What Muscles are Most Important To Strengthen for a Successful and Natural Childbirth?

In the beginning of your pregnancy, the most important muscles to focus on are your Pelvic Floor Muscles. Strengthening these muscles will stabilize the pelvis, thus helping most postural issues that can cause the most common complaint, lower back pain. I remember when I first heard the words, Pelvic Floor. I literally had no idea what my pilates teacher was talking about until one day she described to me that my Pelvic Floor muscles are my deep abdominal muscles that run like a hammock, supporting the pelvis, attaching from the pubic bone to the tail bone. These muscles are what will help support the uterus during pregnancy and help expel the baby during labor. The more functional the muscle group the better, thus properly training the pelvic floor to relax and strengthen is best.

Once the pelvis is stable, it is important to focus on the other main core muscles. With the challenges of natural postural changes during pregnancy, the weight of the breast enlarging, and a new sense of gravity with baby growing forward, it is important to strengthen the back of the body. The back, specific abdominal muscles, gluts, hips, and hamstrings are all very important to properly tone and stretch. The specific back muscles I'm referring to are the "Lat" muscles. These are the muscles just under your shoulder blade. Believe it or not it runs all the way down to your low back, so strengthening this area can not help your shoulders from rounding, but can also stabilize the upper and lower spine.

The gluts, hip rotators, and hamstrings are also very important to tone and stretch. These muscle groups are very stabilizing for the pelvis for they are the muscles that keep our legs together. Because of the hormone relaxin that is produced during pregnancy, the ligaments holding the pelvis together may be loose or separated. Focusing on these areas can also stabilize the pelvis. It is very important to work the legs together during pregnancy to guarantee a safe position of the pelvis. If you are working one leg at a time, it is important to stabilize one leg as the other one moves. Unfortunately this creates an issue for those of us who like to bike, swim, run, dance, and do aerobics. There are many schools of thought and many doctors do tell their patients that if they were doing the exercise prior to pregnancy than they may continue, however risking the chance of the front of the pelvis becoming loose or separated in my opinion is just not worth it.

As I have stated in previous posts, the abdominals are also an area of the body that needs to be toned and strengthened in a balanced fashion. Over working the abdominals while pregnant is just not smart. Finding a balance between stretch and toning the abdominals is the best way to keep the integrity of the abdominal muscles without creating imbalances in the body. Also, doing abdominal crunches in the traditional format while lying on your back is equally not worth the risk. More and more women today risk the chance of developing a diastasis-recti which is a splitting or parting of the recti muscles.

When I originally learned this material I thought to myself "if only more women knew this information prior to getting pregnant, a lot of misfortune during childbirth could possibly be prevented!" So, this is why I continue to keep writing, keep learning, and reach out to the mommies out there!