Lower Back Exercise: Find Your Sitting Bones

Sitting Down :

Sit on a hard or firm chair, preferably a flat-seated wooden one.

Sit on the fingers of your hands. You should feel quite an uncomfortable, bony contact with your buttocks. These bones in your buttocks are your sitting bones.

If you're sitting comfortably upright on a hard chair, you will be able to feel these bones against the wood of the chair, and that feeling can actually help your posture. It's one of the reasons modern, squashy furniture is not all good!

Don't murder your hands-- take them out after about half a minute.

When you take your hands away, this lower back exercise should give you a clear sense of your hip bones, and a feeling that your fingers are still touching them.

That feeling gives you a tactile experience of where your spine ends. It's an example of the imprinting technique used in many back-pain-self-help.com exercises.

Why?

Most people believe (wrongly) that their spine is much shorter, and ends much further up their backs. This is true even of doctors and anatomists who know intellectually where their spine finishes, but still don't move as if they know.

The more you repeat this lower back exercise, the more the "true" length of your spine will "sink in", and the less likely you are to injure your back.

Many people injure their lower backs because they have a faulty "map" of it and are therefore likely to contort their backs in this area. Your sitting bones are very close to the end of your coccyx, or tailbone, which is at the end of your spine.)

By feeling your sitting bones, you experience where the end of your spine is. This is much more powerful than being told. People who know instinctively where the end of their spine is tend to move with greater freedom, and without fixing or collapsing in their lower backs.

How Often?

This is a core lower back pain exercise, and the more you do it the better. Do it as often as you can during the day. Morning, evening and lunchtime is a good start.

Interesting Fact...

Anatomists like to call your sitting bones "Ischial Tuberosities"! Give me "sitting bones" any day.!

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