Most of you know I'm a Personal trainer and fitness junkie. It's true. There is honestly nothing better than completely crushing a badass workout, and reaping the rewards that come with it. Endorphins, a hot bod. You know. The ush.
In sharing my fitness story with a lot of people, I get asked the most about my most outstanding personal accomplishment, which is reversing my pretty severe lordosis. (Lordosis is extreme curvature of the lumbar spine.) So, in this post, I want to share my story and what I did to achieve my goal.
Firstly: a before picture.
See how my lower back is unusually curved? Yeah. It's really bad! Lordosis is caused by muscles being out of whack. Mine was due to my hip flexors being extremely tight, and my core muscles being weak.
Here's a visual- proper spinal alignment on the left, and kyphosis-lordosis posture on the right.
Here's a visual of the hip flexor muscle group above, and what they (and other muscles) do to the pelvis below.
In my personal trainer textbook, they taught me to think of the pelvis as a bucket of water. You don't want the water to spill out the front, and you don't want the water to spill out the back. The goal is neutral spine.
Think of a game of tug-o-war, muscle addition. The pelvic alignment is the rope, and the core and the hip flexors are the teams. Needless to say, my core lost miserably. Thankfully, this is all correctable by proper exercise and flexibility training! I started doing hip flexor stretches like these:
And lots of core strengthening exercises, especially those that are Pilates movements or Pilates inspired.
After about two years of doing this, I've seen amazing results. My lordosis is very near complete reverse, and I rarely have low back pain anymore.
This before & after shot also includes a decent body fat percentage drop as well. Which I am also quite proud of. Just sayin'. :P
So, I hope this was helpful to all you people out there with the same problem. Stick with it! I promise it WILL pay off.
Cheers! Xoxo
