Dead Ribs

My pelvis has been my focus for the better part of a decade.   Plagued by low back pain and steely hamstrings, I discovered that I was stuck in anterior tilt.  Learning to posterior tilt both felt and functioned like a god send.  My dormant lower abs engaged, my back pain dissipated, and my hamstrings finally relaxed.  Key in hand, I practiced it in all kinds of positions- hanging, sitting, lying face down… it became my litmus test of whether or not I could own an action or arrangement.  I was not aware that it also disconnected me from my ribs, relegating them to a useless, floating buoy.

My lower canister was my middle and not my lower canister.  It was the point at which I could control my trunk, top, and bottom.  My hips, the source of my power, marionettes me from my center.  Existing with a flexed tailbone flexed my entire posture.  My ribs could not move independent of my pelvis.

Sitting with flexed hips, I struggled to keep my chest open and extended as I pressed my weight against the floor:

In the second clip, I opt for maintaining fludity throughout the press and hip adjustment.  Much more successful.

My neck, jaw, and pelvis created the tension that manipulated my inert in-between:

My error was in trying to open the body from the back through shortening, versus opening and lengthening from the front.

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Back side vs. Front side extension. Opening, to me, always meant folding over the back. The sweet spot, though, is actually being able to expand through the front. After the postural demo, I drive through the feet, hips, and finally the magic space through the ribs and the hips. SO much easier and more powerful. Also changed everything I ever felt and knew about deadlifts. #extend #extension #open #driver #frontside #betweenpelvisandribs #deadlift #thinkmovement

A post shared by Chris Ruffolo (@ruffolous) on Mar 22, 2019 at 7:22am PDT

I looped back around to examining extension-based pressing, this time through a horizontal lens.  There were many more options for movement when I pushed into the ground with an open frame and included my ribs in the process.  They could act as a stable driver that the pelvis pivoted around:

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Flexing the hip while keeping the spine and pelvis extended. So much harder than I anticipated, especially on the left side. Body wants to use rotation and abduct the knee slide outside the hands, but the real challenges is keeping it inside. Pushing down through the hips and pelvis might have escaped me the last forty years. Standing and walking for sometime after seemed biomechanically easier. Potentially something big here. #hips #pelvis #length #press #extend #pushdown #knee #flexion #slide #contrast #spine #posture #makespace #thinkmovement

A post shared by Chris Ruffolo (@ruffolous) on Feb 20, 2019 at 5:31am PST

At a Rolfing workshop I was exposed to how speed can dictate neural drivers, and how awkward it was to laterally bend the spine from side to side:

Lateral movements were something I rarely did, so they offered a beginner’s sense of novelty and intrigue.  Shifting the hips left and right with and without movement of the ribs helped me find lines of tension that were aggravating a right side SI pinch:

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Laterally shifting the pelvis while spine is in extension. Came upon some odd right hip/SI discomfort yesterday and as I was moving to investigate this combo reached in all the right places. 1. Lengthening and wagging the tail 2. Focusing on pinning the ribs and only letting then hips and pelvis move. I’ve got next to nothing on my right. A correlation/connection. PSA: second time this week my Julianne Moore face showed up. It is reserved for deep internal searching and just the right lighting. #spine #pelvis #ribs #lateral #SIjoint #juliannemoore #feel #examine #thinkmovement

A post shared by Chris Ruffolo (@ruffolous) on Feb 2, 2019 at 6:48am PST

Having motion flow through the ribs rather than around them helped me realize certain sticking points, and that I can direct tensional traffic away from the main intersection of the hips:

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Letting energy get locked up in or flow through the ribs. Pinning the ribs makes the knees shoot up, even when the scapula is fluid. As ribs are allowed to shift, the lower half can stay put. A smooth transfer results in only local parts having to move. #getup #ribs #pelvis #energy #flow #lost #used #stuck #fluidity #rotation #organization #thinkmovement

A post shared by Chris Ruffolo (@ruffolous) on Jan 25, 2019 at 6:08am PST

Once I could move both the pelvis and the ribs independently, I focused on centering movement in that sweet spot between the pelvis and the ribs, manipulating the limbs through that shortest of chains:

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Getting that often dormant left side space between the ribs and the pelvis to wake and pick me up. #abs #core #blindspot #poke #prod #awaken #thinkmovement

A post shared by Chris Ruffolo (@ruffolous) on Mar 1, 2019 at 6:02am PST

Where you place your attention is where you will find the most progress.  Focus, intention, and consistency yield results.  But when you are working within a system, efficient and effective shifts in one direction can cause an unravelling in another.  The ability to see it all simultaneously requires a maddening sense of details and layering, a skill that honors the big picture alongside a fractional contrast in pixels.  Balancing subjective interest with objective measures is the art of revealing principles within the playthings.