Back pain steals your freedom, core connection and healthy movement. Bring it back. So before we get started, I want you to strap your walking shoes on or better yet, no shoes at all, grab your headphones and get your body moving while you listen to the insights that helped me climb out of a decade long struggle of debilitating lower back pain and led to the creation of core balance training, which has helped thousands of people climb out of the back pain spiral for good.
Welcome to the back pain podcast by core balance, where we share practical insights to address back pain at its root. I'm your host, Dr. Ryan Peebles, doctor of physical therapy, specializing in spine and core rehabilitation. Each episode brings you a recording of one of my live sessions with my students.
We start with a focused topic on back pain, then move into a live Q and A where I answered real questions in real time. My hope is that these episodes get you on the path to climbing out of the back pain spiral for yourself. So you can live life the way that you want to let's dive in.
This week's topic is pelvic tilt. So we'll be talking about the differences between anterior pelvic tilt and posterior pelvic tilt and how they could be contributing to your back pain and best practices for how we could maybe use pelvic tilt to help us get out of the pain cycle. I'm a physical therapist by profession, but I like to think of my training as a much broader melting pot of different disciplines and schools of thought and philosophies.
I have a personal history of chronic lower back pain of over a decade and have spent the last 20 years of my life completely dedicated to understanding and reversing the root causes of chronic lower back pain. So let's get on to the topic of pelvic tilt. We'll talk about, like I said, the different types of pelvic tilt.
There's lots of different kinds. It's not just anterior and posterior. The pelvis tilts in all directions.
It sits on top of two ball and socket joints. So ball and socket joint by nature moves in all angles and all dimensions. People often come to me thinking they have a leg length discrepancy because their pelvis is tilted to one side.
That could be true or it could be your lower back and your abdominals and your lower back muscles. But it's also at the mercy of your legs and your hips and your legs are what connect to the ground. So there's so many different factors that have an influence on the tilt of your pelvis.
And by the way, if you don't know what pelvic tilt is, we'll talk about that as well. And we can get into a little bit on how you can know if your pelvis is tilted in a direction, maybe too much anterior pelvic tilt. That's a very common belief that people have and contribution to lower back pain.
Or if your pelvis sits in a posterior tilt, which would be more of a flat back position. And if that could be contributing to your lower back pain. And let's get right into it.
So the pelvis doesn't normally sit flat. It actually does naturally have a little bit of anterior pelvic tilt. So if you know that you have anterior pelvic tilt, it's not an immediate reason to worry.
And it just means that you might be normal, but there's a possibility that your pelvis could be tilting too far forward. And we can figure out if that's the case as well. So anterior tilt is arched back.
If you feel like your back is arched, then this could be a contributing factor. And posterior tilt, another name for it, is flat back. So if you take a close look, the pelvis isn't actually rotated posteriorly.
It's almost to neutral. But we call it posterior tilt because it naturally sits in a kind of an anterior position. And the spine curve of the lumbar spine flattens out quite a bit when it's in a posterior tilt.
The number one problem that anterior pelvic tilt causes would be what is in the medical terminology called stenosis. The closing down of the back of the vertebrae on the disc. And I do animate this in the master class.
If you know that you have lordosis, which is another word for arched back, it's the closing down of the space needed for the nerves and blood vessels to exit. And if you feel nerve symptoms in your legs, it's possible that this could be the cause. Because there are nerves and blood vessels that come out of the spine, out of the spinal cord and into the legs.
And so we want to have space here. Someone that lives in stenosis naturally may want to bias themselves towards a posterior tilt if they need to create more space there for their nerves and blood vessels. And so this is one of the reasons why in the core balance training program we do bias towards a posterior tilt.
It seems to be a safer position for the spine and potentially has less consequences. And it's a very common thing that lower back pain is related to an anterior pelvic tilt. I would say that about 80% of people who are experiencing chronic lower back pain are in a more anterior tilt situation with their pelvis.
But there is that 20% of people who might live in a posterior tilt. And that may be the cause of their back pain. Because when we are in a posterior tilt like this, all the ligaments and tendons and tissues behind the spine are getting stretched out and they may be getting strained a little too much, which could be causing soreness, tenderness and pain in that way.
Another thing is that the discs are getting stretched out a little bit. And so if somebody has a disc injury, then that could potentially be exacerbating it. And so there is no one clear answer what is better, anterior pelvic tilt or posterior pelvic tilt.
And so there's not a safe way to tell everyone to do one thing. The truth is that the best position for the spine is neutral. And so we have a natural curvature of the spine and the maximum amount of space between both the front and the back of the discs and the vertebrae.
So the glutes and the abdominals work together to create this posterior tilt. And so these are two of the muscles that tend to become inhibited or weak. And lengthened in the predictable pattern of muscle imbalances that we see across society, largely related to sitting.
So if you can imagine in sitting, we're sitting on the glutes, large part of our day sitting on this big, strong muscle. And so if you get up off of your bum and you walk around and you've been sitting on the main muscle that does an important job for so long, you could imagine that it wouldn't be functioning optimally. And so this muscle tends to get inhibited and the abdominals tend to become inhibited too, which would explain why if these muscles are inhibited, not doing their job, we tend to favor or bias towards an anterior tilt because there's not enough tension in these muscles.
They're not active enough. And so that anterior tilt, like we talked about earlier, is causing problems by compressing the vertebrae and the discs in the back. And this is the most common pattern, the most predictable pattern.
And like I said, if there's an 80-20 rule, it does apply here. And 80% of people with chronic back problems are in this situation. And so in order to correct the problem, we want to reactivate these muscles that help us move towards a posterior tilt.
And I say towards a posterior tilt because we don't want to go into a complete, full posterior tilt. That would be a compensation. It's not a solution.
And that can cause problems by stretching out all the tissues and ligaments in the back of the spine. And so we want to move towards neutral. And the way that we would do that is moving towards posterior pelvic tilt.
And a lot of the time, it would be beneficial to overcorrect if you've been living in a certain position for so long. And this is something that can happen if you've lived in anterior tilt for so long. The vertebrae, over time, through repetitive trauma, start to break down and they can slide forward.
And that would be called spondylolisthesis. That's beyond our scope here, but it's very common in athletes and other populations. And so that's what I wanted to start with.
As I talk, I'm going to bring up some questions that have occurred from students. In the program recently, and that is the reason for this topic this week. We've had a lot of questions from current core balance training students about pelvic tilt, what is better, and just different questions about that.
So I'm going to pull up these questions. And while I'm doing that, I'm going to give some clues as to how you might be able to know if you have pelvic tilt or if everybody has pelvic tilt, but if it would be excessive in one direction or the other. And just some like signs and symptoms.
So most likely, if you have lower back pain, you have a little bit of anterior pelvic tilt, excessive anterior pelvic tilt. And one way to know if one sign or symptom that kind of indicates that your pelvis lives in that position of anterior tilt is if you're laying on your back and your legs are straight, so your knees are not bent up, you're on a totally flat surface laying on a bed or a yoga mat in what they would call shavasana pose, and you feel a lot of tension in your lower back, almost like it's trying to lift up off the floor. That would be an indicator that there's some really tight muscles, namely the hip flexors that are pulling up on your spine.
And if it's uncomfortable, then that would be an indicator that your pelvis is probably in that anterior pelvic tilt position. And if you want to confirm that, then you could try putting a bolster under your legs. And the bolster lifts up your legs and would support the legs.
This shortens the hip flexor muscles. And this would result in taking the tension off of your spine. So if you lift up your legs, you could put a bunch of pillows under your legs, or if you have a couch or something that you could put your legs up on and you get into this same position and you don't feel that tension or that pulling on your lumbar spine anymore, then that would confirm that the tension in these muscles is probably causing your pelvis to live in an anterior position.
The opposite of that will be posterior tilt. And if you were to lay on the floor with your legs totally flat in Shavasana position and you don't feel that tension, then this would probably mean that you don't have anterior pelvic tilt. And if you can take your hand and stick it behind your back and slide it under your spine, and your spine is touching the floor or pushing on the floor, it's not slightly curved up off of the floor, then that may mean that you have a posterior pelvic tilt.
And so someone with posterior pelvic tilt, if they have discomfort laying on their bed on a mattress because the mattress doesn't have enough support and the spine kind of sags in the middle, then lifting your legs up on a bolster or on pillows would actually cause more discomfort. And so that would be the confirmation for either anterior or posterior. Does putting your legs up after laying flat cause relief or does it cause more discomfort? And again, if it's relief, then you might be in an anterior tilt.
And if it's discomfort, you might be in a posterior tilt. And so that in itself confirms that a posterior tilt is not the solution. It's not better.
It's not inherently better than anterior tilt. It's a pattern that we want to address. The pattern is most people are in anterior tilt and so we would prefer to bias towards a posterior tilt in order to correct our problem.
But at the end of the day, the ideal position for the pelvis is neutral. I had a question in the program. So Mike says, yesterday I had to move some concrete blocks and he says he figured he was supposed to flatten his lower back using his abs.
That's right. You do use your abs and you can also use your glutes to flatten your lower back. That would be posterior tilt.
And he figured that that was what he was supposed to do to protect his spine during the lifting of the heavy objects. And so I wanted to talk about this because it's really important to just make clear that the posterior tilt is not the ideal position and it doesn't necessarily protect the spine. And I wouldn't want everybody to leave this live stream or come out of the program and say, OK, posterior tilt is better inherently.
So I'm just going to try and do that all the time, no matter what, because there is repetitive trauma that occurs from taking any joint, any moving part of the body and taking it to its extreme end range and doing activity, doing life with your body in that position. And that's true for every joint and it's true for every end range of that joint. And so anterior tilt is an end range.
And so we often and I fall into this category in my personal journey with back pain. I had an anteriorly tilted pelvis and I was young. I was 16 when it all started and I would do life.
I went surfing and I played basketball and through those activities and having my pelvis in this position, I created a lot of damage. I created a lot of trauma to the discs and to all the tissues in my spine. So this is what we're talking about right now.
This was the way my pelvis sat all the time because of the muscle imbalances, because the muscles control the position of your bones. Right. The bones are not dynamic.
They don't have the ability to move themselves. They are held in position by the muscles. And so because of my muscle imbalances, I was in the predictable pattern.
This is how my pelvis lived. And I would go play basketball. Imagine jumping up and down playing basketball with your spine in this position.
It's going to crunch the back of the spine. And so for that reason, it was beneficial and it still is beneficial for me to bias towards a posterior tilt. And so personally, I do that as a strategy to protect my spine because this is the kind of bias that I would normally live in if I didn't do that.
And so a lot of people can do that. You can use posterior tilting as a strategy to protect your spine when doing lifting heavy objects. And so Mike's question was accurate for that reason.
But however, we need to confirm that this is his situation, too. If I were to answer and say, yeah, great, do that. But he had a flat back and so he was going posterior tilt because of something he learned in the program.
And that could potentially lead to more repetitive trauma. So it's important to be aware of your body. And if you are still unsure after doing the test that I described earlier, you can always get an assessment from somebody local, a physical therapist or somebody that knows the body really well.
And they can tell you by taking a little bit of a measurement. The next question is, does core balance training work for both anterior and posterior tilt? And so that's a fantastic question, Mr. Simple Feelgood. And the answer is yes, the program was designed to help everyone, whether you live in anterior tilt or posterior tilt, to achieve neutral.
The three anchors, these are the foundations of the program. These three anchors are a system to support the spine that you can rely on, that you can lean on, which will naturally bring the spine into a neutral position and the pelvis into a neutral position. Whether you live in anterior tilt or posterior tilt, by connecting with these anchors and creating this foundation of support, the spine will be supported on both sides, front and back.
That's achieving what I like to call core balance. And you can lean on this. You can use it like a brace, like a back brace, which naturally holds your spine in a neutral position, except instead of it being an external orthotic, it's your own muscles.
And so that's a great question, Mr. Simple Feelgood. And I see that, Ali, you mentioned that you did the free training. I'm not sure if that's referring to the master class or the trial, but the master class is definitely the place to start, by the way, whether you're here live or if you're watching the recorded replay of this and you want to learn more, you want to get the foundation of knowledge of everything I've learned over my lifetime, the last 20 years of research that I've done, first for myself and now for other people, I've condensed it all down into what you need to know first, and that's in the master class.
So I'm sure we've posted the link to the master class in the description below. So check that out. And if you have seen the master class, then the next thing would be to try the program, do the free trial and see what we're talking about here.
And the free trial, the seven day trial, you get to learn the back anchor. And so you get to learn to connect that with the floor and connect to that with your mind and your core. And for a lot of people, because most of us live in anterior tilt, it feels really good.
And so I don't know if you've done that yet, Holly, but if you know that you have lordosis, which is another word for arched back, and this compressing of the posterior or the backside of the discs and vertebrae, then that first week of core balance training, it's free. We should probably feel very good for you. And I really appreciate you sharing, Holly.
It takes courage for people to put themselves out there and to go learn, educate themselves so you don't have to rely on other people. And that's what this is all about. So the back anchor is the first week and we spend an entire week, the first five days of the program, the first five lessons are week one, just focusing on becoming aware of this back anchor that you can connect to and forming the back of the foundation of this triangle of support that supports your spine.
And we take five days to learn one exercise. And that can lead me down a whole path of talking about movement, but I won't go there, but we really break down movement to the most fundamental level. And so connecting with that back anchor can help us to do an exercise that could be kind of risky for people if they don't do it right.
It's called the bridge. And if you have anterior pelvic tilt and you just go to the bridge without instruction, it may cause more pain in your spine. But with this connection, if you can maintain this connection with the back anchor here while doing the bridge, it feels so good.
After that first week, and we just learned that we focus on that one exercise and we get really familiar with this support zone for our spine. Then in that next week and week two, we learn the two front anchors. So that's the upper front anchor in the front and on the rib cage and the lower front anchor on the pubic bone.
And so we learn how to bring the pubic bone forward like that. Okay, that's connecting the front anchor. And we first use the floor as a cue because that's how we first learned when we were infants and babies developing our core.
We were incredibly strong. Our core was the strongest part of our body. If you have any experience with babies or infants, their arms and legs aren't very strong.
They can't do much with them, but they certainly can lift their butt up off the floor and hold their legs up and lift their torso and rotate around. And all of that is through core strength. And so we mimic that.
We model after how we first learned so that we can start over and hit reset with our movement and learn how to reconnect with the deep spinal support muscles. Glinda Hernandez, looks like you're asking if the program helps with degenerative disc disease and a bulging disc. That's exactly what I had and probably still have.
I don't get imaging anymore because it is not psychologically helpful, but I also don't have pain anymore. And that's a result of the things that I've done and put into the program. And so absolutely, the program is designed specifically for degenerative disc disease, herniated discs, bulging discs.
It's interesting that the most common question I receive is, does the program help for fill in the blank? And the answer is, I can't remember the last time I said no, the program helps for all spinal conditions because we are achieving a neutral supported spine. We're creating a back brace for our spine with our muscles. And it's a systematic process, so it's repeatable, it's reproducible.
I can go through the program and create this and a totally different person can go through the program and create this and so on and so on. It's as effective as a back brace, but without the downsides. The downside of wearing a back brace is, yeah, it feels good while you're wearing it, but the moment you take it off, you've got no natural support left.
Your muscles have atrophied and they've gotten weaker and they have stopped learning how to do because they can now rely on an external support. And what I always thought was such an interesting piece of knowledge that I learned from physical therapy school was that the muscles begin to atrophy after 72 hours of not using them. So if you spend three days in bed, not only have your muscles gotten weaker over that time, but after 72 hours, it's the muscles actually physically start eating themselves.
They get smaller. Atrophy is the shrinking of the physical structure of the muscles. Weakness starts happening right away.
If we don't move our body for one day, we'll be weaker the next. But the actual loss of muscle mass happens very quickly. All of that to say that, yes, the program helps for where I was kind of going was this question, this common question I get of, does it help for the fill in the blank, you name the diagnosis.
These different diagnoses are all a result of a cause. The cause is underlying these different diagnoses. And it could be a car accident.
It could be muscle imbalances. It could be repetitive trauma. It could be picking up a toilet paper roll and your back goes out.
It doesn't really matter what the cause was, because now, today, as we sit here or for me, stand here, I'm standing this week after last week because I sat the whole time and my body didn't like that. So I made a change. So as we exist in this body now that we have a condition and what helps that condition, giving it support, improving our posture, strengthening the supporting tissues, muscles.
As we exist in this body now, we have a condition. What helps that condition? Giving it support.
Improving our posture. Strengthening the supporting tissues, muscles, around the injury. It doesn't matter if it was a car accident that happened 10 years ago.
That already happened. It's in the past. Now, all we have is this condition.
It can get better. I believe, I'm an optimist, but I believe that everything can get better. I work with some of the most sick people in healthcare, still, on a weekly basis.
I go into facilities, and I help people. I have not met somebody in my career that can't improve. It just so happens that with the spine, even if you have a degenerated disc, and this is to give you hope, Holly and Linda, even if the damage is already done, for some reason, if you can give it more support, and you can begin to correct the problem, things start to feel better.
The body has gone from this baseline, just default state that we've been in, if we've had back pain for 5 years or 10 years or whatever, that has become the default. If you can improve that, the body starts to feel good. The damage may still be there.
For me, I'm sure I tore up my spine over many years. If somebody took a picture of my spine, it would look very painful. My discs are black.
My last imaging I had over a decade ago, there was certainly no opportunity for any more bulging or herniations in my discs because they were already gone. Discs should look white. And so mine became like crab meat.
It's the closest looking thing. If you ever dissect a cadaver, you see what an old person's discs look like. They start to look like crab meat.
And so most old people do fall into this stenosis condition, degeneration and stenosis. They're all, and even bulging discs, they're all a just slightly different result, a slightly different tissue being damaged in a slightly different way of an underlying cause. So we address the underlying cause, which is not enough support and protective imbalances that the body is trying to close up and trying to be in a safe position, the fetal position, but we still go around our day and our life using our bodies, which is causing damage.
And so it doesn't matter what the original cause was. We fall into this pattern. The imbalances occur.
They're predictable, and there's damage to the tissues, and the spine needs more support. And that's where this came from, this system. When the three anchors are combined together, it's called the anchor triad, and it's a natural back brace.
And so hopefully that answers your questions. Holly, the masterclass you should see in the description, the link to the masterclass in the description to this video. So after we're done, or even right now, go ahead and check that out.
It's only 15 minutes. It moves fast, but it's free, and it's pretty short. Let's see, I'm going to catch up on some of these comments.
So Linda, yes, it's going to help. I wish you could see the comments I get on a daily basis from the people in the trial, but it's free, so there's nothing to lose, and you get to test out the program and get that back anchor, and just doing that will have a big impact on your life. The results from learning these connections are permanent, and that's because it's changing the relationship that you have with your core and with your body and the way you move.
And if you can change that relationship, if you think about any relationship you have, you can change that relationship, and it has permanent effects. So we live in here, inside this body, and we learn how to control it and operate it and move it, and we can learn how to do that in a different way, with a more active, involved core, our center of power, our powerhouse. And I think it's, oh man, I can't remember the word, but there's so many different words to describe the center of our being, and it's somewhere, it's our solar plexus.
If we can connect more with that in our movement, things will get better, no matter who you are. So, cool, you're getting PT, Holly, and they're working on leveling your hip bones, and the muscles aren't keeping it there. That's one thing about physical therapy, it's so good at breaking down the body into parts.
And that's what I learned in PT school. I learned a lot in PT school, but I certainly didn't learn what I do and implement with my students on a daily basis, because what I thought was a little bit of a shortfall from physical therapy school was teaching the body as a whole, how it works together. And so I can manipulate your spine or your joints and get them back to level, and I can say, stretch this muscle and strengthen that muscle.
But the way that I'm teaching this and instructing it is separate parts. Muscle here, joint there. And what really is the reality of us using our bodies is it all works together.
And so PT is extremely beneficial for certain things. Hasn't been that successful for chronic lower back pain. Nothing really has until now.
And that's why I'm doing these live streams, so I can get the word out there that core balance training is a highly effective, you know, for since 2017, yeah, since 2017, we've got 90% or more of our students have had success, permanent success. I'm just saying this to say that it's worth giving the free trial a try, and you don't have to quit your physical therapy. It works very well together with PT, and it might give you a better lasting impact that you're talking about with the muscles having trouble holding the adjustment in the pelvis.
Linda, it looks like you've done the free trial because you're talking about day five, the Get Fat concept. That's one of my favorites. It's actually one of the hardest to grasp for people, but one of the most important.
So I put it in early, but I actually wish people would go back and review that one later on as you get more, a better relationship with your core. Epidural, you know, somebody's suggesting it for you. I rarely would utilize an epidural for myself.
I'll just talk about for myself because this is not medical advice. But with an epidural, you know, it's a Band-Aid. It covers it up.
It covers up the pain. And it can be effective for certain things. I've used it effectively on a foot injury that I had.
Chronic swelling was reduced by a steroid injection. But I wouldn't use it more than once. It could help you get over the hump.
And there's research to show, long-term studies to show, that the long-term use of epidurals can weaken the tissues. And so there are a lot of doctors, the good doctors, that won't do more than three injections because that research came out. And so that would be my advice to you.
You can work towards the solution without the epidural and experience improvements. But it's possible that epidural, while it's not long-term, and while it's not addressing the root of the problem, it could help you get over the hump. And so without knowing your full situation, that's what I have to say about that.
Let's see. Yevgeny showing back up. Good to see you again, my man.
So Yevgeny is an alumni of the program. And looks like he's back to share some more of his story. Hey, it's great to have you.
Always, Yevgeny, I hope you show up every week and share a little more of your story. We got to connect again soon. I know it's been over maybe a couple years since we chatted, but I'd love to connect and see how things are going with you.
Let's see. Linda, we're asking about if you should wait to do the epidural. Nothing interferes with the program, so it's not going to interfere.
One thing that I would consider is being able to feel the improvement of the program. I think this is going to be good advice for you, Linda. If you do the epidural and it's your first time doing it, you may or may not experience improvement from that injection.
If you do the program, the free trial, and it's your first time doing it, you will most likely experience benefits from doing that. But if you do them at the same time and you experience benefits, you won't know which thing, which intervention the benefits are coming from, and you may not be able to feel everything as well because the injection is a Band-Aid. It covers things up, and it reduces your sensation of pain.
That's one of the reasons why the epidurals can also have a little bit of a negative effect is because it's like taking a painkiller. If you don't know that your body is supposed to be telling you pain because you're doing something it doesn't like, then you might keep doing that thing and not feel the body's alarm system to tell you to stop. I'm not going to say any more than that because I believe in just having confidence and psychological strength, but the pain mechanism is for our own benefit, and it's communication.
I would recommend just for that reason, if you're going to do, say, the injection now, I would wait to do the trial just until you get to a little bit of a level. You level out, know if you've got benefit from the injection or not, and then do the trial, or vice versa. Ideally, if it were me or my family member or my grandparent, I would start them on the program, and I would say, I feel this.
By the end of that first week, we may be asking a different question. We may not be asking, should I get an injection? We may be asking, should I keep going because I don't feel the pain anymore like I used to, and I don't need the injection right now. Maybe I should do more because the body communicates to you good feelings for doing the right thing just in the same way that it communicates to you pain for doing the wrong thing.
And so that's what I would do in that order. Holly, I really appreciate your most recent comment. I'm going to read it out loud, and it's going to be a topic for an entire live stream.
I'm always getting weaker and less flexible because I'm afraid of doing harm. It's so common. It's one of the main factors for this cycle, this pain cycle that I refer to in the Masterclass, and just this general cycle of back pain that we fall into is we change the way we live.
We change the way we move. Maybe rightfully so because we're afraid of hurting ourselves. And so it may be true that we would hurt ourselves, and it's good that we don't do certain things or change the way that we bend down to lift up this object, but that in itself is continuing the cycle because we're not doing the things that keep us strong, and we now have altered movement patterns that is leading to abnormal muscle tension in certain places.
And so it's almost a lose-lose situation because if you do it, you're damned, and if you don't, you're damned. So it's important that we start to do the right thing and so we can get out of this cycle, and then it's important to gain back that confidence. And that's going to be the topic of a future live stream is moving with confidence.
I have an incredible personal story to tell around that and how that completely changed my life when I decided to start moving more confidently. That in itself was a huge, like, jumping-off point for me to get out of the cycle. So thank you for sharing, Holly.
I really appreciate that. I would strongly recommend to listen to your body when it starts. If it ever tells you a good feeling, you did something and it says, good feeling, and you go, huh, I'm not in as much pain as I normally am.
Weird. Then do more of that, and that is going to just be one thing you can do in general. Say, and I can't remember, I know Linda is in the program.
All right, you made it through the trial, Linda, and you're doing the second week. I love it. It's my favorite week.
I wish it were the first week, but the program is taught in layers and it has to be that way because the next layer is built on top of the previous layer. But it is my favorite week, and I'm excited for you. So, Holly, I'm not 100% clear, but if you haven't, give the trial a shot.
And if you feel good feelings from that, and say you can't afford to continue just doing that one week and getting those good feelings from learning the back anchor, it can be life-changing. Do more of it. Get more good feelings.
Build up that foundation. And then remember, the whole point about this is to start gaining more confidence with your movement because that in itself can change everything. And I'll tell my story in another week.
It's time to start wrapping up. I really appreciate you all being here. Holly and Linda, you've been super active in the chat, and I hope that anything that I have said helps you.
And you have Danny. Vivian, I see you here. Another alumni, grateful to have you.
And I remember that you did the program in the summertime, I believe, a year or a year ago-ish, maybe. It's great to see you in here. And that she says it helped me a lot.
You need to do more, and do you have another program? The program that I recommend to follow core balance training is if you haven't integrated core balance into your life completely, then just do core balance again. The goal for core balance is that the program afterwards is life, moving through life, not just doing the exercises, but doing the day-to-day, even the mundane tasks with that connection that I'm talking about, these anchors. And that in itself is what's going to keep you healthy.
And so sometimes that takes, I think, even after people finish the program, it may be that the program is three months, but you continue integrating what you've learned for five, six months. And I think that's really common for people to get to. It takes about that five- to six-month mark before they feel like they have reached the level of normal life movement is maintenance, and that where the core anchors are more automatic, they're more part of you.
Three months is a lot to ask for that change to happen in that short amount of time. And so we try to smash everything in in three months, but it's because the program is structured in layers. Everything that was built on the previous lesson includes that.
And so it's easy to continue and get this lesson on pelvic tilt that I went over. You can check with this little test I described if your pelvis might be tilted forward or backward. And depending on if your pelvis is tilted forward, you might want to think about biasing towards a posterior tilt.
And if you have a flat back, you're one of those 20% of people with chronic lower back pain who has a flat back, you can think about biasing towards anterior tilt. Or you can do the program, you can do the free trial, and you can learn the core anchors, and that will, no matter where your pelvis is tilted, it will bring you towards neutral, and it will create a stable foundation for you to live in a supported body. Your spine is supporting, your core is supporting your spine.
So thank you, guys. Don't get discouraged, Holly. Keep moving forward.
As a PT myself, I understand what you're saying, but they have a role and they can be extremely valuable. It just may not be for chronic lower back pain, but they can help. Thank you everyone for being here.
I'm super grateful and until next time, get down on the floor and take care of your body that does so much for you.
