Your body undergoes physical changes to accommodate the needs of your growing baby during pregnancy. These alterations can bring a wide range of aches and pains. Physical therapy in pregnancy is designed to help you to better manage these discomforts, and ensure a smoother pregnancy, birth, and post-partum experience for you.
Here at Oklahoma Physical Therapy, pregnancy physical therapy is one of our specialties. We help mothers to incorporate physical therapy into their prenatal care. Our treatments can help you deal with common pregnancy-related problems such as back pain, musculoskeletal pain, and discomfort, urinary leaks.
Back Pain during Pregnancy
Up to 70% of women will experience back pain during pregnancy. The overuse of the wrong muscles in physical therapy is one of the most common reasons for back pain during pregnancy. Your general movement and your approach to lifting items off the floor will change during pregnancy.
That change triggers the use of muscles that normally won’t come into play while lifting outside of pregnancy. The combination of the weight of the baby and using the wrong muscles generally leads to back pain.
Additionally, Relaxin, a hormone released during pregnancy, causes the ligaments in the body to be a bit lax. When this happens, your lower back and pelvis may be pulled in different directions as you go about your daily routines. This strain can leave back, hip and pelvic pain.
Physical therapy can help you to identify the cause of your back pain, find out your lifting limits, and create exercises that can provide you with relief. The focus of most back-pain relief exercises in pregnancy is to improve your strength and lengthen your muscles.
How Physical Therapy Can Help during Pregnancy
Here at Oklahoma Physical Therapy, we work with prospective mums to provide relief for back pain, urinary incontinence, and other pregnancy-related problems that can be improved with physical therapy. We understand that pregnancy affects women in different ways, so we take time to create a bespoke therapy plan that can help you deal with the situation with medications or surgery. Contact us today to discuss with an Oklahoma pregnancy physical therapist.