Why A Mobility Exercise To Fix My Hernia?

I realized, after writing on this blog for a few years while trying to fix my hernia, and talking to tons of people with inguinal hernias, that we all had a few things in common. Most of us have some sort of pelvic postural problem, usually anterior pelvic tilt. It’s usually coupled with back pain or tension, and tight hamstrings. Once I realized this I thought that this had to be a contributing factor to why people end up getting hernias in the first place.

There is a story about a guy who was able to heal his hernia naturally by walking on his toes. So I decided to give this a try for a little while to see if it would make any difference for me. What I noticed after a few weeks of walking around on my toes without allowing my heals to touch the ground, was that all that was doing was causing me to rotate my pelvis under just enough to alleviate the anterior pelvic tilt that I didn’t even realize I had up until then. The crazy thing is that it was actually working to make my hernia pop out a lot less.

What Is Anterior Pelvic Tilt?

Basically anterior pelvic tilt (A.P.T.) is when your the top of your pelvis is tilted forward a bit too far. Imagine your pelvis as a cup that’s full of liquid. If the cup is tilted forward too far, the contents of the cup will spill out, and you’ll have a big mess to clean up. Well, your pelvis is the same. If it is tilted too far forward it skews the musculature that is connected to it and causes all sorts of tension in places where there should not be tension.  All that tension leads to injury, such as a tear in the abdominal wall that allows your intestine to sneak through. (hint hint) See the connection?

Anterior Pelvic tilt looks like this:

 

Before you get all crazy about fixing your pelvic tilt, you need to make sure that you actually have APT to begin with. Your pelvis is supposed to have a small amount of tilt to the front. Usually about 7º, but if yours is tilted more than that, you have APT. Here is a great video on how to assess your pelvic situation:

 

I Have Anterior Pelvic Tilt, Now What?

If you did the test in the above video, and figured out that you do have anterior pelvic tilt, you can follow the exercise that I go through in the video below to fix it. Because I realized the connection that APT has to being able to fix my hernia, I did this exercise every day for about a month and fixed my APT. I still do this at least a few times a week to keep my hip flexors including the psoas nice and loose.

The exercise

To do this exercise you’ll need a good resistance band. I got the one that I use from Rogue Fitness. You will also need a strong place to wrap the band around.

Step One:

Wrap one end of the band around something strong enough to hold it at about waist height or lower. Most of the time I do this inside the house. When I do, I wrap the band around a door knob like this:

 

Step Two:

Put your left leg through the band, bringing the band up into the crease between your hamstring and butt while stepping back to create tension.

Step Three:

Take a knee with the left leg. Keep your left knee directly underneath your body, and the top of your left foot flat on the ground. Your right leg should be out at 90º with a bent knee, and the sole of your right foot should be flat on the ground.

Step Four:

With the band distracting your femur into the front of the hip socket, shift your weight forward over your grounded knee while squeezing your glute and keeping your stomach tight.

Step Five:

Hold that position or move in and out of your end range slowly for about two minutes.

Step Six:

Follow steps one through five for the right side.

 

Side note: If you cannot hold the hernia in on your own, make sure you’re wearing a hernia belt while doing this exercise.

 

Conclusion

In order to fix my hernia, I knew that I would have to get my pelvis aligned correctly, and this was the perfect exercise to accomplish that. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!