Pelvic floor muscles can be hard to feel when you are exercising or moving through daily life. "Engage the pelvic floor" or "Activate the pelvic floor muscles" are common instructions in Pilates as well as in Internal martial arts, but many students are unsure about how to get that to happen.
My favorite image for getting the pelvic floor muscles in on an exercise is to think of bringing the sit bones together and up. The sit bones are the bony parts that you feel under you when you sit up straight on a firm surface. This is what is erroneously described as squeezing your anus. Correct description is lifting your perineum. What you need to do is engage the pelvic floor muscles. This will lift your anus not squeeze it but the effect will be that your butt cheeks will be squeezed together effectively squeezing your anus. Your pelvis will also be rotated forward and upward. This will also lift and pull in your genitals. You know the iron balls trick, where one guy sits in a narrow horse stands, and someone kicks him between his legs with a lifting kick, with no effect. You do it by lifting the pelvic floor. This rotates and lifts the butt muscles, and moves your genitals out of the way.
Another good image for pelvic floor muscles is to think of drawing a fountain of energy up from the base of the pelvic bowl -- up through the middle of the body, and out the top of the head. This image helps connect the in and up action of the pelvic floor muscles with the other core muscles, and an increases awareness of the central channel and dan-tians.
Here a Bagua teacher talks about this from the Internal martial arts point of view:
Importance of Down
No comments:
Post a Comment