Kegels Are Not the Best Way to Prepare Your Body for Childbirth.
Six years ago, one of my best friends and I were pregnant at the same time, and during the day we wrote one word to each other: “Kegels!” For us, it was a reminder to squeeze the pelvis – 100 per day was the recommendation we both heard – as a way to prepare our body for childbirth. Kegel exercises, contraction and relaxation of the pelvic floor muscles, have reigned as the main exercises for decades to help speed up and facilitate labor . They’re so easy to make! The American Prenatal Association notes that they can be done anywhere. When you stopped at a red light! While you are in the waiting room at the OB-GYN office! In the carriageway of the bank! I often did them during my lunch break – I was pleased to know that while stuffing my face with Thai pasta, I was training quietly.
In the end, I’m not sure if my dedication to these vaginal crunches helped me a lot – considering my five hours of intense pushing the baby out, I would venture to say that maybe not. I have since learned that while Kegels has a place, some childbirth experts believe they are being over-emphasized, and perhaps doing more harm than good for many pregnant women.
Lindsay McCoy, a childbirth physiologist and childbirth educator, explains the Kegel riddle to me as follows: “When the baby comes out, the pelvic floor has to give way. It should open up. So if we just squeeze-squeeze-squeeze everything , that’s the opposite of what we want. ” McCoy, who co-founded the One Strong Mama prenatal exercise program, wants to spread the idea that “tighter isn’t better – it’s just tighter.”
The pelvic floor muscles act as a hammock for the pelvic organs, including the uterus, bladder, and rectum. McCoy explains that a kegel is a concentric contraction, which means that the two ends of a muscle come closer together. According to her, this is a great movement, but the problem is that most women already have hypertonicity or too narrow a pelvic floor. Sitting at a desk all day can be stressful. So stress can. And when you start with muscles that are already too tight and then add concentric contractions, you make those muscles less functional for childbirth, she says. (Imagine another example of concentric contraction: lifting weights while curling the biceps. If you do this constantly and never learn to let go, your arm will lose flexibility and become completely useless.) Tension in the pelvic floor can cause other tension. problems too, such as restrictions in your deep core muscles and pain during sex.
During labor, women need their pelvic floor to be “pliable and stretchable,” McCoy says. And she believes that for this they cannot simply squeeze the vagina all day. “The pelvic floor is a whole body problem,” she adds. “You can’t fix a whole body problem with acupressure.”
Instead of doing a ton of Kegel, McCoy recommends that pregnant women strengthen their core and pelvic floor muscles, which requires exercise and sometimes physical therapy. With those she trains, McCoy uses all sorts of methods to achieve this – she helps them lengthen their muscles, shows them how to squat correctly, works on aligning them, and teaches them to breathe so they can move on. ribs. Kegels are part of the program, too, but McCoy forces most women to focus on “releasing, not pressing.”
“I wish I could just say, ‘Do these three exercises three times a day, or 20 times a day,” says McCoy. “But it’s the whole system, and every part of it works together.” Payback for doing everything right? According to her, smoother labor and delivery. When a baby is born, trained bodies know what to do. “If the labor is intense or painful, I at least want it to be effective,” she says. “Nobody wants to hustle for five hours.”