All the time when you were growing up, you have heard your mother talk about stretching your muscles and tuck in your tummy. What if we told you that those tidbits would help you through your pregnancy too?
Pregnancy has a profound and everlasting effects on your body, mainly to accommodate the growing fetus inside your body. If there is any kind of physical discomfort, physiotherapy can come to aid. Further along, these actually help the mother-to-be to relax and even practice them at home.
Pregnancy And Physiotherapy
When pregnant, doing even the daily activities such as walking, sleeping, sitting down, or standing can prove to be difficult. For all this you can simply blame the growing child inside of you which is making physical changes. With physiotherapy, you can get relieve from the following:
- Lower back pain caused by carrying around the extra weight in your body
- Neck pain and headaches
- Tightness and swelling in the hamstrings and heel cords
- Bladder leakage
- Stretching of the abdominal walls causing severe backaches, etc. and more
The following is a video that explains how physiotherapy can help you during your difficult pregnancy months:
Physiotherapy And Postpartum
Postpartum rehabilitation is important so much so that there are countries (like France) where women are made to complete physiotherapy programs so that their body can heal.
Once you have given birth, its common to face problems like urinary incontinence and diastasis recti and even pelvic pain. Infact, research has shown that approx. 85% of women feel pain in their pelvic area after giving birth. Because of it being so normal, most women choose to ignore the symptoms and ignore treatment. But here’s the fact, you don’t have to live it.
To recover, countries like Netherlands, Australia and France have programs with physiotherapy that helps women recover from the rigorous childbirth. In the US, the women have a six-week post-partum checkups before they resume their daily activities. All these initiatives aim in making the women comfortable in her own skin and be okay inspite of the hardships of giving birth.
Therefore, if you or even if you know anybody who are going through hardships after childbirth, don’t write it off as “you just had a baby,” for definitely there are musculoskeletal implications which needs the intervention of physiotherapy. Besides if not treated on time, they can lead to further complications like low back pain, hip problem, constipation, urinary and bowel function issues etc.
How Physiotherapy Can Help
Now that we have already established that physiotherapy is indispensable during and even post pregnancy, here are some more advantages of undergoing specialized physiotherapy:
- Identify and repair: The physiotherapist can identify the areas that require treatment concentrating on areas that have altered during pregnancy, labor, and delivery.
- Bespoke programs: Once the areas that needs treatment have been identified, the women are advised specialized treatments that can help them get better.
- Do daily tasks seamlessly: Being a new mother and balancing work, life and kids can be taxing. Physiotherapists can help moms complete even the most difficult tasks easily without exerting any kind of pressure on the abdominal areas.
- Identify temporary neuropathy: Physiotherapists can even identify and treat temporary neuropathy or any damage of the nerves that controls the pelvic muscles.
We understand that caring for a newborn can leave little time for sleep, let alone going out for these physiotherapy sessions. Inspite of that we cannot stress less on the importance of undergoing these sessions for at the end its your health that we are talking about. Your body would just not snap back together, which means that you need care, love, support, rest, and treatment to heal.