How Strengthening Your Glutes During Pregnancy Relieves Pain and Prepares Your Body for Birth
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
Your back aches when you stand too long. Sharp pains shoot through your pelvis when you roll over in bed. Your hips feel tight and uncomfortable no matter how you sit. Sound familiar? These uncomfortable pregnancy symptoms are signs that your body needs more support from your glutes as you prepare for delivery.
Symptoms You Might Be Experiencing During Pregnancy
During pregnancy, your body undergoes dramatic changes that often lead to discomfort. You might notice:
- Low back pain that worsens throughout the day
- Pelvic pain that makes walking or climbing stairs difficult
- Pain in your tailbone when sitting
- SI joint pain that radiates through your buttocks
- Tight hips that limit your mobility
- Difficulty finding a comfortable sleeping position
Most pregnant women accept these discomforts as inevitable parts of pregnancy. But the truth is that strengthening your glute muscles can significantly reduce or even eliminate these symptoms!
How Glute Strengthening Can Ease Pregnancy Symptoms and Prepare Your Body for Delivery
Your growing belly creates a significant challenge for your body. As your baby grows in front, your center of gravity shifts forward, placing tremendous strain on your back, pelvis, and pelvic floor. Without proper posterior support from strong glutes, your body compensates in ways that lead to pain and dysfunction.
Your Body Needs Balance
When your glutes are weak, your growing belly loads your pelvis and spine without any counter-balance. This asymmetry can cause spinal compression leading to low back pain, increased pressure in your abdomen straining your pelvic floor, and dysfunctional tension throughout your entire core system. Strong glutes provide the counter-balance your body desperately needs during pregnancy, helping maintain proper pelvic alignment and core muscle tone, despite your changing shape.
Resolve Low Back Pain and Pelvic Pain
Your glutes work as stabilizers for your pelvis and lower back. When they're strong and functioning properly, they take pressure off of your spine and pelvic joints by being the primary movers of your hips. If your glutes are weak, the spinal and pelvic muscles will get stuck with the work that the glutes are supposed to do and this leads. When the core muscles are forced to do the work of the glutes, when they are already strained by pregnancy- the result is typically low back pain, SIJ pain, pelvic pain or pubic symphysis pain. My pregnant clients have found that their back, pelvic, SIJ and pubic symphysis pain significantly reduces after just a few weeks of targeted glute strengthening.
Beyond providing pain relief during pregnancy, strong glutes also support your body during labor. When your back and pelvis aren't in pain, you'll have more positioning options during labor and more stamina for the physical demands of delivery.
Eliminate Restrictive Trigger Points
Pregnancy creates muscle imbalances that often lead to painful trigger points in your glutes, piriformis, and deep hip rotators. Since the ligaments and joints become more lax during pregnancy, the muscles have to work harder. This often leads to tender knots in the glute muscles that can cause radiating pain and restrict the mobility of your pelvis and hips.
Regular glute strengthening helps prevent these trigger points from forming by keeping muscles properly engaged and balanced. For the remaining trigger points, specific release techniques combined with targeted strengthening exercises will ensure the glute muscles are getting stronger as your belly gets bigger. When the glutes are strong, the pelvic floor is well supported, receives more blood/lymph/nerve flow, and the chances of tearing during delivery go way down.
Help Your Pelvic Floor and Hips to Open
Your glutes don't work in isolation—they're intimately connected to your pelvic floor muscles. When your glutes are strong and balanced, they support proper function of your pelvic floor, allowing these muscles to both properly support you as well as stretch when they need to.
Symmetrical, strong, trigger point-free glutes create the ideal environment for your pelvic floor during delivery. Let's be real: Birth is the ultimate challenge for your pelvic floor. She needs to stretch more than she's ever stretched before, and go back to "normal" quickly after. In order for her to be this resilient, she must have optimal blood flow, support, and not be "overworked". Strong glutes that provide her circulation, and help her support the pelvic organs, spine and baby ensure she is nourished, rested and ready for anything.
Tension, imbalance, or weakness in your glutes can actually restrict the movement of your pelvic bones during labor, making delivery more difficult and potentially prolonging the pushing phase. So having a regular glute strengthening practice throughout your pregnancy is of the upmost importance for a health pelvic floor going into delivery.
How to Strengthen Your Glutes during Pregnancy to Prepare your Pelvic Floor for Delivery
Your mechanics and breathing during glute exercises is a critical part of their effectiveness. Adding decompression breathing to glute exercises is a game changer because it lifts your uterus and unloads your pelvic floor while the glutes are being strengthened. Squats with decompression breathing is on of the best ways to prepare the pelvic floor for delivery because it stretches the pelvic floor as it strengthens it.
The Core Recovery Method® teaches you everything you need to know to strengthen your glutes, core and pelvic floor during pregnancy so that your body is ready for anything going into delivery. You will learn specific breath work exercises that reduce the pressure in your abdomen and reflexively activate your pelvic floor, combined with targeted glute exercises that improve baby's position and protect your spine, SIJ and pelvic floor.
This method focuses not just on strengthening, but on creating symmetry and balance in your glutes and hips. This approach ensures your pelvis can move freely during labor, reducing the pushing phase, decreasing pain and making delivery more efficient.
Practicing glute exercises during pregnancy actively prepares your body for a smoother delivery experience. Strong, balanced glutes create the foundation of support your body needs to handle pregnancy and childbirth with greater comfort and confidence.
When you're ready to prepare your body for delivery, The Core Recovery Method® provides the guidance and techniques you need to strengthen your glutes effectively and safely throughout every stage of pregnancy.
