Can someone tell me why we are all so excited to talk about all things pregnancy but then when the baby is here we just. stop. talking…? I mean, yeah, I get the excitement of it all is great, but this woman JUST destroyed herself carrying the baby then delivering the baby. This is when things get interesting for a biomechanical nerd. There are so many changes that take place throughout pregnancy that can affect someone for the rest of their lives if not addressed properly.
First off, we have the dreaded diastasis recti (AKA DRA). There’s an important reason why this happens in pregnant women. You’ve got to make room for that baby while they are growing, so what else is going to happen but separation of your abdominal muscles? It’s worse in some versus others, but there are ways of fixing it without surgery. When someone has DRA that hints at me they have significantly compromised core, so we want to address this separation and improve the core quickly following delivery, because I would hate for a woman to be picking their baby up then throw out their back. It’s happened before, and trust me it ain’t pretty. We use different functional exercises to do this in our practice based on functional progressions that each and every one of us go through at different points in our development. We literally bring it back to the basics...so if you see me rolling around on the floor, I’m working on my core, I promise ;)
Then we have the ever-so forgotten, but one of the most important muscles: The Diaphragm. This is the one that brings air into your lungs and gives you life. But we all forget about it because if we can’t see it, then we don’t care about it, right? This is one that is hard to use while you are pregnant, but the exercises to work it out can be done almost immediately following almost any kind of labor.
Pierce has been into the postpartum game for a while now, but like with most things in our life, I’m a little later to the party. So, we are pivoting our focus to being the most well-informed postpartum team San Antonio has seen. That doesn’t mean we won’t be here for your prenatal moms and any of you on your conception journey, because we ARE. We just want to also be the ones there when the dust settles.
Since we all locked ourselves up in 2020, I’ve been on a mission to learn more about the biomechanical changes, how to address them and help my patients be stronger than before. I’ve sat through hours of education on it and plan to do more this year and next.
So consider this our official announcement: tell your diastasis recti, your diaphragms and your cores we are coming for them. Are you a freshly minted mom who wants to start rehabbing her core? Give us a call, we’d be happy to help :)
