Shaping Up
Though we can’t all look like Madonna a few months after childbirth, exercise can help to tone up the stretched muscles, promote good circulation and help with posture.
It's essential to take it easy at first
Exercises you might have sailed through before you were pregnant, can actually damage your joints and ligaments if you attempt them too soon after the birth. High-intensity workouts are not the answer. Your body needs time to adjust to the changes that have taken place during pregnancy.
Post-natal exercise classes are one way of ensuring safer exercise and also enable you to meet other mothers with babies of the same age. There’s usually a crèche and additional activities, such as baby massage, add to the experience and enjoyment.
After the birth
Weakening of the pelvic floor is common after childbirth. The pelvic floor is not a ‘floor’ at all. It's a hammock shape of muscles slung between your coccyx bone and your pubic bone. The muscles support your bladder and bowel. The effect of a weakened pelvic floor is that you tend to leak urine especially when you jump, cough or sneeze. Not good news – but for most people regular pelvic floor exercises cure the problem.
- Start pelvic floor exercises as soon as you can after the birth. They may feel weak at first but the more you do, the stronger the muscles will get (helping to prevent incontinence and prolapse of the uterus). It also has the added advantage of improving your love life later on.
- To locate the pelvic floor muscles imagine you are at the back of the queue for the loo, and desperate. You tighten up muscles to stop yourself from leaking. Or you are in a lift with someone special and you feel you are going to break wind. These are the muscles you tighten to stop yourself.
- To practice pelvic floor exercises imagine that you need to stop yourself from going to the toilet, pull the muscles up and in. Hold the position for five counts, then release back to the starting position. Repeat that as many times as you can until you feel the muscles being to tire. Try to breathe normally.
- Another exercise is to pull the muscles up and in as before, but to lift, squeeze and tighten the muscles quite quickly, as in the beat of a pulse and then release. Repeat five times. Again breathing normally.
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