Body angles -- I am confused

That's right, HumbledLady.

If you are sitting up straight and not hunched over, your lumbar curve is in place, providing the structure around and through which intraabdominal pressures are applied. This pins the organs down and forward against the lower belly.

When you sit back and widen that angle, intraabdominal pressure can no longer grab hold of the organs. Instead of being pinned into position, they begin to be blown backward and out of the body. This is self-evident to every woman. If you really exaggerate your lumbar curve and bear down, your organs do not move to the vaginal opening. Sit back and do the same thing and they maximally descend.

Hi HumbledLady

I wish it were as simple as how high your knees are. Remember that the pelvis and hips are a strange machine. We can flex and straighten our spine /sacrum joints, which are in the centre, but we can also flex and straighten our hip joints (one at each side). Sitting WW posture is almost the same as standing WW posture, except that the hip joints are flexed. The tilt of the pelvis relative to the spine is the same in both positions. In both cases the pelvic organs are pressed forwards. As long as your lumbar curve has something behind it you can bring your knees up quite high, and drop them down to almost straight, but it is more difficult to do this if not standing, because you tend to overbalance and pull your torso either back or forwards to balance the lower body. This is where the shape of the spine tends to change and intraabdominal forces head in different directions

Allowing your pelvis to tilt back and straighten the lumbar curve causes the changes in the direction of intraabdominal forces and sends the organs back and down, not the angle of thighs to torso. It is all about the angle that the curved, upright spine makes with the pelvic bones, and keeping the pelvis vertical. Actions from the hip joints down are almost irrelevant.

Louise

As a raw beginner to this website I am a bit "lost" and wondered if some clever person could do stick drawings of the best sitting positions etc. Sorry, but I hope this comment helps others like me who know very little about the body beautiful.

Hi Angela

Sitting is no different from standing, except that the thighss are at right angles to how they are in standing. I would try and use horizontal seating, rather than seats that slope backwards. If you have an otherwise satisfactory seat that you use regularly, a standard foam wedge can even up the seat for you. this is what I have done with my car seat.

I have also taken a saw to the front legs of a set of plastic stacking chairs that we use outdoors at lot, making them 1 inch shorter at the front. This has made them slightly lower at the front, made the seat horizontal, and made the backs more vertical.

The aim of the exercise is to have your thighs horizontal or slightly sloping downwards. This seems to make it easier to take some weight on your feet, and maintain the lumbar curve because your pelvis doesn't slouch backwards on the backwards slope of the seat. I would also put your feet about shoulder width apart, which gives you a wide, stable triangular base. I try not to rest my back against the back of a chair because my pelvis tends to collapse backwards if there isn't a gap between the base and the back, to accommodate my womanly butt and hips.

I am not really overweight (well, not much, anyway), but I have come to the conclusion that most seats are designed for some mythical male with no butt or hips, who wears high heels all the time, or spineless amoebae who need to sit in a bowl like a lump of jelly. All we can do is use whatever seating we have available in ways that are body friendly.

Louise

ok, I will come clean...the acute/obtuse angle thing still has me confused too.
that said, I have a good sense of it in my body so I dont worry about it. here's how I sit....never do I have my knees higher than my hips. I usually slide to the edge of the chair, tuck my feet under and rest them on the lower crossbar of the chair (under the seat between the legs) if there is one. if not, I have my toes on the floor (I know, they *should* be flat, but this works for me). and the key is that my weight is kinda on my thighs, or the 'front' part of my bottom if that makes any sense. I can slip my hand easily under my bottom from behind. this allows my pelvis to tip forward, and my back to pull up into posture with my chest forward and my shoulders relaxed and down.
in my mind, this is actually forming an obtuse angle but like I said, it feels right, it works so I'm going to gently step away from the geometry.

Hi Granolamom, what you have described is exactly how i sit... my way of thinking is that this is not an obtuse angle. If you are sitting with your back straight up at a 90 deg angle and not leaning back,it is a right angle posture. I always know when i have it right as it is confirmed with the disappearance of symptoms.

this is a really helpful topic. After watching the DVD, I had mistakenly been thinking that my legs always had to be at a 90 degree angle with my torso *or less*. So I thought it was okay to lean forward.
I will keep reading this topic as people add to it :)
I've injured my knee recently so cannot kneel or sit crosslegged anymore until it heals.

This had been quite a long thread. I hope everyone has picked up that it is not the angle between the thighs and the torso that is most important. It is that the position of the pelvis, the link between the thighs and the spine, which is the critical structure. It is important that the pubic symphysis is at the bottom and the wings of the pelvis face forwards. This makes the pubo-ischial ramus (the rails) horizontal and lifts the coccyx off the seat. You are sitting on your thighs, pubic symphysis and sit bones. This means that the spine comes out of the 'top' of the pelvis almost horizontal and the underside of the sacrum is a convex dome, or at worst horizontal. The pelvic diaphragm is almost vertical, so it hangs kind of like a curtain across/down the pelvic brim, rather than a concave hammock which is pressed downwards and into the pelvic cavity, squashing the pelvic organs back and down.

The 90 degree thing is thus. If you look in the mirror at your seated body your lower back should be upright (90 degrees) or slightly forward (80-85 degrees). If it is greater than 90 degrees then your pelvis is tilted back and the spine is coming off the sacrum too vertical, and you can slouch easily. If you cannot slouch easily you are fine. A relaxed belly makes this much easier and is essential to give the pelvic organs room to move forwards. Once the belly moves forwards they take the lumbar spine with it and literally tips the pelvis forwards, like a cheap laundry bucket with a full bottle of soft drink resting against one side. If the angle is less than 90 degrees you can move the upper spine backwards to balance it ('broad upper back').

It is a relaxed posture. NB the visual line of the skin covering the lower spine is not parallel with the line of the supportive part of the spine. There is a lot of connective tissue, ligaments and tendons in this area, which makes it very tough and thick. You will not be able to feel the spinal processes of the lowest few vertebrae because they are buried too deeply and this covering is too thick. If the visual angle is 90 degrees you can rest assured that your lumbar spine will be forward of 90 degrees.

Likewise, if you are sitting on/in a chair with a back that slopes backwards, eg the average comfy, bowl- like chair, for long periods, and have to crane your neck forwards, it is almost impossible to keep the 90 degree angle. You will need a pillow behind your lumbar spine. You will still need to crane your neck forwards.;-)

RIDER: If you are very overweight or if you have a lot of fat on your butt and thighs it is difficult to tell this angle, but you can still tell which parts of your skeleton are in contact with a hard seat. These are guidelines not mathematical formulae.

Louise