending and rotating the spine and the other abdominals (transverse abdominis) accountable for stabilizing the abdomen during movement. Have you tried this? If so, then let us know how effective it was in strengthening your core!
