Pelvic Floor Relaxation ❤️

🪷Pelvic floor Relaxation in Pregnancy🪷

In gestational care we hear a lot about strengthening pelvic floors, lax pelvic floor muscles, long term issues from lacking pelvic floor strength, BUT we talk very little about how the ability to RELAAAAAAX the pelvic floor is important too 🤔.

Generally in life, but *particularly* in pregnancy, at the end of which you likely will have to rely on maximum pelvic floor relaxation at the moment of the baby’s birth.

So, instead of frantically trying to strengthen your PF, think about investing some time into *downtraining* your pelvic muscles too 🤓.

How?

💥 Sit comfortably and breathe. Your pelvic floor should relax and bulge downwards a little with an inbreath, in a sort of piston movement in conjunction with your diaphragm, then it comes back up to its normal position during an out breath. When you feel that, great! Now sit for a while, breathe, feel the relaxation with your inbreath, and then try to *maintain the relaxed state even when you breathe out*. Do this for a couple of minutes.

💥 Some positions can encourage your pelvic floor to lengthen and relax beautifully. A deep squat or the ‘happy baby’ yoga pose (perhaps in conjunction with the above breathing technique) are wonderful in aiding relaxation.

💥 If you find it hard to feel any sort of release in your pelvic floor (not uncommon) take the weight off your PF, to encourage some letting go (so it doesn’t feel the need to work against gravity)……leaning forward over a table or sofa or even going on all fours is an excellent position to practice PF relaxation with.

💥 Practice when eliminating 💩whenever you go for a wee or poo, relax your PF consciously. Feel what happens when you release. Preferably try to poop with a squatty potty or similar. Try to time poops so that you go when you have the actual *urge* to……this is when a simple pelvic floor relaxation will let the poo slide out easily, or with a bit of an involuntary squeeze from you, rather than with active pushing. This is an excellent analogy for birthing and gets you to listen to your body’s (pretty clear) signals.

💥 Visualise your PF relaxing. Some people like the ‘open flower’ analogy, personally, I quite like a trampoline or hammock picture in my mind 😬

💥There might be other ways that you can achieve pelvic floor relaxation, some people may want to see a pelvic floor physio, massage their perineum while relaxing or use a pelvic floor trainer like the Epi No or Aniball.

All these techniques and awareness of what it feel like to *release* your pelvic floor may come in very very handy when you are trying to release your baby during birth too!

Expelling a human from your nethers is much harder if you have to shift them past a really tight pelvic floor that is geared towards *keeping things IN* as much as possible ☺️