Relax Your Butt

All movement has an energetic pattern. Muscles are designed to move and work in specific ways, with each muscle having a directional flow that helps to guide us into proper alignment and allows for healthy movement. Unfortunately the opposite it true as well. Muscles that move in the wrong direction interrupt our ability to find proper form and mechanics.

In standing, our bones should bear a majority of the load with certain muscles helping to bring us into our bones so to speak. The bones hold us up and the muscles move us. The problem with most posture is that we get in the habit of using certain muscles to hold us up which tends to make those muscles very tight and often full of tension. Often when one muscle becomes dominant another muscle tends to become somewhat weaker or more lax. Specifically to what we are discussing here the buttocks muscle, which should be completely relaxed when standing up, tends to be engaged constantly and our pelvic floor, the foundation for all of our organs, tends to weaken.

The pelvis is in the middle of the body providing a center from which the legs move down and the spine moves up. The muscles of the legs and the trunk are designed to balance and enhance this separation.

Energetically, the buttock muscles should move down and the pelvic floor muscles should move up. Many people get this backwards; at least the butt part. Very often, due to poor abdominal tone our thighs move forward which forces our buttocks to engage to stop us from sinking too far forward. As a result our pelvic floor muscles tend to go get lax while the big gluteal muscle, gluteus maximus works overtime against its own best interest causing dysfunction in many muscles around it.

This big buttock muscle is what brought us to standing from all fours. If you imagine a four-legged animal, a dog or a cat for example, they have no butt because they don't have need of one. The gluteus maximus is an extensor muscle that, along with the hamstrings and others pulled the pelvis from horizontal to vertical. The energy of this extension is a downward pull into the legs and heels as the pelvis and spine is drawn upright. If you sink your thighs forward and feel what kind of tone that brings to the butt, you will likely feel it as an upward gripping action.

The muscles at the base of the pelvis also serve a different function in the quadruped than in the biped.. These muscles form a wall at the back of the body rather than a floor at the base of the spine. Upright posture is a radical and unprecedented shift. The pelvic floor muscles are called the levator ani, a group of three muscles that form a sling connecting all of the bony landmarks at the base of the pelvis; the tailbone, pubis and the two sit bones (ischial tuberosities). This sling or hammock supports the weight of the organs, helps to control urogenital functioning, and when properly toned helps to bring intrinsic support and stability to the base of the pelvis as the spine falls into the hips.

These imbalances, overworked butt and under worked pelvic floor, are at the heart of so much postural misalignment. We must learn to let go of our butts. If we can learn to retrain some of the conditioned patterns that have taken such a strong hold in the body, many physical, physiological and even psychological bonds can be loosened. Allowing the energy of the body to flow as it was designed is an easy way to bring big changes to your body and mind.