You can prepare for birth by including exercises in your prenatal routine that prepare you to open each pelvic level! The pelvis has three main levels:
- The Inlet: The top of the pelvis where your baby will enter or engage during pregnancy or labor
- The Midpelvis: the middle of the pelvis where your baby will rotate through from the top to bottom during labor
- The Outlet: the bottom of the pelvis where your baby will extend under the pubic bone to be born.
When preparing for PUSHING, you want to focus on opening the lower midpelvis and the outlet of the pelvis. You can accomplish this with:
- Internal hip and pelvic rotation (staggered stance RDL, all four ship shift, back expansion exercise): this creates more side-to-side in the bottom of the pelvis.
- Sacral nutation where the tailbone moves backward (banded row): this creates more space front-to-back in the bottom of the pelvis
8-Minute Birth Preparation Workout: Prepare for Pushing
In this workout, we walk you through 8 minutes of exercises that focus on helping you create more space in the lower half of the pelvis. These exercises help prep for pushing!
All three exercises help you find more internal rotation at the hip and pelvis, which is vital to creating more space side-to-side in the bottom of the pelvis. The staggered stance RDL and all fours hip shift both move the hip through internal rotation. As a bonus, a posterior pelvic tilt (rounding in the lower back) can make internal rotation easier, so the all-fours hip shift with pelvic tilts and the back expansion exercise support this!
Another important muscle group to help with pushing is your back muscles, the lats! Lat tension can help pull the bottom of the sacrum backward to create more space front-to-back. We can strengthen these muscles with rowing motions, so we include a banded row with the staggered stance RDL to help prep for pushing!
The good news is that you don’t need to wait until birth to figure out how to open your pelvis–you can incorporate exercises throughout your prenatal workouts to create more space!
Prepare for Your Birth with MamasteFit Prenatal Fitness Programs
If you want more daily workouts to support a strong pregnancy as you prepare for birth, join our online prenatal fitness programs!
MamasteFit is unique in that we are one of the ONLY prenatal/postnatal training facilities in the United States. We develop our workout programs from our experience of working with in-person pre/postnatal fitness clients and work closely with physical therapists to refine our programming. In addition, we are birth workers, so we combine our experience as perinatal fitness trainers and birth professionals to ensure that our programs actually support your birth preparation and recovery!
Our prenatal fitness programs are offered in several formats:
- 40-Week Prenatal Strength Program in the Teambuildr App:
- This program is a self-paced workout with shorter demo videos. This is ideal if you like to workout in a gym setting and prefer a traditional workout delivery format.
- This program syncs to your current week of pregnancy, so you can start anytime, with one-time payment or month-to-month payment options.
- This program has a full and mini version, depending on how much time you have to dedicate to workouts!
- Prenatal On-Demand Fitness Program:
- If you prefer to follow a video as you workout at the same time, this workout program will be the best option!
- This program syncs to your current trimester, so you can grab the trimesters you need!
- Prenatal Yoga Classes:
- If you want prenatal yoga, join our prenatal yoga program! This also syncs to your current trimester.
Learn the science of pregnancy and birth to take the mystery of labor away! Understand why you are feeling what you feel, and learn strategies to confidently move through pregnancy and birth!
- 9h+ of Video
- Support Group
- Close Captioning
- 5 Workouts/Week
- Gym Workouts
- Self-Paced
Instructor
GINA
Workout on-demand with our prenatal fitness workout videos! Each workout is 30-40 minutes to follow along as you exercise at the same time!
- Birth Prep
- All Trimesters
- Mobility Work
Instructor
GINA
Find comfort and relief from pelvic girdle pain throughout your pregnancy and postpartum period! This program incorporates myofascial sling focused exercises to stabilize across the pelvic girdle joints.
- 3 Weeks
- On Demand Workout Videos to Follow