To Tuck or Not to Tuck

• June 19, 2023
• By Doran Richards

To Tuck or Not to Tuck

What are some of the main core directives we give throughout our classes? 

We encourage elongating the spine, head tethered to the ceiling, shoulders down and back, rooted on all four corners of your feet, shoulders over the hips, hips over the heels, rooting down to rise up… these are all very common directives we hear and practice in every class. 

The one we will focus on here is “tuck your tailbone.”

What does tucking your tailbone embody? Naturally we think of our sacrum and coccyx when we hear the words to tuck our pelvis. The sacrum has five sacral vertebrae and sits posterior in our bodies at the base of our spines. But when we tuck, are we tucking to an unnatural position or are we just aligning correct positioning of our pelvis as it sits in our body? 

If we use terminology, “tuck” – lets use it in a way that brings awareness to our alignment of pelvis, not to extremely tuck beyond the neutral pelvis.

By aligning our pelvis neutral, we then can know that we are distributing our weight evenly and can carry the upper body with the utmost strength and stability without long term damage or weakening of our lumbar, shortening of the lumbar, and giving us optimal whole-body alignment.

People have an anterior tilt, or a posterior tilt naturally because of years of bad postures and habits that cause our body to not recognize the neutral station, hence the possible need for this directive to be given in class or in a pose. 

When we have an anterior tilt to our pelvis, it creates tension on the lower back, or hypertension. When we have a posterior tilt, or extreme tucking of the pelvis, this will then take out the natural curvature of your spine.

Some of the more common poses we would use a directive explaining “tuck your tailbone” or find your “neutral pelvis position” would be:

Warrior One

Warrior Two

Crescent Pose

Mountain Pose

Tree Pose

These poses can be deepened by bringing the pelvis back or forward around to neutral, in alignment with our hips over knees, and knees over the ankles. When we “tuck” under, the stretch and pose can be more intense and we feel the sensation of strengthening, lengthening, and working of the muscles hugging the bones. There is benefit to this directive here.

The next time you teach, help your students understand the mechanics of this directive and guide them into great yogi posture. You can encourage your students (and yourself) to feel the pose in extreme forward tilt and backward tilt, then to neutral tilt to feel the difference and make their experience deeper as they learn how to align their pelvis.

To tuck or not to tuck – no matter your belief, may you always be aligned from head to toe in each and every pose you do!

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