Beginning posture mods

Hi Time4Tea and welcome,
I was having a time of it also when first starting posture, but I found that I was also exaggerating or tipping my hips forward causing that lower back pain. I learned to relax into it more by just keeping in mind relax belly and pull up strongly in the chest. It does take time to get all these posture principles down, so don't be too hard on yourself.
I also had a bad hip going into this; it was the sacral illiac joint that kept going out, to be more specific, but with this work and getting my body back to it's natural form made that go away!
The whole woman posture has so many side benefits that I hadn't even considered when I found my prolapse.
Give yourself quality rest too, don't just continue to force it if you are having pain. It will come with practice.
I did the daily exercises that Christine has in her many videos, and also whole woman walking to help strengthen those stubborn muscles in the right direction.
Just keep up the good work, and if you continue having hip pain, you may want to look into Christine's hips series. Our Aussie Soul Sister swears by it, but she can tell you all about her experiences. It's a pretty awesome account.
Best wishes to you!

Hi Time4Tea,

Welcome and thanks so much for joining us. Yes, women complain all the time about the discomfort, until they strengthen in the posture and see their symptoms start to change.

I would start to gently work on the “tight hips” as well. In my experience, loss of external rotation is a major factor in chronic hip disease, which is rampant in the older female population. I had two older clients recently who were the same age with similar body types and similar prolapse symptoms. I thought it interesting that the one who has remained sexually active (which causes us to externally rotate our hips in the missionary position) has no hip pain, while the one who basically never externally rotates her hips has severe hip pain and rotational constriction. Sitting crosslegged in WW posture is good medicine for the hips, but the knees have to be close to the floor in order that the lumbar spine and pelvic organs can move forward. Sitting up on a cushion will help a lot.

Try this exercise and see if it helps relieve the discomfort:

Walk across a room (or outside is even better) forefoot first, pulled up strongly in WW posture, while making broad, wing-like (slowly “flapping your wings”) motions with your arms - all the while keeping your shoulders down, etc etc. This has a remarkable ability to take pressure off the lower back and instead distribute it evenly throughout the spine and pelvis.

The WW work (or really I should say the body!) is miraculous, but there is no mystery to all this. It’s just how the body actually works.

:-) Christine

Hi Time4tea,
It doesn't matter what position you sleep in, because its when we are up and about that the intra-abdominal pressure comes into play. But, you shouldn't sleep with your upper body propped up on a ton of pillows, as this will put downward pressure on your pelvic organs.
Be sure to read Christine's post above if you missed it. She always has the best advice!

Hi Time4Tea,
Love your name - having a cup as I write this!
When I first adopted the posture, I had IMMEDIATE relief from the crunching painful hip concussion I had started to have, and also knee pain on climbing stairs...

All my pelvic organs had been suddenly worsening so that I felt like I had a blown up rubber glove sitting in my vulva area. I had been managing rectocele, and painless hip instability, (except for at night when I couldn't sleep on my side at all... ) for more than 17 years....

I didn't connect the hip issues with WW Posture at first and commented about a possible connection here a few weeks later. I still had the instability. I also had the hip snapping illio psoas tendon which used to move across the front of my right hip as it was sitting tightly on the surface - I could feel it sometimes doing that and now know that if it becomes tight enough it can become in-bedded into the underneath muscle...
I tried doing the first aid exercises and couldn't do them easily at all. So I stuck with the posture for about eighteen months by which time Christine had brought out "Save Your Hips" ...
I did that DVD for a few months almost daily and could hardly do some of the exercises either, I was so stiff, my arms and legs were stiff and muscles shortened, and tight, however I persevered... and my body told me when it was ready for more!

I can now do the foot exercises without holding on to anything, with the baton in full human extension above my head... I can do the other DVDs and am learning Scottish Country Dancing which Christine does - it supports the posture and hip turn out and ballet style steps for the foot arch...

WWPosture and the hips program evened out both sides of my body as I used to sit on my right buttock often and stand putting all my weight on that leg as well ( the weird things we do without even realizing). Inner ear balance issue is 99% better. My back and torso and neck are much stronger, great for looking around while walking or driving!
I can also stand at functions without back fatigue and discomfort - one of the first things I was able to do straight after adopting the posture. Another immediate result was greatly strengthened thigh muscles which helped with WW toileting which now I can do in a semi - squat...

My shape had been a C with tucked bottom and pulled in abdominals and also the rounded shoulders. I try the C shaped posture sometimes and it feels so weird now. I now have an even slight curve on both sides of my waist - it was once pointed out that one hip was higher than the other and one side of my waist was straight - ( by my pattern making teacher when I was in my early 20s - just remember that now as I write this)
I also have a much tighter tummy button and can barely fit my pinky finger into it!
Many big victories and so many tiny but significant ones and others that I started to dare hope for like the inner ear balance which Happened!

And yes I did have some discomfort learning how to sit unaided as I had had the opposite posture for so long - I used to roll up jackets or anything I could when sitting and it can be quite tiring and uncomfortable at first. Eventually and with the help of the wonderful Save Your hips chair exercises like the torso twist..I can sit in a chair without support and love bench seats that I used to avoid like the plague!
Almost six years into WW the posture is there, and it is able to be relaxed into. It is energy saving as there is almost no effort or conscious muscle tension compared to my old posture.

I hope you get some relief from your issues - we all have our own individual issues and I hope I have addressed some of the benefits that most individuals can hope for and so much more...I am so grateful for Christine's work and for sharing it with people across the world...

Wishing you all the best,

Aussie Soul Sister

Hi Time4Tea,

The posture will become effortless over time. The pelvis is already rotated all the way forward, so there really is no concern there. Even the most nimble contortionist could not stand with her pelvis in the bowl position. However, we do have a choice between standing and moving with our pubic bones directly underneath us (WW posture), or moved slightly forward and tilted slightly (less than 45º) up. The main thing to pay attention to is not trying to create lumbar curvature by sticking your bum out the back.

Try this:

Place the palm of your hand over your navel area. Now let your belly completely flop out. Keep your hand there and *do not* pull your belly in, but rather strongly lift your chest. This is the natural configuration of the abdominal wall.

If you are like the rest of modern women, your lower belly is more protruded than your midriff (below breasts and above navel). With this work we pull up (never in!) so that the midriff is the leading edge of the abdominal wall. Over time you will see that your lower belly remains gently curved but is much flatter than when you started. To have a flat belly in the conventional sense of “6-pack abs” takes a tremendous amount of work that is actually damaging to the pelvic organ and hip joint support systems. While simply learning to pull the belly up instead of in throughout the day creates a beautiful natural curvature that fits the Golden Proportion.

As far as bending, we move through obtuse angles (torso-to-legs is greater than 90º) all the time. The point is to not stay there, such as bending over slightly to vacuum, etc. Enjoy bending low by hinging at the hips, keeping your knees straight, and keeping one long line from crown of head to tailbone. Really, we try to keep the body in WW posture even when bending, etc., simply because it feels good. This is how the body prefers to be aligned.

Congrats on starting the WW work! It is truly life-changing. I’m set up on the floor for my work today as well. Enjoy!

Christine

wow - i think I need to get the hip materials next....
I also have a snapping hip. It's been like that since my early 20s? I discovered it doing aerobics and sit ups - anytime I lift my leg (straight forward only) there's a click and I feel a pop. I looked into it over the years and never found anything of note. Since it's been painless (so far) I've kind of forgotten about it.
While pregnant though, both times, I had sharp 'pain in the butt' pain when I sat on any hard surface, especially when sat back semi reclined on a hard surface (i would sit on the floor and lean back against the couch). It even hurt to lie on a hard floor - when I relaxed everything into the floor the tailbone pain was very sharp. In bed it didn't hurt, only on a hard surface. I remember telling my husband it hurts deep inside where my back meets my hip (how's that for anatomical lol). I attributed it to the aches and pains of pregnancy. The pain subsided after giving birth.
Both the pain and the clicking are(were) on the left side.
oh, and i often get lower left rib pain, from sitting... prob won't be getting it since adopting the posture though.
no real question here - just musing :)

but as a slight aside - would the saving your hips materials work for men too? my brother in law has had chronic hip problems and has had a couple of surgeries/procedures - none of which have worked (surprise surprise). I'm wondering if I should have him try this...

Hi Typicalme,
I first noticed hip instability started after I had had my children and I would have issues while walking to and from their school.
The kind of hip snapping for me was the tendon which wraps from the side of the hip to the groin. I found it would move across the front of the right hip sometimes when I walked and my understanding is that it can snap across quite quickly....

I also used to turn and find no support in my right hip like the joint wasn't there. There were other times when walking when I would find that my right hip seemed to be caught somehow making me hobble - this could have been the illio psoas tendon being a bit tight.

Other times yes I have felt a clicking sound when doing some exercises and initially the hip exercises my hip would click and I think my knees did as well. The only time I ever popped a hip - my left one was by doing a full hip bend to the floor and that was because my body was so tight that there wasn't enough length in my contracted tight muscles and fascia to accommodate that move.

I don't get any of that anymore except sometimes the right hip catch happens, and I fix it by lifting up my knee and circling my knee across the front of my body and up and around and out to the side so that my bent knee and my leg is at a right angle to the hip and this fixes it and on I go ( sometimes in public but I don't care :)

I did go and get hip Xrays decades ago when I had the turning with no hip support issue, and am now so grateful that I was told my bones were strong and that was that.... and I just somehow knew that pop surgery wasn't for me.. or hip for that matter!

All the best,

Aussie Soul Sister

P.S. Hip exercises for men - I would love to know if Christine's program would work for men also, as I have come across men struggling with hip issues. It would be worth a consultation with her.

I am virtually certain that Christine recommends the hips work for both men and women. When I have a few minutes I will try to find a quote from the forum, book or video to confirm this. - Surviving

Reconstruction surgery after c-section, can you elaborate? Any surgeries need to be part of this discussion. Thanks. - Surviving

Hi Time4tea,
You are bringing back memories for me. I had also thought I would have to live with hip pain the rest of my life. I had all that clicking and a catch like feeling in there that I had to stretch to release. I used to go the the chiropractor all the time for it, and in bed at night, it would just ache like a tooth ache!
I had forgotten I really had those symptoms until I started reading all these posts. It just amazes me where I was then and where I am now! Simple proper alignment of the body is what it takes to get us back to our most natural state.

it's really amazing to me how 'small' adjustments cascade into every part of the body... good and bad!
i know of a few people who had hip replacements and 2 of 3 of them still have hip pain... the one who doesn't have any pain is the 43 yr old who had her hip replaced just last year.... time will tell. I hope she'll be pain free for a long time but from what I know about the surgery, it doesn't last forever...

my brother in law is only 33 and he's had chronic hip problems (I'm not sure of the details) but he's seen chiropractors, acupuncturists, russian mystics lol, pretty much everyone.... he's had 3 procedures - 1 of which was a stem cell procedure, the other 2 I don't know. he's dead set against hip replacement unless he tries everything else first- a few years ago I thought he was just being stubborn (!) - just go get it taken care of - i thought... little did i know right?
I think I'll point him to the save your hips video anyway - even if it's not made with men in mind, i doubt it would cause any more damage. i know men's bodies are slightly different but not different enough where he'd hurt himself doing these exercises. i love that about christine's work - it's a risk free option... because it's all about the natural state of your body...

time4tea - i'm so glad you found some areas of the posture that you were able to correct to relieve your back pain - hopefully that was the missing link. I was tilting my pelvis forward too far in the beginning too. And just this past week I've really really focused on lifting chest. It feels so awkward to me because it feels like i'm making myself taller and my whole life i've been trying to make myself shorter! but on the other hand it feels really freeing in a weird way. kind of regal...
thanks to christine's recent posts here - i realized i was relaxing lower belly but inadvertantly still holding tension in upper belly... trying to work on that this week... it's a constant work in progress! just when I think I've got it another piece clicks.

I also had hip pain before discovering my POP. After adopting the posture through out my day for almost a year my hip pain has been resolved for the most part. I do hip stretches several times a week as well but I find walking, running and hiking in the posture every day has really helped my hips!

Are we talking about diastasis recti, or is this something else? - Surviving

Hi Time4Tea,

Yes, I’ve looked into “tummy tucks” extensively and even produced a dvd (which we no longer sell) about the importance of restoring the goddess belly, rather than having surgery to flatten the stomach or close diastasis.

Abdominoplasty is quite drastic surgery, suturing the deepest layers of muscle and connective tissue, and removing a great deal of tissue whose purpose is to extend the abdominal wall. An extended abdominal wall is the core of the WW work. Muscles and fascia that wrap from back to front are severely immobilized by abdominoplasty, and it’s no wonder you are experiencing the symptoms you describe.

So what now? I think it’s pretty clear there is no operative cure. However, if you become incapacitated by hip pain to the point you can no longer walk, then prosthetic hip surgery must be considered. The surgery can be remarkably restorative - for a variable period of time.

The only other alternative is to try ever so slowly and gently to stretch your soft tissues toward their original configuration. This may take years and it may be less than completely restorative, there really is no way of knowing. You are also at significant risk of abdominal hernia, which throws another wild card in the works.

All we can do is send you our hopes and prayers for being able to stabilize (and hopefully reverse) your symptoms at a level you can live well with.

Best wishes,

Christine

I totally understand the feeling of violation from idiotic and highly damaging surgery. Not surprisingly, the first abdominoplasty was performed by Howard Kelly at Johns Hopkins (around 1910), the surgeon who also devised anterior colporraphy or cystocele "repair"!!

All we can do is move forward in the most intelligent way possible, which from my perspective includes disengaging from a blind and destructive system. The Goddess Belly video is being upgraded, but it really wouldn't be that helpful at this point, since it was aimed at preventing this surgery. The hips exercises are great as is the WW core mat program, which is included in various renditions in both WWYoga - The First Wheel, and the WW Dance Workout (both part of the exercise bundle, but you can order the yoga bundle separately).

I believe you will slowly be able to align your body correctly to alleviate these chronic conditions.

Christine

Hello again. It's been about a week now of being able to keep my uterus and bladder up most of the time (not bulging out if vagina). Although I feel worried most of the time that I'm going to move or stand wrong and things are going to fall out, I am pleasantly surprised that this works! I m currently working on getting more relaxing clothing so I can relax my belly more. With that said, I have been more focused on relaxing my belly (which is very hard to do as Christine states it is the hardest part of the posture. What I am finding is my low back is killing me around the sacral area and upper hip. It seems like the weight of my fat belly is causing it. Is this normal? Or am I doing the posture wrong. I try not to over exaggerate my pelvis forward but not sure if I'm doing that. Even sitting with the posture and relaxed belly causes pain in that area. Do you think it's just from weak muscle.

Also I'm wondering if over time can the ligaments and fascia etc that holdthings in there get stronger? If they have been overstretched can they shorten and hold things in the position like they use too?

Hi Sassi246,
Your muscles do need to get used to the posture, so as long as you are not trying to force a lumbar curvature by tipping your hips too far forward, you should be fine. Remembering to just relax belly and pull up strongly in the chest are the most important parts, but keep in mind all the rest of the posture principles.
It would also be a good idea to try out some of Christine's exercise videos as they help strengthen those stubborn muscles into posture, along with mindful whole woman walking. Those really helped me.
I had a belly when I started this work, and still do, so that really isn't a factor in my mind. It could be a combination of over exaggerating the posture and the fact that your body still needs time to get used to it.

Sassi - I like Christine's comparison here: "Prolapse symptoms begin to improve [after adopting WW posture] because the muscle and facial structures attached to our realigned skeleton shift the organs back toward their natural positions. Except in the mildest cases however, this is an incomplete process due to the tendency of pelvic connective tissue to maintain its altered shape, much like a stretched-out sweater."

Great analogy. - Surviving

Thank you for responding. I so appreciate it. I will work on doing the exercises. I may be tilting my hips forward more than normal. My hips are tipped too much naturally. And the sitting with straight back is also killer. My low back does tend to hurt when I stand too long (even before the prolapse). I have a lot of work to do. Thanks again.

Ahh yes, I remember that analogy, Surviving! That reminds me of a conversation I had with Christine about that stretching out of things, and how important it is to get everything as forward as we can to let the intra-abdominal pressure pin those pelvic organs in place. We may be stretched out, but we still have tools and resources with whole woman to help us.

Hi there!
I just finished watching all of the sections of First Aid for Prolapse. I do need to go back and watch it in more detail (likely a number of times) but I have a few newbie questions. I saw that in proper posture, our organs are thrusted forward over the carriage of our pelvic bones and fully supported. I have always been told that I have an introverted (or maybe antroverted...something like that) pelvis that is titled backwards rather than forwards. This meant that I had severe back pain for each of my three pregnancies. I'm wondering if this effects the placement of my internal organs when I am in Whole Woman posture or not. Ever since my prolapse (stage 3 cystocele) began over a year ago, I have also had very bad back pain on the right side of my back, as well as pain in my frontal region directly across from the back pain...(in other words, whatever's causing that pain is going right through me). I am trying not to over exaggerate the curvature of my spine but of course when I lift my chest, this sort of happens naturally. I have also been a mouth breather when I sleep or even sometimes while I am concentrating on things and I have erratic breathing so I am hoping that doing these exercises and maintaining the posture will help to resolve this. I am also curious about weight loss....does it make a difference? I am not overly large but in the past year I have put on some weight in my belly, buttocks and thighs so I'm assuming that causes more excursion on my internal organs!?? I understand that the WW posture and exercises are good for all of us who have prolapse, but do both of these things really help the prolapse to retreat somewhat into our female cavity? Do people who practice this regularly actually go from a stage 3 to a stage 2 etc??? If so, I'M IN!!! I also have PID (Pelvic Inflammatory Disease). I LOVE your kitchen in the First Aid video Christine....I really need to work at eating an anti-inflammatory diet for sure.
I apologize for the first post...I am wistful, excited and cautious about all of this but I feel very inspired by what I've read and seen thus far. THANK YOU Christine for your intuitive advice, knowledge and expertise with regard to physiology etc. It's wonderful to have hope!
p.s. Someone once told me that if you want to put yourself into a better walking posture, simply take your hands and turn them so that your palms are facing forward. This makes your shoulders drop back and your chest move up and out. If only I could remember that every time I walk. Hope springs eternal!

If your pelvis is tilted in such a way that your lumbar curve is flattened, well, that just sounds like bad posture, pure and simple. It's what most of us did for years or decades, before we came here and got ourselves back on the right path. I think it would explain your pain in pregnancy and your discomfort as you start correcting your posture, but that just means you need to take it slowly and not push it. Being overweight does not aggravate prolapse. In fact, in correct posture the weight can actually accentuate the dynamics of pelvic organ support. It's all about posture, gravity, and breathing. Just keep working on all of it.....it doesn't happen overnight. Good luck to you and keep us posted. - Surviving

Thank you so much for your response, Surviving60. I just reviewed some of the WW material and I am incredibly thankful to have found this site. In viewing and then doing the 1st wheel of yoga, I can already see where I have many weaknesses but participating in a program that actually addresses my most prominent concern is so liberating....and empowering! I have a very busy, hectic life and I felt so much calmer after completing this very first leg of the journey. There is such a wealth of information here. I feel like I've only discovered the tip of the iceberg! I am in the very bad habit of holding my breath and often catch myself doing this. Hopefully in time I will be able to correct this. I love everything about the courses and look forward to conversing with people on here, learning more and more about the physiology of our beautiful female bodies, improving the symptoms and being more accepting of how I perceive my body in all its complexities! I will take your advice and watch for gradual improvements along the way, Surviving60...thanks for alleviating some of my concerns.
Namaste

That's OK, Namaste, we "KNEW" what you meant! - Surviving