My name is Ashley Rollins and I'm a pelvic floor physical therapist here at UT Southwestern.
Physical therapy can help women during their pregnancy at any stage, helping you prepare
for pregnancy during the pregnancy, helping you to prepare for delivery and even in the
postpartum period.
Some of the yoga poses that we'll go through today are to be used at any time, pre and
postpartum and during pregnancy.
It's kind of depending on the specific needs of the patient.
For child's pose, you start in the tabletop position where your wrists are underneath
your shoulders and your knees are underneath your hips.
And then the motion of the pose is to kind of hinge at the hips and relax your thighs
back onto your calf and bring your body forward towards the ground.
This is for full relaxation of all the back muscles and hip muscles.
The deep squat pose is starting in the tabletop position, rock back so that your feet are flat
on the floor and move your hands back towards your knees.
As you're doing that, you're going to slowly lower your hips and bottom towards the floor
towards your heels without sinking into a sitting position, allowing for full stretching
of your hips and knees.
Cat-Cow is a pose that's good for improving the mobility of the spine.
What you do is you start in a tabletop position and then alternating with your breath.
You exhale into an arched position, looking down and curling your tailbone and then inhaling
into a more arched position, looking up towards the ceiling.
Just alternate through inhalation and exhalation, mobility in your spine.
Perineal bulges are an exercise performed to help you prepare for delivery.
This is the practice of bulging to push your pelvic floor muscles to help encourage them
to relax during the pushing process.
Typically, what is done is this area is the perineum, the space between the vaginal opening
and the anal opening.
You kind of mimic the motion as if you're trying to pass gas or to make space between
the two sit bones to allow the muscles to relax while you're pushing with your abdomen.
Perineal massage is another exercise that can be performed in order to help prepare your
vaginal tissues for delivery.
This is a gentle massaging of the tissue surrounding the vaginal opening.
It can be performed about five weeks towards the end of gestation to help prepare these
tissues for stretching during the delivery process.
When you're being cared for at UT Southwestern, not only are you being cared for by some of
the best obstetricians in the United States, but you have access to special patient opportunities
in treatment in our pelvic floor physical therapy department.
We have special training in order to provide us with the skills and knowledge needed to
treat you during your pregnancy, delivery and postpartum period.
Based on our evaluation and findings, we'll create a specialized home exercise program
for that person.
Whatever your birth plan is, be it natural vaginal delivery, delivery with an epidural
or cesarean section, we can work with those goals and kind of create a plan and practice
the birthing positions and things to help prepare you so that when you're there, we're
creating muscle memory.
So you don't even have to think about it during delivery.
It's something that you've practiced and you've prepared for leading up to it.
If you're interested in any of these exercises, always first check with your physician to
make sure that these are safe and okay for you to perform.
And of course, reach out to physical therapy if you have any questions and would like to
be seen and treated by us here.
We'd love to see you.
