How Is Your Pelvic Floor After Pregnancy & Birth?

How Is Your Pelvic Floor After Pregnancy & Birth?

Do the Pelvic Floor Test

If you ever had a baby, you may have gotten used to and accepted:

  • Tthe odd or more frequent leak occurring when you don’t expect it
  • Recurring, niggling back problems
  • A gap in your still-unjoined tummy muscles
  • A general lack of tone in your middle area
  • A feeling that things didn’t quite go back the way you would have expected following the birth of your baby

Your pelvic floor, tummy muscles and back muscles form your core which gives you stability in your daily life.

Your pelvic floor is *always* weakened by pregnancy.

Women who have had c-sections and women who had vaginal births both go on to develop the same pelvic floor weakness.

Tummy muscles which have stretched and separated during pregnancy need to rejoin and tone. The attachments for your tummy muscles are right down near your pubic bone, up under your ribs and stretch right around your back to the top of your pelvis…

These muscles need to be ‘switched back on’ again so that they work together automatically, in the right order and in symphony with your pelvic floor, to achieve a strengthened core.

Many women who suffer pelvic pain, instability or back pain during or after pregnancy already had imbalances in how some of their major muscles were working prior to pregnancy. Carrying a baby only accentuates these problems.

So how do you know how strong your pelvic floor is?

One simple way is to do the balloon test:

Blow up a balloon and one of three things will happen:

  1. You will have a sudden urge to wee, or:
  2. Your pelvic floor will lower but you will control the urge to wee, or:
  3. Your pelvic floor will actually rise… yes a well toned pelvic floor will respond to the task by automatically rising.

How can Postnatal Yoga help?

Many of the health problems we experience after the birth of our babies and later on in our lives, all go back to our pregnancies and births.

We have a lot of advice given to us on nutrition and exercise in pregnancy but almost no guidance on how to put our bodies back together after having a baby.

Postnatal Yoga teaches a comprehensive set of gentle yoga and breathing exercises for women in the first month and first year after giving birth, to:

  • Realign the pelvis
  • Strengthen the pelvic floor
  • Rejoin tummy muscles
  • Progressively give a woman back her body after birth.

Post-natal yoga also works well for an increasing number of women with older children who were never given postnatal yoga practises to do when they had their baby, and who would like the chance to do so now.

My Own Story

My own experience shows that it is never too late to address these problems!

Three years after the birth of my first child I suffered from:

  • Mild stress incontinence (from a weak pelvic floor)
  • Pelvic instability (from postural problems pre-dating my pregnancy)
  • Hip and leg pain (from high impact running with a misaligned pelvis

Within nine days of taking up Postnatal Yoga the stress incontinence problems were gone, and within two months I had realigned and stabilised my pelvis.

This then enabled me to take up a low impact sport (swimming along with classical yoga) to improve and work on my flexibility in my newly aligned and ‘switched on’ body.

A strong core means that you have found your centre again. As mothers we are pulled left right and centre by everyone in our lives..

We are the source and we need a strong core to stay physically and emotionally stable so that we can keep providing and nurturing those around us.

I can honestly say that through doing Postnatal Yoga I integrated both of my birth experiences, one of which was traumatic; and it helped me transition out of my ‘Postnatal Body’ and into being a Woman again.

And do you know? Two and a half months on from starting these exercises my posture became better than it had ever been prior to my two pregnancies!

To find out about the next 12-Week Postnatal Yoga course starting on 11th September :: Click Here ::