The postnatal stuff that doesn’t get spoken about.
7 min readAny new parent-to-be is likely to be inundated with conversations of what to expect. Mostly, it will be about how you will never sleep another full night and will be changing more nappies than you can imagine. This will be from someone who has been through it and knows, most likely said with an all-too-knowing sense of smugness, so as an expectant parent, you brace yourself for these horrors to unfold. But what is not often spoken about, is the very real possibilities of a postnatal mum having to navigate some major physical (and often psychological) rehabilitation needs, with very little support readily available.
With the background rhetoric of the “bounce back” culture, new mums, whether they have been into exercise pre-pregnancy or not, are often made to feel that they “should” be boot camping their way back to their pre-baby shape. The potential problem comes in when the healing that needs to happen postpartum has not been fully understood or encouraged to occur, and if things have not naturally resolved, more support is needed to make that happen.
This may mean that high impact classes and exercises can put stress and strain on connective tissue and on a pelvic floor which has not yet regained enough strength to handle more impact, pushing it to a point where damage rather than intended strengthening occurs.
So, a mum who has got through labour “ok”, but didn’t have an internal check at the very rushed 6-week GP appointment and has a mild prolapse, may be entirely unaware of what is going on in her own body. In amongst the many other things she is learning incredibly quickly about her baby, and lifting all the heavy gear, she is told over and over: “Just do your kegels”. But she doesn’t have all the information. If she was told what was going on, with very clear guidelines of exactly what she should be doing: to gradually build up strength from the inside and give her pelvic floor and posture more attention, she may not be so desperate to go for a jog after 6-8 weeks. If she knew there was even a chance she would land up injuring herself, she would treat her pelvic floor like an injured muscle and do the proper rehabilitation it needs so that it doesn’t become a chronic injury.
Let’s face it, being told to do kegels 3 times a day (when some days you don’t even have time to shower) and without a proper explanation of why it is so important, means that those kegels are pretty unlikely to happen. If you do manage to find the time, or remember to do them whilst feeding your baby, the next question is: have they been properly explained to you, and are you breathing correctly whilst doing them? Because if not, there is strong evidence that shows that they are not going to help.
Added to this, if you have not been checked and you land up with a hypotonic pelvic floor which means that instead of being too weak your pelvic floor is too tight, kegels can in fact make things worse.
A one size fits all approach really does not work. Seeing a woman’s health physio really should be something every postpartum woman is given, as standard not months later when the problems surface.
Many women come to me on the other side of this. They were not checked postpartum, so they didn’t know what was going on. Although they knew things didn’t feel quite right, somewhere along the line there seems to be an accepted idea that if you have had a baby, there will be some pelvic floor dysfunction and you may be destined to a life that features Tena pads and put up with leaking/prolapse/diastasis recti.
If they’d had better information, they would have done things very differently. They are understandably angry and feel betrayed by a system which has let them down. Their physical wellbeing and especially that of their pelvic floor was never given the attention it deserved and now they are left trying to put back together the pieces.
The message I want to put across is that our bodies, once given the correct input have an incredible facility for healing and health. It doesn’t matter how many years postpartum you are, it is never too late to improve these issues, and they are not something you need to put up with.
I count myself very lucky to have been given the information to be able to help many women find that healing capacity within their bodies.
The future of postnatal fitness
I was introduced to Low Pressure Fitness and the world of Hypopressives, after the birth of my first child. I had been a professional dancer for 15 years, and one thing I did not anticipate was a struggle to get my abdominals and pelvic floor strength back postpartum. I had a third degree tear and reading the booklet I was sent home from the hospital with, quickly dropped me out the love bubble I was in. As I slowly began to heal, I realised that whilst I was not in the worst case scenario, I no longer trusted my pelvic floor, and for someone who had spent their entire life working with their body almost daily, that was a pretty scary place to be. New motherhood is probably the steepest learning curve most of us will go on, and embarking on that whilst trying to navigate what can feel like a broken body is dramatically under represented.
A training method that can improve prolapse, diastasis recti and incontinence.
Whilst on the Low pressure Fitness training in Spain, I was somewhat amazed at what I learned and saw. The training I did was with the International trainers and one of the few courses in English. From day one, something very apparent was that all the trainers had the same abdominals! It became clear that this was not genetics, but a training method. Some of them had 2 or 3 children, yet looked like they had not had any. My perception of what was possible for a woman’s body to look like postpartum dramatically changed, but the part that excited me the most was that these women were strong and functional. Many had worked with this technique to reverse prolapse.
Having focused on teaching postnatal pilates after my first child and feeling somewhat frustrated that I wasn’t seeing the results in myself and my clients for the real issues they were dealing with, like diastasis recti/incontinence and prolapse - Hypopressives finally felt like the tool that would not only make an impact on these, but was also safe. After my second pregnancy, I began training in the technique myself and working with 1:1 clients. The results that I saw in my own function and then in every client I have worked with 1:1, and many more that have come to my classes and now joined my online platform, has time and time shown me this technique really does work wonders.
If I had not experienced it in my own body, I am not sure I would have believed anyone who said their pelvic floor and abdominals were stronger after their second child! That idea seemed impossible, but my experience of Hypopressives was exactly this. It has spurred me on to share this work with women in London and now internationally, who as far as I have seen, have been dealt a huge disservice by Hypopressives not being part of the accepted post birth rehab as it is in France, Spain and Brazil. I am honoured to be part of a new wave of trainers helping women all over the world, reclaim the function and strength in their entire body.
As well as the health of the baby, the physical and psychological well-being of the mother has to be paramount for the family system to thrive. Without a functional body that is incredibly hard to achieve.
My hope is that re-centre brings function and connection to a mother’s body giving her the potential for confidence in her body and wholeness in her family life.
