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How Your Body Changes During Pregnancy, and How Clinical Pilates Can Help

mail@bodyincommon.com — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 12:33:50 +0000

COVID 19 Update: Physiotherapy Open. Group Fitness Now Doing Online Live Classes

How Your Body Changes During Pregnancy, and How Clinical Pilates Can Help

“Are you currently pregnant and starting to think about your body after giving birth?
Or have you just given birth and have noticed changes in your body?
Do you feel like your tummy is bulging a lot even after delivery?
Do you want to get back to exercising, but don’t know where to start safely?”

All Bodies Change During Pregnancy

This article is dedicated to all the moms out there, either those who are preparing to be a new mom, or to those of you who are still new to all the sudden changes in the body after giving birth to your baby. This will be a great chance for you to get to know your body a little bit more.

After delivery, your body will face some changes, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. People often say that your body will never be the same anymore, but the good news is that by understanding the changes and doing the right things, you can mostly get back to your pre-baby self.

Body Change Number 1 -
The Mummy Tummy Bulge

After giving birth, it’s normal to have a bulging tummy.

You may feel a gap located right in the centre of your tummy muscles. This gap is called Diastasis Recti. You may have heard of this issue, but most women go into Childbirth without ever having heard about it. Then after birth, you suddenly get a surprise!

There are two common reactions to this. Either you ignore it, or you think that something has gone wrong with your body.

But don’t worry, this is a very common symptom of giving birth, with plenty of science to fix it.

What is Diastasis Recti?

Diastasis Recti is basically the separation of your Rectus Abdominis (your six-pack abs). This separation happens down the middle of your six-pack muscles (at the Linea Alba).

During pregnancy, your body naturally releases hormones to relax your muscles in preparation for childbirth. Unfortunately the side effect is that every muscle in your body relaxes – not just specific ones. All of your connective tissues also relax, leading to the separation of your six pack.

Our abdominal area consists of four main muscles:

Rectus Abdominis (Six-Pack)
Internal and External Obliques (To the sides of your six-pack)
Transverse Abdominis, which hides underneath all of the other muscles. (Remember this one!)

There are a few factors that may worsen Diastasis, but one of the major factors is having a weak Core.

Your Core is made up of your Transversus Abdominis, Pelvic Floor, and Multifidus, a deep muscle situated in your lower back. Your core supports your body in positionand also holds you together.

To relate this back to the mummy tummy (Diastasis), imagine wearing a pair of loose jeans without having a belt to keep them up. Without that belt, the jeans will remain loose until you tighten up the belt.

Here, the belt is your Core muscles (not your six pack!), and to get rid of the mummy tummy, you need to tighten all of these back up.

Be Careful When Doing Sit-Ups!

Unfortunately, the most common answer people have is to do lots of crunches and sit-ups, thinking that they’ll keep in shape. What this actually does is to overwork your Rectus Abdominis during pregnancy.

By doing lots of abdominal crunches, sit-ups, chest curls during this period of time will encourage the separation of your abs (at the Linea Alba), causing the gap to be bigger, longer, or deeper.

Moral of the story: be careful what exercises you do during pregnancy!

Change Number 2 - Postpartum Fatigue

After giving birth, You’ll notice that you get tired more often than before.

Studies have shown that fatigue is a common problem for mothers after they give birth. With more tasks to do and more things to take care of now, your body might be trying to do too much.

You might be getting insufficient sleep and nutrition, might have breastfeeding difficulties, and find getting back to normal is quite stressful. You may also notice you have less motivation during this stage.

Exercise is the Key to Getting Over Fatigue

While doing exercises or any physical activities, our body releases chemicals called Endorphins. These chemicals make us more energized and reduce our stress levels

As I mentioned earlier, not all exercises are suitable just after pregnancy. For example, focusing only on sit ups can make the Mummy Tummy worse. That’s definitely not what we want! You may also want to be careful doing too many stretching-style classes, as your body has already become quite slack and ‘relaxed’ during pregnancy.

Low-impact, balanced, strength workouts are a great choice. Pilates is one of the best options during this time.

Change Number 3 - Incontinence

This may not be as common (luckily!), but you may notice some urine leakage when you’re doing big movements, such as coughing or laughing. You might also notice that you have less control over your urge to go to the toilet. When you feel the urge, you have to go immediately. It’s also quite common to need to go to the toilet more frequently.

This is due to the Pelvic Floor getting weaker as the body prepares to give birth.

After delivery, a good recovery is important to prevent incontinence. This means that we need to rebuild our Pelvic Floor strength. These muscles not only act as a support to hold our urine in, but they also keep our organs in place, and play an important role in sexual function.

Re-training the Pelvic Floor muscles is one of the more difficult tasks. After giving birth, it’s hard to feel them properly, and often quite hard to control their motion. Seeing an exercise specialist will really help with this specific problem.

Change Number 4 - New Pains and Aches

As you’ll remember, during pregnancy our bodies pump themselves full of muscle relaxant hormones to make giving birth easier. This means that after pregnancy, our muscles are not the same as before. We’ve also been carrying a 3-4kg weight in front of our bodies for months!

Developing aches in the lower back, upper back, neck, and wrists is a very common postpartum problem.

In particular, your posture will be slightly different than before, which will be putting new strains on your spine and neck muscles. It’s quite common that some muscles will be tighter on one side, and weaker on another side.

While many women just accept this part of the process, when these pains and aches appear, it’s always a good idea to get them checked as soon as possible. This is because our muscles are highly adaptable, and will not always grow back into the optimal position and length without help. It may be something simple that you can actually work on and solve quickly.

How can Clinical Pilates Help Get Back into Shape After Giving Birth?

Clinical Pilates is very effective in building strength, improving body postures, enhancing body awareness, reducing body pains and injuries, as well as preventing falls.

Clinical Pilates is fundamentally different from fitness Pilates, as it’s run by registered professionals, such as Physiotherapists. The exercises we do in Clinical Pilates are targeted, and clinically-proven, science-backed movements (hence the name!).

The first step of any Clinical Pilates programme is to get yourself properly assessed by a Physiotherapist. They do a detailed assessment of your body, your goals, and issues, and at the same time understand where and how the problems arise. This allows us to design a programme specific to your body.

For instance, if you do have a Diastasis Recti, what we do after getting a proper assessment is to start getting some activation through your Transversus Abdominis.

Our first step is to make sure you’re getting the activation correctly, and also making sure you feel what you’re supposed to feel. This allows you to start safely working on the issues, instead of working on the wrong things.

For Further Information

If you have already given birth, We have a dedicated article discussing Diastasis Recti, and giving you some tips to start safely working on it at home.

It’s never too early or too late to talk to a professional about your body. Look after yourself, and best of luck with your pregnancy!

“Body in Common is an Australian-Style Physiotherapy Studio in Bangsar, Malaysia. We provide Physiotherapy and Clinical Pilates services in our studio, as well as online Telehealth services. Feel free to get in touch and look after yourself.”

See Our Home Exercises for
Fixing the Mummy Tummy

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Diastasis Recti

mail@bodyincommon.com — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 06:17:43 +0000

COVID 19 Update: Physiotherapy Open. Group Fitness Now Doing Online Live Classes

Get Your Body Confidence Back After Pregnancy with Clinical Pilates.

Want us to contact you about 1-on-1 Post-Natal Pilates or Diastasis Pilates? Fill out the form, and we’ll get in touch!

Diastasis Recti: Recovering your tummy after giving birth.

Pregnancy starts a large range of changes in a woman’s body. Muscles start to relax to allow for big changes in both your tummy and your pelvic floor. As the baby grows, they push on the walls of your abdomen, causing the belly to expand, and the abdominal walls to separate. This is Diastasis Recti: the dreaded ‘Mummy Tummy’.

While there may be stretch marks on the surface, there is something more significant happening underneath.

Your abdomen is actually made of more than one layer of muscles. On the top is the most obvious: your ‘six pack’ muscles (aka the ‘Rectus Abdominis’). These are the most famous, but for women, they are definitely not the most important.

The muscles that are really doing all the work are you core muscles (aka ‘Transverse Abdominis’, ‘TVA’ or ‘TA’ for short). These muscles are the corsette or ‘spanx’ holding your body together: keeping your guts in, and your tummy tight.

Why do you Get Diastasis?

Unfortunately during pregnancy, your TA and your Sick Pack get in the way of your baby bulge and something has to give! The muscles separate down the middle, allowing everything to spill forward – making plenty of space for the baby. When the baby is gone, your muscles are still relaxed and weakened from the Pregnancy. You’re still left with this gap between the muscles and the dreaded ‘mummy tummy’!

This separation is measured in finger widths. 1 Finger is pretty good, 2 fingers is common, and 4 fingers is getting quite big. You can measure yourself, but the measurement won’t be accurate unless done by a professional.

Apart from ruining your beach body, this separation also reduces your core strength, which can lead to additional effects such as posture issues, associated weak pelvic floor, and other muscle imbalances.

It’s definitely worth reducing that gap!

Does Exercise Really Work at Reducing Diastasis?

The bad news is that ab crunches and traditional core workouts may not solve your diastasis. These workouts heavily work the ‘Rectus Abdominis’ (Six Pack), but are not very good at working your TA (your core). You can be working hard for months and have strong abs, but still have a bulging tummy, ruining all that work.

What we really need to work on is that underlying core. It acts like a corsette, and if we tighten up the TA, that tummy bulge will start to reduce.

Clinical Pilates is a very successful method for targeting this core area, and if done 2 to 3 times a week, you will notice big improvements in as little as a few months (Sorry, no quick fixes or magic drugs to sell you here!).

If you’re in Kuala Lumpur, have a look at our Clinical Pilates system and get in touch. If not, we have a few tips below to get your started.

Exercises for you to Do at Home.

One: Engaging the Core by finding your neutral spine.

The most difficult part is actually engaging your core in the first place. Start by lying on your back, hands by your sides, and knees bent with feet on the ground.

Start rocking your pelvis back and forth, slowly creating an arch in the lower back, and then flattening it out again. The key is to keep your upper back glued to the floor: you’re not arching your whole back!

As you rock back and forth, slowly come to a neutral position between fully arched, and fully flat. You should have space under your lower back for a blueberry, your ribs will still be fully against the floor.

When you have the position right you will feel a light contraction in your tummy (a tightness across the centre), but you still want your six pack to be asleep. If you let your six pack take over, try again until you find the position. You may not be able to feel your TA at first: it’s been a long time since it has been used! That’s ok. Just check for the light tension with your hands.

Once you’ve successfully engaged your core without engaging your bigger six pack, just trying breathing exercises first. Big inhales, big exhales. Your core hasn’t been used in a long time, and it will get tired.

Two: Abdominal Hollowing

If you’ve successfully found the right position and engaged your core (your ‘TA’), then you can start to turn it off and on again by doing abdominal hollowing.

Still lying on your back, try to lightly draw your belly button inwards towards your spine using only your core (Don’t let your six pack do the work!). Hold for 10 seconds, and then let your belly spill back slowly towards the ceiling. Do this 5 to 10 times, and then have a good break. If you try to do too much in one go, your sick pack will definitely take over.

Three: The Plank

Lying on your tummy, try bring your body up into a straight plank between your knees and your elbows. Don’t worry about trying to do a full plank just yet (a full plank is from your feet to your elbows).

The key again is to keep focusing on your core muscles. If you’ve been working on exercises one and two, you will start to become more aware of what is your six pack (Rectus Abdominis), and what is your core (Transverse Abdominis). We want the work to be in your core!

Hold the pose for only 20-30 seconds when your start out, and then build up from there. 3 to 5 planks is all you need.

Remember to rest properly once you’ve done exercises. You don’t get any gains if your muscles don’t get recovery time.