After birth recovery … we all experience it differently, but we all need to help our bodies recover to some extent or other.
So, the all important question, how can we support our after birth recovery?
Here is a super easy quick tip, that you can easily (and will love to) slot into your day.
Horizontal rest.
These two words mixed with pregnancy and postpartum make my heart sing. As a pelvic floor physio, horizontal rest is the bee’s knees, especially for those first 6 weeks after birth.
Whether or not we have a vaginal birth, or a caesarean birth, a few short 5 minute bursts of horizontal rest thrown in throughout the day is enough to help with pelvic floor and abdominal recovery.
Let’s think of our pelvic floor area like a trampoline. Imagine before you were pregnant you had 1 kid sitting on the trampoline. Now imagine, by the end of pregnancy, you have 10 kids sitting on a trampoline. Can you imagine how much extra movement/bowing the trampoline will have? By the end of your pregnancy you can have an extra 10-15 kg sitting on top of your pelvic floor area. That’s a whole lot of extra stretch and bounce.
So if we think of our pelvic floor area like an elastic band that gets strettttccched during pregnancy and birth. We want that natural recoil to occur post birth as much as possible. We don’t want that elastic band sitting on stretch for more than we have to, right?
That is where horizontal rest comes in. A few minutes of horizontal rest can help reduce the weight of gravitational forces on the pelvic floor, reducing stretch, and improving recovery.
This is aiming to help reduce symptoms of prolapse, incontinence, pain, abdominal rectus diastasis, and more.
So ladies, let’s all throw in a few minutes of horizontal rest into our day once our baby is born (and preferably during pregnancy too).
Your body (and pelvic floor) will thank you for it 🙂
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