The team to do it

I'm starting off my prep work with two very knowledgeable women to help me get past the postpartum hurdle of regaining core strength. For those of you who haven't experienced pregnancy and childbirth, let me just say a few words... hopefully educational words that don't gross anybody out.

When pregnant, your body produces a hormone called relaxin and your bones, specifically your pelvis, go soft. I'm not joking. The ol' pelvis becomes supple and changes shape to get the job done. It does eventually re-solidify. All of your tendons, ligaments, and therefore your joints loosen up too. You become severely sway-backed from the constant weight of your belly pulling on your abdomen. And since your ab muscles have completely given up the ghost at that time in order to allow you to breath shallowly, you waddle carefully trying not to pull anything too much out of place. Your ribs have been stretched- many women measure a different width to their ribcage afterward- and you get hunched over from all of these contortions, too. And if you choose to nurse your baby, you get even more hunched: neck, shoulders, back... and what's more, according to some experts, your body continues to produce relaxin (in lower doses) the whole time you nurse! So you stay strangely, dangerously loose- and more injury-prone even after you've given birth. Oh, and if you carry your baby, as all women do, you probably end up favoring one arm over another, and then you end up with one hip higher, your whole back curving, tweaked to one side, which spreads up your neck and shoulders and down into your sacrum.

And that's mostly just the skeletal change. I could go on to describe the impact of having a baby on the pelvic floor muscles, but I'll leave that to Lynn Leech to explain a little bit in January when I feature her in an interview. She'll be helping me with my abdominal recovery.

Lynn Leech offers a 4-step program, developed by Julie Tupler, RN, to help heal Diastasis Recti. During pregnancy, the abs known as the 6-pack get split down the middle- they pull apart, leaving the ligaments weak and over-stretched, and they need help coming back together. The problem is that most crunches and core-strengthening exercise is actually very bad for healing this separation and can make it worse! So she's going to work with me to repair the gap and check back in with me regularly to make sure I'm not doing more harm over the course of my training. 

Now there's another aspect to all of this, which is that I've repeatedly injured my back over the years. I broke my back in a fall about 10 years ago, and then re-injured it about 5 years ago, damaging a nerve in the sacrum. The pregnancies were not kind to my back, and I find I have to rehabilitate it once again. This is where Hayley comes into the picture.

Hayley Hobson is a Pilates instructor who I met through Lynn. She also has an infant, so she's in touch with the post-partum challenge.  Last time I had to rehabilitate my back (after my first pregnancy) the PT I worked with used mostly Pilates to help me, and it was highly effective. My insurance has changed and I can't return to that PT now. Happily, I found Hayley, and look forward to having her help me build up strength in my core (in cooperation with Lynn's approach). Hopefully I'll have an interview with Hayley coming up, too.