How to Train Your Body to Push
Pregnancy Mini Series
Part One: How to Prepare Your Pelvic Floor for Birth
Part Two: How Strengthening Your Glutes During Pregnancy Relieves Pain and Prepares Your Body for Birth
Part Three: Boost Contractions, Reduce Pushing: Hypopressive Breathing for Labor and Delivery
Part Four: How to Train Your Body to Push
When it comes to pushing during delivery, many women receive conflicting advice. Hold your breath. Don't hold your breath. Push into your bottom. Tuck your chin. The list of instructions goes on, often leaving you confused about what your body should actually be doing during this critical phase of labor.
What if your body already knew exactly how to push effectively, without you having to remember a set of complicated instructions during one of the most intense moments of your life?
How Hypopressives Train Your Body to Push Properly During Delivery
The pushing phase of labor requires a delicate balance—enough force to help your baby move through the birth canal, but not so much pressure that you damage your pelvic floor. This balance isn't something you should have to consciously calculate while in labor. It's something your body knows how to do instinctively.
Hypopressive training during pregnancy prepares your body for this exact moment.
When you practice hypopressives regularly throughout pregnancy, you're training the involuntary muscle fibers of your core and pelvic floor muscles—the fibers that activate automatically during delivery. These involuntary fibers make up about 80% of your core muscles, yet most pregnancy exercises completely ignore them.
To be more specific, hypopressive exercise during pregnancy trains your core muscles to lift and center your uterus with every breath you take. So that means during labor and delivery every breath you take will lift and center your uterus as she births. The natural support in her best position at all times will allow her to have very efficient contractions, requiring fewer for birth.
A hypopressive training practice works by combining specific postures with a precise breathing pattern that creates a reduction in pressure in your abdomen. This in turn lifts your organs and activates your deep core muscles in exactly the pattern needed for effective pushing during delivery.
With consistent hypopressive training, your body learns:
- When to engage your core muscles and when to release
- How to manage and direct pressure in the abdomen, pelvis and spine.
- How to coordinate your diaphragm, abdominals, and pelvic floor
- The optimal pressure needed to push effectively without strain
- How to maintain uterine alignment during the pushing phase
By the time you reach labor, this pattern is deeply ingrained in your muscle memory. Instead of trying to remember complex instructions from your birth class while in the midst of contractions, you can simply surrender to your body's wisdom. Your muscles know what to do because you've trained them through hypopressive practice.
This training specifically addresses one of the most common challenges women face during the pushing phase: the inability to effectively manage pressure changes in their core while allowing their pelvic floor to yield and open. Without healthy core muscles, many women push in a way that causes the muscles to freeze, creating excessive pressure that can lead to tearing and pelvic floor damage.
How The Core Recovery Method® Can Help
The Core Recovery Method® provides comprehensive hypopressive training designed specifically for pregnant women preparing for delivery. The Core Recovery Pregnancy protocol includes hypopressive training, glute strengthening, trigger point release and self abdominal massage to prevent diastasis, heal your pelvic floor, lift your uterus, and flatten your belly.
When it's go time, all you have to do is surrender into contractions and follow your instincts. Instead of worrying about how, you simply let your body do what she was made to do! You will go into birth with confidence knowing your body is strong and knows exactly what she needs to do.
The Core Recovery Method® teaches you:
- Safe hypopressive postures for each trimester of your pregnancy
- The exact breathing pattern that optimizes your pushing efficiency
- How to activate your deep core muscles without creating harmful pressure
- Techniques to prepare your pelvic floor for the stretching required during delivery, and the rebounding required post partum.
Moms who follow The Core Recovery Method® during pregnancy frequently report shorter pushing phases during labor. Many describe the pushing experience as intuitive rather than forced—their bodies simply knew what to do when the time came.
The Core Recovery Pregnancy protocol also addresses the common fear many women have about pushing: the fear of pelvic floor damage. By training your body to push correctly, you significantly reduce your risk of tearing and long-term pelvic floor dysfunction. This proper pushing technique allows you to automatically activate the right muscles in the right sequence, without having to consciously think about it.
Beyond the delivery itself, hypopressive training sets you up for faster postpartum recovery. The same muscle patterns that help you push effectively will help your body heal after birth, supporting your organs as they return to their optimal positions and helping close any abdominal separation that occurred during pregnancy.
Instead of trying to memorize instructions that you'll likely forget in the intensity of the moment, The Core Recovery Method® trains your body so thoroughly that you simply trust her innate wisdom when the time comes.
