Retroversion is like tucking your tail between your legs, and is just the opposite; when you curl up in the fetal position and your spine curls in, that’s retroversion.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Arthur Sissman

#2: You definitely don’t want to be crunching your lower back when tipping your pelvis. This seems to be a common mistake — I think it happens from sticking your butt out via using the lower back rather than tilting the pelvis forward.

The part you want to pay attention to in the book is the squat in step 11 of the tallstanding chapter. This squat is really key — you soften the knees, groin, and tip the pelvis all in one action. It’s a squat as if you were sitting on a pelvis. I often find it helpful to put one finger on my iliac crest (where the pelvis sticks out; you can feel the bone) and one on the center of the hip joint, and as you squat you can see the tilt of the pelvis (the angle increases.) You want to increase this angle while keeping your back the same as it was before tilting (you don’t want to be crunching the lower back in particular.)

#4 — Two things you can do with your hand are:

Feeling the back of the neck. You should feel a curve like feeling the outside of a cup (but with less curvature) — and nothing sticking out. Pull your head forward and see how your neck feels — this will given you an intuition for how the back feels when your head is properly back (i.e., the opposite of how it feels when forward!)

For the tilt, I like to put one finger on the center of my ear and one on my nose and see that the nose is a bit lower than the ear (effectively finding this angle using my hand.)

#5 — I am not sure here, but I’d assume no. My guess is your weights properly on your heels, these won’t engage, but you will need to bend forward at the hips to counterbalance (step 10 in tallstanding.)

Good luck with the class and keep me posted!