5 Best Pregnancy Lower Back Pain Relief Exercises By Doctor Jo

 

 Hey everybody it's doctor Jo, and today I have a special guest with me Doctor Jen, and we're gonna talk about low back and pelvic pain during pregnancy. So let's get started. 

So Doctor Jen specializes in the pelvic floor. So this is awesome, that's why she's special. She's actually just a cool special person anyways, but she's also pregnant. Like it's not really fair forme to tell you what to do, but she's gonna tell you what to do. So tell me a little bit about what you do in general.

 So I am a pelvic floor physical therapist. What that means is I specialize in treating bowel, bladder, andsexual dysfunction in men, women, and little kids, and that includes the preand post partum population. so I see a lot of women who are dealing with pain,urinary or bowel issues during and after pregnancy. So a lot of stuff. Lots of lotsof stuff. yeah. So today we're going to talk about low back pain, pelvic pain during pregnancy cuz I think you kind of know about that. so let's get started tell me some things that you experienced in general being pregnant and those a ilments and what can you do to fix them.

 Perfect I think I speak for most womenin their third trimester when I say that there are a lot of changes that happenin your body. So some of the first things that change are your hormones. So your hormones are shifting all over the place and during the first and third trimester is when those hormones are the most variable. So you may see a woman who has barely gained any weight but is complaining of significant low back or pelvic pain because she has a special hormone called relaxin moving her pelvis to get ready for baby.  Then that happens a whole lot more in the third trimester. So those hormonal changes will cause some pain in general, but the next biggest problem during your third trimester is postural changes. So the weight of the baby as well as the weakness that occurs in yourbelly and your bottom changes the way that you stand and then the way that you transition.

 So all of a sudden you're experiencing pain as you get out of bed,bend over to pick up a child, tie your shoe. Name it it all hurts because our posture has changed. All that weight shifts forward.Yeah. Yes exactly, exactly so what we want to do today is talk about how you can bring that back to it what we would call a neutral posture to help calm down your pain. 

Awesome. yeah all right so you're gonna show us some stuff. I'm gonna show you guys my top five exercises for low back and pelvic pain during pregnancy. I just want to mention that these exercises are a balance of both mobilityand stability. So we do want your pelvic girdle to move, but we want it to move safely and we want it to move pain-free. Then the next category of exercises that we do are stability or what we call control exercises. 

To where you can get your body moving in a pain free range and stable in a pain free range. Cool. So the first thing that I want to do is I want to lie down. Now all of that to say if you are a bigger lady who's having a harder time lying on your back there are lots of modifications. You can grab a seat on the edge of the chair you can prop yourself up on a ton of pillows, but in general it is safe to lie on your back for short periods of time in the third trimester. so that's where I want to start today.

 So I'm going to go ahead and lie down on my back, and show you botha mobility and a stability exercise. all right we're gonna switch roo. right ohoh oh. see it's real here, it's not just me with a basket ball underneath my shirt. It's part of it okay. So in a relatively relaxed position with your hips and knees bent and feet flat what, I want you guys to do is connect to your pelvis and your low back. So the first direction that we really emphasize movement is that what we call a forward and a backward direction. 

You can see how she's coming kind of up and down with her belly there. Pretty cool. Yeah. This should be pain-free and initially your movements may be very very small. so for example a woman.