When preparing for birth, we can focus on a variety of exercises to support both the strength required to navigate laboring positions, and also mobility to support the suppleness required of birth.
Let’s explore five exercises you can include in your prenatal workouts to prepare for the second stage of labor: pushing!
Physically Prepare for Birth
We can both mentally and physically prepare for birth!
The mental aspect can include childbirth education courses, meditations and mindset practices, yoga classes, and things that support you feeling confident in approaching your pregnancy and birth.
We also find that preparing physically for birth can help us mentally prepare, as well!
Prenatal exercise is our opportunity to:
- Connect with our body and baby. It allows us to recognize our body’s needs, such as the need to slow down or rest. And allows us to notice the subtle changes and shifts that we will feel during labor.
- Maintaining an upright position during labor can help enhance the labor hormone feedback loop and speed up labor!
- Mobility and strength require to find laboring positions and maintain the stamina to move for prolonged periods of time during labor.
Our prenatal fitness programs incorporate exercises to help you physically prepare to open the pelvis for birth and meet the stamina requirements to maintain an upright labor position for longer periods of time!
We have designed our programs based on working with in-person clients, online clients, and our own personal experience navigating pregnancy!
Our programs have all been developed in consultation with physical therapists to ensure we create the best program to support your pregnancy and birth!
What should we focus on for exercises to prepare for pushing?
When preparing for pushing during birth, we want to focus on:
- Strengthening the lats and hamstrings
- Focusing on hinge type movement patterns
- Internal rotation emphasizes to open the bottom of the pelvis
- Mobility work to release the sacrum, hip flexors, and lats
This could include deadlifts, rows, and both bilateral and unilaterally focused exercises and mobility work!
Strengthening Exercises
1) Deadlifts and Hinge Focused Movements
When opening the pelvic outlet, we want to find internal rotation in the femurs on the pelvis. Internal rotation tends to be emphasized with hamstring and adductor activation.
Deadlifts and other hinge focused movements can focus on strengthening the hamstring, so they can pull the pelvis into a posterior pelvic tilted position to more easily find internal rotation.
2) Back Strengthening Exercises:
Single Arm Dumbbell Row
But we don’t necessarily want to find a posterior or anterior pelvic tilt while pushing due to how it adjusts our ability to manage pressure (pushing is a pressure management activity)!
Lat or back strengthening exercises can help us counter the hamstring pull to keep the pelvis in a more neutral position, and also can assist maintaining strength and endurance during many pushing positions that include a pulling element!
The single arm row is a great exercise to include that focuses on lat strengthening!
3) Internal Rotation Emphasize:
Staggered Stance RDL
We need internal rotation to open the pelvis outlet! This means knees in, ankles out.
But sometimes it’s easier to find internal rotation on one side than the other (usually it’s easier to find internal rotation on the right side due to common postural tendencies).
Unilateral focused exercises, such as the staggered stance RDL with internal rotation emphasis can help us find internal rotation on both sides to prepare for pushing!
Mobility Work
4) Standing Hip Shift
Next, we can focus on mobility work to help us feel this shift into internal rotation!
The standing hip shift is one of the first mobility exercises that we can focus on. In this movement, you can either stand on a yoga block or stand on the floor.
We are focusing on finding internal rotation by bringing belly to thigh, straightening in the focus leg to feel more of that hamstring pull, and then reaching with the opposite hand to emphasize the rotation.
Watch the breakdown video to learn more!
5) Lat Release: Hip Flexor and Side Body
Movements that will make it more easy to find internal rotation include releasing the lats and hip flexors!
One of my favorite exercises to do for this is the hip flexor stretch with a side body opener to stretch the lats at the same time!
Watch the video below for a breakdown on how to really enhance this movement!
Prepare for Pushing
We can physically prepare for birth. When we workout during pregnancy, we want to ensure that our programming has been designed to help us meet the demands of pregnancy and also prepare for our birth.
We can include workouts that focus on deadlift, or hinge focused movements, back strengthening, and internal rotation emphasis to help us prepare for pushing.
Want more support? Check out our prenatal fitness programs!