Pregnancy is a very transformative experience and brings many changes to your body, mind, and relationships. Trying to prioritize yourself during pregnancy and prepare your body to experience this new journey is important.  Pelvic physical therapy can be a game-changer during this transformative time, providing comfort, support, and strength. In this post, we’ll explore how pelvic physical therapy can help you feel your best through every stage of pregnancy.

What is Pelvic Physical Therapy? 

Pelvic physical therapy is a specialty in physical therapy where the physical therapists have taken extensive continuing education to evaluate and provide treatments to the pelvis, including the muscles, ligaments, and connective tissues of the pelvis floor and surrounding areas including the lumbar spine, hips and abdomen. These areas are particularly affected during pregnancy due to the physical demands of carrying a baby. A specialized pelvic physical therapist works with you to stabilize, improve mobility on only the hips, spine, knees/ankles but also the pelvic floor and abdomen to promote overall well-being and a more comfortable pregnancy.

How Pelvic PT Benefits You During Pregnancy

Pain Relief

Pregnancy often comes with discomfort or pain in the lower back, hips, and pelvis. Pelvic physical therapy helps to address these common aches by focusing on proper alignment, posture, and muscle balance, reducing discomfort so you can move with more ease.

Prepare Your Body for Birth:

Strengthening and balancing your pelvic floor and core muscles can help your body prepare for labor and delivery. Pelvic physical therapy can also teach you techniques to relax and lengthen your pelvic floor muscles during labor, breathing strategies, and positioning during labor and delivery. 

Preventing Pelvic Floor Dysfunction

Pelvic floor issues such as urinary/fecal leakage or prolapse can occur during or after pregnancy. Pelvic physical therapy helps prevent or resolve these conditions by improving muscle performance with coordination, lengthening and strengthening these pelvic floor muscles for a resilient pelvic floor for your life or any future pregnancies. 

Support Your Changing Body

As your baby grows, your posture and center of gravity shift, placing strain on your body. Pelvic physical therapy provides manual therapy to help with stiffness in the spine, hips and pelvis, and exercises and mobility for home to support these changes, helping to keep you feeling balanced and strong as your body adapts.

Promote Recovery After Birth

Pelvic physical therapy isn’t just beneficial during pregnancy—it also sets you up for a quicker, healthier recovery postpartum. This includes education of your specific changes to your body whether cesaeren birth or vaginal birth, manual therapy to help with any pain postpartum, mobility and strengthening for your core and pelvic floor, so you can return to taking care of yourself, baby and back to any movement/exercise routine you’d like to be doing. 

What to Expect from Pelvic PT Sessions During Pregnancy 

During a pelvic physical therapy session, your physical therapist will assess your posture, movement patterns, total spinal/hip mobility, core/gluteal strength, Diastasis Recti screening, breathing dynamics, and pelvic floor function– strength, relaxation, coordination, prolapse screening. Sessions typically include a combination of education to help empower you through your different trimesters, manual therapy, gentle exercises, mobility (stretches) to focus on, and breathing techniques, perineal massage education, labor & delivery positioning and breathing, and preparing for birth sessions tailored to your specific needs and stage of pregnancy. 

Who Should Consider Pelvic Physical Therapy?

Pelvic physical therapy is beneficial for most pregnant women, but it can be especially helpful if you’re experiencing:

• Lower back, hip, or pelvic pain
• Urinary incontinence
• Concerns about labor or delivery
• A previous pelvic floor injury or condition
• Desire for better postpartum recovery

Your body is doing an amazing job of growing and supporting your baby, and pelvic physical therapy can help you feel stronger, more comfortable, and better prepared for birth. Whether you’re experiencing discomfort or simply want to be proactive about your health, pelvic physical therapy can be a vital part of your prenatal care routine. If you’re curious about how pelvic PT can support you during pregnancy, reach out to a specialist to learn more.

If you’re interested in learning more about pelvic physical therapy during pregnancy, ReGenerate Physiotherapy offers prenatal sessions AND we have our thorough Thrive and Flourish Prenatal Wellness Program for expecting moms. Schedule a consultation with us today to learn more about ours sessions and see how we can help you on your journey to motherhood.

I have had this question so often… how do I know if I need to relax my pelvic floor muscles?

So, let’s talk about what that means and who needs to be doing that.

First, the pelvic floor muscles again support organs, control sphincters (pee, poop), they stabilize the spine/pelvis and everything that attaches to the pelvis and spine, they help with healthy sexual function, they allow for good circulation through the pelvis. The pelvic floor muscles don’t just do the lifting contraction also known as a kegel.

So, you may have found on social media and through Google searches that it’s important to relax the pelvic floor muscles. What does that mean?

Relaxing the pelvic floor simply means that you know how to lengthen or elongate the pelvic floor muscles so that you can have good bladder emptying and bowel emptying, allow for penetrative intercourse, good stability of the spine and pelvis, and allow for a delivery of baby vaginally.

The reason why this is so important is otherwise you might struggle with constipation, urinary leakage and pelvic pain, including pain while sitting, walking, moving, and pain with penetrative intercourse or the use of tampons or menstrual cups.

Women and men alike struggle with overactive or hypertonic pelvic floor muscles.

Who needs to relax the pelvic floor muscles?

The people that need to relax the pelvic floor muscles are struggling with some of these problems:

Pain prior to bowel movements and relief of pain after

Constipation, which means firm stools almost like pebbles, difficulty getting out your stool.

Urinary leakage or urgency of having to use the bathroom and frequency.

People with interstitial cystitis

People with vulvodynia,

Tailbone pain

Pain in the testicles, penis or vulva.

It’s so important to get assessed by a pelvic physical therapist when you’re struggling with any of these issues. Again, a pelvic physical therapist is one that assesses the entire body, and assesses the pelvic floor muscles internally and externally.

If you see a general orthopedic physical therapist that does not assess these muscles, you are not going to fix the problem efficiently. It may take longer and you may not get full resolution.

If you don’t struggle within these problems, lengthening the pelvic floor is still important to do.

First to avoid any of the above problems from happening.

How do you lengthen the pelvic floor muscles?  

Some of the ways to do that are going through different types of exercise. Squats are phenomenal for strengthening but also lengthening or relaxing the pelvic floor muscles. So I always tell clients to squat!

Exercising the body is a great way to not only exercise your heart, your brain, your bones, and joints, but also a really great way to maintain great pelvic floor, health and strength. And do not focus on doing “Ab work”.

Another key thing is always to stay hydrated, drinking enough water. Making sure to drink half of your body weight in fluid ounces.

Certain hip opening and rib cage mobility exercises found in yoga, pilates or stretching programs can help.

In conclusion… 

If you have ever been told to just relax the pelvic floor muscles, it may not be something you can control and resolve on your own, and is just poor advice!!  So trying to do these things at home without getting an assessment, again can lengthen the duration in which it might take to resolve your symptoms. A pelvic physical therapy can give you better answers to what is causing your tight pelvic floor muscles.

So, we offer free consultation to see if you’re a good fit for pelvic physical therapy here with us. We would love to hear from you!

We are entering a new journey in our mom culture and it is called postpartum recovery aka recovery after baby. Why has it taken so long to get this implemented in our country and world again? We used to be set up very differently in our culture, but times have changed, and mom has become pretty darn low on the priority list after baby!!

Oftentimes you’ll get comments like this after baby has been born…

How is baby doing? How is baby sleeping? How is baby eating? Oh… baby is so cute, can I hold her?

Moms are often left behind and often very minimally supported in postpartum recovery. It’s almost like this is a luxury, which is absurd!! Think of a place where mom was rested, fed, attended to after baby… how much more calm would baby and mom be?

There are many aspects that change after baby, emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Today, I want to address the changes to your body after baby.

So, for 10 months your deep core muscles are stretched out and have long term pressure on them… and 100% of women get diastasis rectus abdominus — see image below. This is a stretch of the connective tissue between the 6-pack muscles (rectus abdominus). In 30-40% of postpartum women this connective tissue does not return back to normal. If it doesn’t, most moms can have “mommy tummy” and it can lead to hip pain, low back pain, pelvic pain and leaking urine.

Another big event is pushing out baby or having a c-section… Now when you push out baby you can have a tear of connective tissue in the vagina or perineum. It is absolutely wild to me that you can have this big event of a tear or c-section and no rehab postpartum. For any other type of tear or strain of muscles in the body we have rehab (torn hamstring, torn rotator cuff, biceps, calf). So if this is you, then you would highly benefit from physical therapy to restore muscle function, activation and most importantly restore pain-free movement and increase strength!

Oftentimes women can also be diagnosed with prolapse (bulge of tissue at vagina opening) after baby. Please please note that women can feel symptoms of a prolapse after baby, oftentimes it’s just swollen and blood engorged tissue, your OB/GYN, midwife or postpartum physical therapist will check after baby. Symptoms of prolapse are fullness in vagina, tampon feeling in vagina, low back pain, and some women have no symptoms at all. This image below depicts what a prolapse is, and different types. Physical therapy is highly effective in reducing a prolapse, and oftentimes depending on how significant the prolapse, the prolapse can be reduced altogether.

Then there are symptoms you can have after birth that are common, but not normal… I repeat, not normal after baby, meaning you DO NOT have to live with these symptoms.

Here are some common symptoms:

• Leaking with cough, laugh, sneeze, or jump (stress)
• Going to the bathroom every 30 minutes with strong urge
• Constipation
• Painful intercourse
• Wearing a pad all day long
• Pelvic pain
• C-section pain

So… what do you need to do?

Well pelvic physical therapy is a standard in many other countries around the world to assess how pelvic floor and core is functioning after birth and to rule out the above issues that can arise from pregnancy and birth. So every woman would highly benefit from an evaluation from a pelvic physical therapist after baby is born.

If these symptoms are dealt with early on, then mom can avoid the negative side effects including: postnatal depletion, chronic pain in pelvis/low back, leaking urine and stool with no control, pain with intercourse/intimacy, advanced prolapse, and decreased confidence.

You are strong, courageous, and powerful. You do not need to live with these symptoms, even if other people have told you… “Well you are a mom, this is what happens….”. You do not have to live your life in this lie, you can have confidence in your body again, you do have control!

It’s important to seek out a pelvic physical therapist that knows how to assess accurately for pelvic floor muscle dysfunction and how to treat it so you CAN learn how to move in your new body after baby. Not only will a PT find the root cause of the problem, but will help lessen the DRA, but also prevent injuries to your pelvic floor and further into your low back, hips, or knees. Don’t wait for the leaking, pain, or a prolapse to disappear – act now and prevent any of these symptoms from happening or just get rid of them. We know how important an active and healthy lifestyle is to you, and we’re here to help.

Click here to book a free phone consult with your local South Atlanta pelvic physical therapist.