Try These Simple Moves to Prevent Pain in Pregnancy and Create Space for Baby to Move

The Psoas (so-as) is the lesser-known birthing muscle, which is often overlooked in pregnancy and birth. Using these tips and movements can help get you on the right track to prevent pain and build a stronger core for your healthy and happy vaginal birth.

The psoas muscle is one of the most functional and crucial muscles our body has when it comes to movement in everyday life, and especially during pregnancy and postpartum. It is the deepest foundational core muscle to our bodies. The Psoas is attached to and down your vertebrae, then through your pelvis and end at the top of your femur bone. 

With the psoas, we are able to bend at our hips in flexion, but it also keeps our trunk and spine stable during any other type of movement. Most importantly in relation to birth, the psoas helps to keep our pelvis open and free to move in the way our body needs, it stabilizes. If your psoas is tight or short, it could tilt your pelvis forward, if your psoas is stretched too far or weak, your pelvis could be tilted backward, causing low back and leg pain. In either situation, it can become a snowball effect in pregnancy, and could possibly lead to a C-section if a doctor does not feel your pelvis is in the right place to get the baby through the birth canal.

3 Tips to Strengthen This Neglected Muscle That can Weaken Your Chance of Having a Vaginal Birth:

1. Try not to sit for extended periods of time. Get up and move every 30 minutes or so, as you walk maybe throw in a couple of lunges;

2. Perform Pelvic Tilt exercises as seen in the below video:

3. Do this Lying Psoas March to strengthen your core and hip flexor: 

Activate your Psoas to relieve pain, open your hips, and strengthen your core

Understanding the psoas muscle gives us the foundational knowledge we need to change the way we move. It’s important to activate our psoas so we can:

• Locate the muscle in our body;

• Loosen our hips to help relieve pain (especially in pregnancy);

• Strengthen and stretch it properly to keep our lower back and body stabilized in all movements during pregnancy;

• Open our pelvis to help create more space for the baby to move around and get in the right position for birth to have a more comfortable and shorter labor.

1. Try this psoas activation test: 

2. Perform these stretches to continue activating the psoas and then loosening tight hips:

When we deliberately engage our psoas muscle, we are giving our bodies the chance to correct unhealthy movement patterns. When we move in an unhealthy way, our bodies tend to compensate by pulling on other muscles or ligaments to adapt to the movements we are trying to accomplish (i.e. walking, sitting, bending over, getting up), thus creating pain because it is unnatural. Instead, when we choose to activate our psoas, our bodies start to move naturally again and eliminate pain. Even better, if we engage with our psoas before we start compensating, we can prevent compensations and pain.

It starts with a single step.