What causes lower cross syndrome?

Lower crossed syndrome happens when you sit too much. And almost all of us do, whether you have a desk job or not. Our society just has a lot of sitting involved with it. But if you do have a desk job, then you’re even more prone to this.

What does lower cross syndrome look like?

Lower crossed syndrome is when the muscles on the front of your hips become incredibly tight and begin to throw off the dynamic of where your pelvis sits. Your pelvis should be in a neutral position but can start to tilt forward where you can possibly end up with a little bit of a duck butt or you may notice in photos you have a belly hanging forward that’s actually not there but it looks like it because you’re really tight and its causing everything to draw forward. Additionally, people will tend to have pain in the front of their legs from this, or even low back issues.

How do you fix lower crossed syndrome?

When you come into the office we are working on it every time to restore the structural dynamic there but at home, there are a few things that you can do to help.  One of the first things is that if you’ve been assigned a lumbar traction pillow, to make sure that you’re using it every day. You can use a heating pad across the front of your hips while you’re doing your traction pillow to help relax the tight muscles and also the fascial layer there.

Then you can do some releases that you could do both with stretching and with a tennis ball to help release all of the damage done from too much sitting over time. The first home exercise that you’ll want to perform if you have lower crossed syndrome is to make sure that you’re doing your lumbar and cervical traction pillow every day.

You never want to do the lumbar traction pillow without the cervical traction pillow. It’s very important that you do both at the same time and to make sure that the placement is correct. You want the top of the lumbar pillow to sit at the bottom of the ribs and you want the bottom of the lumbar pillow to sit before your hips start.

While you’re doing the traction pillow, you can use a heating pad across the front of the hips to help release the tight muscles. You will want to do your traction pillows for the full 15 minutes. You can do the heat for that whole time too, or if you need to a break you can use the heating pad for just 5 to 10 minutes as well.

This is something that you would want to do every day along with your prescribed exercises to help release the front of the hips so that the dynamic of your pelvis and your low back can begin to heal.

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