Question about cues for stacking the ribcage and pelvis in Baseworks
Group: Montreal Study Group: 2026 Winter Cohort Author: Sara Gomez | Posted: 2026-01-25
Hi Patrick and Asia, thanks for a really interesting session today!
I have a question relating to stacking the ribcage and pelvis. I have a tendency not to hold my pelvis in a neutral position and to flare out my ribcage. It can be difficult for me to correct this. I became aware of this several years ago when I took one-on-one reformer Pilates lessons with a kinesiologist while recovering from a spinal injury. It took a lot of indirect cues (like getting me to imagine “zippering” up my torso from the inside, etc.) to help me eventually understand these concepts and how it feels to close my ribcage and maintain a neutral pelvic position. Since Baseworks also emphasizes stacking the ribcage and pelvis, I am wondering if you have any indirect or visual cues that might be helpful for those of us with postural alignment issues who might struggle with this. By indirect or visual, I mean along the lines of how you instruct us to imagine pushing our heels towards each other as a way to get us to activate our leg muscles rather than just directing us to activate our leg muscles.
As a specific example relating to the ribcage: Lowering my shoulders will generally cause me to flare out my ribcage. Once my ribcage is flared out, it can be hard for me to figure out how to close it. If I were to take a moment to open my mouth and expel all the air in my lungs until I can feel my ribcage compress and my side abdominal muscles activate a bit, I’d have a better shot at achieving (and maintaining) a closed ribcage position while I perform the Baseworks sequence of lowering the shoulders, relaxing the neck and raising the head. Even visualizing pulling my lower ribs towards my belly button (while keeping my pelvis stable) before lowering my shoulders (or after, or during…) would help. Adding a cue prompting me to activate and neutralize my pelvis to some extent (even if it were just being occasionally instructed to rock the pelvis back and forth gently and to find a “middle position” to rest it in) would help me with stacking the ribcage and pelvis. All of this would result in me feeling more of a full-body activation in the Baseworks sequences we have done so far. I’m sure you have considered this and there’s a reason you focus on particular elements and not on others, and I would love to know your thoughts about this particular issue.
Thanks!
Sara
Replies
Section titled “Replies”Reply by Asia — 2026-01-26
Section titled “Reply by Asia — 2026-01-26”Hi @SLG (Sara)! Thank you very much for this thoughtful question.
It is also directly related to what @magali.lalonde asked about during the session.
What you’re describing - that drawing the shoulders down can make an already-flared ribcage flare more - often happens when working with these patterns initially.
I made a slide that shows why this happens. It shows three positions: (1) What we want to see in Baseworks - head, ribcage, pelvis stacked above the heels. If we apply pressure on this stack (by imagining someone pulling the arms toward the floor), the structure holds. (2) Common postural alignment: flared ribcage, anterior pelvic tilt, weight closer to the front of the foot. (3) What happens when we really pull the arms down from position (2) - the ribcage and pelvis shift forward uncomfortably.
This (2)→(3) transition is an exaggerated version of what you’re experiencing.
Why we can’t cue ribcage stacking like we cue leg activation
Here’s the key difference: “Pull the legs away” is a muscle co-activation pattern designed to create Distributed Activation - you feel muscles working. “Stack ribcage and pelvis” is a spatial pattern (related to the principle of Gridlines & Symmetry) - it’s about positioning points in space, not contracting specific muscles.
This is why the cueing approach is fundamentally different. In Baseworks, we guide muscles to contract around established joint conformations, not to force their positions through muscle contraction.
How capacity develops
If repeated verbal and visual cues aren’t enough to find the stacked position, this signals low capacity to sense and control movement in this particular task. The solution isn’t more cueing in the moment - it’s developing that capacity through practicing movement patterns across different forms and gravitational directions. This takes exposure to different tasks and practice.
Standing positions are actually very complex - too many moving parts to dissect effectively. We’ll work on ribcage stacking more directly in seated forms (EQUATE focus, Segment 3 in Primer) where hip grounding reduces degrees of freedom. Session 1 focused on only a few basic patterns, and we build the complete picture across all seven sessions.
Your overall observations are spot-on
I’d like to comment on how some of the observations you shared actually align beautifully with Baseworks methodology:
Your approach of expelling air to compress the ribcage in order to feel side abdominal activation resonates with one of our core principles: it is much easier to control a muscle when it’s already activated and you can feel it. That’s one function of Distributed Activation: to pre-activate muscles and create more sensation. What you’re describing uses a different strategy (breathing out) to achieve a similar principle.
Your visualization of pulling the lower ribs toward your navel matches how the brain actually computes movement. Rather than just sending signals to contract particular muscles, the brain selects a point it needs to move, then computes how much signal to send to various muscles to reconfigure joints so that point moves. An imaginary dot at the bottom of the ribcage (a few centimeters above the navel) is exactly one of the points we move a lot in Baseworks (red arrow in the attached slide). If your ribcage is flared, you can think that you need to move this dot back.
I also recommend to re-watch the video in 2.6 “Concept: Movement Patterns” from 1:33. It first talks about the distinction between using movement patterns to achieve Distributed Activation and to establish Gridlines & Symmetry. Then it shows what the stacked ribcage-pelvis looks like in different gravitational directions. And then it gives a complete basic set of cues in the Star Form (Including what most people will be doing to counteract the rib cage flaring).
We will definitely be addressing this question in practice across the upcoming sessions, but if you would like to clarify anything further here, please feel free to respond!