Are you struggling to know that if you're contracting your core and using it properly during your workouts? Are you left with back pain or shoulder pain after you've gone to the gym? Let's go over today what a neutral pelvis is and how it can protect your body and engage your core properly so that you get the best workout possible. I'm Kristen Feline, a certified role for and Pilates Instructor and today we're going to use Dr. Mitchell Israel as a dummy to help us learn what a neutral core is. So we're going to use our hands to help guide our body and learn this position. So we're going to take the pinky part of our hand and we're going to place it on the knobby bone of our pelvis and we're going to use both hands. This doesn't matter how much padding you have here, we're looking at the bones. So the hand bone to the hip bone. We're going to take our index fingers and we're going to place them towards our pubic bone. Thumbs are going to come together so that we create a diamond or a triangle right over top of our bladder here. Now just holding our hands in this position, if you push your knee or your feet into the floor it's going to press your low back and squish it. Yeah, your butt doesn't have to lift up fully but just squishing that back down a little bit. Now if you let go of that pressure in your feet and you arch your back, yes. So we're going to keep going through this motion. We're just going to go between the two positions here. Now as you arch your back, your thumbs lift up towards the ceiling and as you push your foot, your index fingers lift up. Now you're going to stop at a place where you feel like your index fingers and your thumbs are completely flat. That's going to be the same. If we were to put a cup of tea right here, you wouldn't drip tea anywhere because they're completely flat. Those bones are held very neutral. So now we're in this neutral spine position. Everything we do in the gym, whether it's standing up, bicep curls or whether it's a bench press that we're laying down, we're trying to hold this neutral position. If we can't hold this position, our weight is too much. Even if you think you can do more, it's more important to stabilize your pelvis and your lower spine than to have extra weight in this bench press. So Dr. Israel from this point, I want you to just try and feel, take a couple of breaths and push your thumbs up towards the ceiling with your air, not with your bones moving. Perfect, just like that. So being able to use our core efficiently has three pieces to it. We have the alignment, which we just learned with our neutral pelvis. We have breathing, which Dr. Israel is working on now. And then we have concentrated control, which is the next movement to come if we were to challenge by moving a leg or an arm or throwing a weight somewhere on his body to create a challenged control. You can use this pressing into your feet and arching your back to hone in your neutral pelvis and finding where your body is held in the best position to get the maximum contraction and stability through your core and your spine. So we press into our feet and we arch our back like we did at the beginning. And then we focus on breathing to learn the best positions for our core. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this neutral pelvis exercise helps you to hone into your core. And if you have any questions or concerns, please leave a comment below.