Carving Out Your Pelvis: Understanding Pelvic Structure and Movement

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How familiar are you with the contours of your face? You probably spend a few minutes per day washing your face, putting products on your face and maybe even checking it out before heading out for the day.

Now if I were to pose the same question to you about how familiar you are with the contours of your pelvis that would be a very different answer.

Identifying Your Pelvis vs. Hip Bones

I always like to begin with how we misrepresent what we are actually putting our hands on. When most people place their hands on their hips, they are actually making contact with their pelvis, not their hip bones. If you migrated your hands just a few inches south, that would then make contact with your hip joint thus your hip bones. But the place where we carve our hands around out iliac crest is actually our pelvis.

Difference between pelvis and hip, Image credit: Cleveland Clinic

Why Is It Important to Connect With Your Pelvic Contours?

There are many more round contours that are part of your pelvis that we may not really think about until something starts to hurt or we are limited in our movement. Let’s take for example, the ischial tuberosity or also known as the sitz bones, the bones that we literally sit on. Those are a set of bones that we regularly carve whatever surface we are sitting on on a daily basis without giveing it much thought.

Sitz bones, Image credit: Alexander Technique London

Because there can be such a disconnect with our body in general and with our pelvis more specifically, it is important to learn how to establish a connection with this most outer surface of our pelvis before we start to want to dive into the deeper more intimate structures.

How to Connect With Your Pelvic Structure

One of the best ways to do this is feeling for the frame, the outer structure of your pelvis and I call it carving your pelvis. This is great and helps to inform the movement in our hip joint but we also need movement throughout your pelvis as that is what is connecting our lower half to our upper half.

First, let’s begin with using our hands or a soft tool, like a Coregeous ball to help find all of the different contours and landmarks of your pelvis:

Now another way of carving out our pelvis and connecting with the bony landmarks and contours is through movement. Our pelvis is a 3-dimensional structure and should be able to move in three different planes, thus 6 types of movement! Do you think your pelvis does this on the daily? Let’s explore what this can look like:

I hope that you are able to build more familiarity with your bony pelvis now and create better connections. In the very same way that you touch, moisturize and move your skin and muscles over the bony structures of your face, know that you are constantly nourishing it through touch and what you are putting on it and how you are moving it. This is excatly what you are helping to do with your pelvis as well.