PREGNANT WOMEN LISTEN UP!
Your muscles will inevitably go into spasm. Which ones they will be I don’t know, but I am willing to bet it will be one of The Big Three or all of them. These muscles all are intimately related to pelvic and low back stability. You have your lumbar spine erector spinae, your iliopsoas and the piriformis.
The erector spinae muscles lay on either side of the spine and go from the low back all the way up into the neck. They’re a group of muscles including the iliocostalis, longissimus, and spinalis (try saying those three times fast). The names don’t really matter as long as we know what they are meant to do and why they aren’t working properly for you. So, normally these muscles are meant to only be spinal stabilizers and are only meant to keep you standing upright (and sometimes will help with rotation of the spine)...but guess what. During pregnancy you’re putting a lot on these guys, but don’t worry, it’s not your fault, it’s just the nature of the beast. Your center of gravity gets thrown off and these muscles wind up becoming strength muscles just trying to properly keep you from collapsing forward. Fun stuff, eh?
Outside of being a fun word to try and say for the first time, the iliopsoas is your primary hip flexor and is responsible for bringing your knee to your chest. Sometimes it can be in such a spasm it is seen on x-ray. We don’t need to X-ray you though to know yours is in spasm, don’t you worry mama. The reason yours is going into spasm gets back to the whol center of gravity being thrown off again, however this is more related to your pelvic center of gravity. Your pelvis goes into what has been coined ‘Lower Crossed Syndrome’ by people smarter than me. Basically your pelvis tilts forward to accommodate a growing baby and indicates spasm in some muscles and weakness in others, in this case, we are talking about the iliopsoas.
The piriformis is such a tiny muscle but is the biggest pain in the butt. This muscle is responsible for causing sciatic-like symptoms in many people, whether they are pregnant or not. Without having any kind of trauma in pregnancy, I just assume this is the culprit if a patient comes in complaining of numbness/burning/tingling going down their leg. It is responsible for external rotation of the hips (opening your leg up). In pregnancy it acts as a sacral stabilizer and is just trying to keep your pelvis glued together, because let’s face it, your ligaments are drunk on Relaxin.
We have a video about how you can stretch these muscles out available to our followers on Facebook and Youtube. If you’re experiencing low back spasms and are pregnant (or not) these are pretty easy and reliable stretches to help while you wait to get into see us.
Give us a call at (210) 323-2163 to get on the schedule, we are always happy to help you have a comfortable pregnancy :)
