Last week I wrote a post about the importance of the external obliques in pelvic control.  If you missed it, check it out HERE.  Now I wanted to give you a couple drills and exercises you can use to improve the recruitment of the external obliques in pelvic control.

The exercises that follow are not all extremely difficult to perform.  It’s more about focusing on performing them the right way.  The pelvis should be neutral throughout the entire movement and as you as you feel your back arching, it’s generally a sign that you’re losing the external obliques engagement.  These exercises are by no means the only ones that exist to attain better recruitment of your external obliques in pelvic control, but it’s definitely a good place to start if you have no clue how to achieve that.

The first one is probably the most basic one.  It’s a variation of an exercise that comes from Shirley Sahrmann’s book Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes.  The goal is maintain a very slight arch in your lower back throughout the whole movement.  To engage your external obliques as much as possible, you can keep your fingers above your illiac crest on both sides; palpation always helps to feel the right muscles doing their work.

The second one is a little similar, and also a variation of the deadbug exercises.  My colleague Matt Siniscalchi posted this one on his website last week.  I believe that Craig Liebenson or Bill Hartman might have come up with this one.  Again, the goal is to maintain a very slight arch in the lower back and make sure the arch is not increasing as your lowering your legs.  The press against the wall will also favor some inner core activity throughout the movement.

The last one is definitely much harder than the previous two.  I don’t recommend you try it until you’ve mastered the first 2.  It’s basically a leg lowering exercise, but because of the weight of the lower extremities it makes it much harder to keep the neutral pelvis and the external obliques activation.  Again the goal is to maintain a very slight arch in the lower back and make sure yo don’t lose it.

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Pelvic control is an important thing to have at the hips level.  Anterior pelvic tilt is a common problem in the athletic population.  With too much anterior tilt, also comes increased lordosis.

Neutral pelvis on the left. Anteriorly tilted pelvis on the right.

Both of these postural problems can lead to a number of injuries including back pain, hamstring pulls, quad pull, etc.  The traditional approach to reestablishing neutral alignment is to stretch the hip flexors and strengthen the glutes and hamstrings to pull the pelvis posteriorly.

Although this is a good approach, there are other players that can contribute to pelvic control that are often forgotten.  One really important player is the external obliques.  The external obliques’ primary functions are to stabilize the trunk (in combination with the internal obliques, rectus abdominis and spinal erectors) by creating a brace around the spine and to create/prevent rotation at the trunk.  A function of the external obliques that is often forgotten is posterior tilt/control of the pelvis because of its attachment on the illiac crest.  When you’re stuck in anterior tilt the external obliques usually have poor control on the pelvis.

With their attachment directly on the pelvis, the external obliques play a big role in preventing anterior tilt.

Because of their role in posterior pelvic tilt, we could call the external obliques the lower abs.  Not that the bodybuilding guys were right in training their upper abs and lower abs separately, but there might be some merit in making the distinction between the rectus abdominis (who felxes the spine and depresses the ribs) and the external obliques (who posteriorly tilt the pelvis as we’ve just mentioned) in some cases.

Stay tuned for part 2!  I’ll go over exercises you can do to help improve pelvic control using the external obliques.

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