Birth takes a lot of strength, courage, and confidence. To deliver a child is a mighty feat. For expecting women, implementing specific exercises and styles of exercising can help better prepare both the mind and body for the birth experience. You know the vagina is a muscle, right? All that push is because your actual body has to get that baby out. Prepping the mind and body for birth can be done through a certain method of training known as kegelling. We’ve spoken to The Bloom Method on the best way to begin this process and how it can make delivery a lot easier. Keep reading for more.
How to Train the Pelvic Floor For Birth
When you train the physical and mental body in a way that relates to an embodied birth experience, you inspire women. They show up to their births feeling more prepared, more supported. There is a feeling of confidence in their ability to move through their individual birth journey. Deep squats, Hip opening stretches, and breathwork is vital components of prepping the physical body for birth.
Aside from smart and effective birth training, we highly recommend that women implement a deeper level of “down training”. This helps the pelvic floor muscles in a more effective pushing phase of birth, It also helps with the ability to decrease pelvic floor injuries that can be common during pushing when the pelvic floor is over-toned. An over-toned pelvic floor can be extremely common in all women. In athletes, women who exercise frequently, and those who carry higher levels of stress.
Down training the pelvic floor muscles is exactly what it sounds like, just as we contract the pelvic floor (often referred to as kegeling) it’s vital that we can connect to the release or lengthening of those muscles. Adding a level of down training to your workout regimen throughout the 40+ weeks of pregnancy can truly shift the way women pushing during labor, and how they heal and return to exercise postpartum. We often say that if an expecting woman can at least begin to transition to the more pelvic floor down training around 35 weeks, she will still see and experience a better prepared pelvic floor when it comes time to push.
How the Bloom Method Does It
At The Bloom Method, you’ll find an innovative way to go about this type of training. Their signature BIRTHPREP class is designed specifically to fuse athletic training and a labor prep mentality. The result is one challenging fitness class that provides a cutting-edge way to train for the birth marathon. In these unique fitness classes, Bloom’s expert coaches use bouts of muscle fatiguing exercises, core and pelvic floor awareness, breathwork, and mentally empowering cues to help their moms train for labor.
During the birth process, most women experience the height of a contraction. It is often referred to as an intense or painful contraction. There is also a low of a contraction, sometimes seen as the rest period in-between contractions. BIRTHPREP takes this natural rhythm of birth and uses it to train women in a new way. This helps to invoke a new level of empowerment that women carry into their births.
Founder Brooke has redefined the way women work out when trying to get pregnant, during pregnancy, and throughout postpartum with her online fitness platform, The Bloom Method. The Bloom Method is the #1 pre and postnatal fitness app and is recommended by doctors, PTs, Chiropractors + Moms. This month, she’s adding 50+ new on-demand classes including dance, cycling, and boxing! From a postnatal barre class to strength training circuits, to cycling classes that strengthen pelvic floor muscles. Brooke’s app is for the modern mom looking to workout safely at home. Whether it’s dealing with pelvic floor issues or how to build your strength back after having a baby. Brooke also helps you find the time to schedule in fitness as a new mom. Brooke has many invaluable tips (and will share myths!) associated with common pregnancy-related issues. Visit The Bloom Method here!
