How to Prevent Lower Back Pain – Correct Your Innominate Rotation

This morning I bent down to feed my dog and I felt a twinge in my back. You know the feeling? It’s like something is about to slip out of place. I was standing on the precipice and I was either going over the cliff having several days of aching lower back pain OR I was going to carefully walk away and be fine. It’s in moments like these that it helps to know your anatomy and understand exactly what is happening in your body.

 Your pelvic bones, called your innominates, rotate with every step you take. A good illustration of this rotation is the yoga warrior pose. In this picture, the womens’ left innominates are rotating backwards called a posterior innominate rotation and their right hips are rotating forward. The right hips are in anterior innominate rotation. This rotational ability is the reason some people (not me) can do front-to-back splits.

The problem is that many of us have one or both hips stuck in this rotation. You can see this problem when you view the hips from the front. When stuck in innominate rotation, your hips and shoulders appear unlevel. Can you see that the gentleman’s left shoulder and right hip are higher?

When your hips are stuck in rotation, you are more likely to hurt yourself say, for example, when you feed your dog or move your laundry from the washer to the dryer. If your hips are tight and stuck, other parts of your body become overly flexible. For me, it is my lower back that picks up the slack. This morning, one of my lower back disks was about to slide out of position to “accommodate” my unyielding pelvis.

But that didn’t happen.

I eased myself down to the floor, unrotated my hips and did some gentle stretching to keep the pelvis mobile. Then I put some ice on my lower back to quiet the inflammation. Now, a few hours later, I feel like I could run a marathon.

Most of us have some form of pelvic misalignment. We get it from sleeping on our sides, crossing our legs when we sit or generally having imperfect posture. The good news, is once you know your body’s misalignment tendencies, it’s easy to put yourself back into your natural alignment. Here is a picture of me correcting my own innominate rotation.

Learn how to keep your hips level by working one-on-one with a Better Living exercise physiologist.