Pregnancy and Pilates

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Pilates is well known for curing chronic back pain. It help to correct the postural imbalances and strengthen muscles to with stand the pressures place through them daily. During pregnancy many women suffer from low back pain, but can Pilates help with pregnancy related back pain, or prevent it?

During pregnancy many changes occur to your body, there is weight gain, altered posture, ligaments are stretched and specific muscles are weakened as they are stretch due to the growing size of the baby. Unsurprisingly most of these changes occur in the abdominal area and most of the muscles in this area are affected in one way of another.

The abdominal muscles at the front of your body are stretched due to the baby bump. This stretching automatically weakens your abdominal muscles causing your low back to arch. This arching of your lower back can cause pain due to an over tightening of the muscles in the low back.

The newly gained weight pulls your weight onto your toes, which lead to you to arching your back further to keep your weight going through your feet as normal as possible. This stops you from feeling like your falling forward, but this again leads to muscles spasms in the low back.

The arching of the low back causes the muscles in the hips to change shape, again this weakens specific muscles, especially the gluts. As they have to work harder to keep your weight going through your heel, they can spasm and cause pain running down the side of your thigh.

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Pilates for pregnancy is aimed at limiting the usual pregnancy postural changes. They can limit the exaggerated arching of your lower back, this will prevent and treat pregnancy related pains. Pilates can also be used to treat and prevent other common side effects of pregnancy such as rectus diastasis, incontinence and pelvic floor dysfunction.