I recently wrote a post for my tango site, accesstango.com about hip dropping in tango and why it is not a great idea. Well, it’s not a great idea to drop our hips in walking or standing regardless of tango dancing or not. So better than hip dropping let us look at Pelvic Listing. Pelvic Listing is a great exercise for developing lateral hip stability. What does that mean? It means that “over-used knees and under-used hips typically go together”. It means more support to your pelvis for walking, standing, and everything else you do. When we walk we need the leg to swing through to the next step and how we swing that leg through is determined by how much you are using the muscles of the lateral hips of the non-swinging leg.
Most of us tend to fall when we walk because we don’t have proper hip strength or hamstring length to propel ourselves through space. This is
part of a much longer blog on walking which you can also find on Katy Bowman’s blog. In the meantime, start Pelvic Listing by standing with both feet pelvic width apart, their outside edges lined up parallel to a straight line. Putting the weight in your heels, push the standing leg into the floor until the free leg clears the floor. Here’s a picture of me Pelvic Listing. You can always make things more challenging by standing on a phone book (if you have one lying around! or an anatomy textbook! or yoga block).
and see the video below of Katy performing the exercise from her DVD collection.