Exercise During Pregnancy

Postgraduate-trained womens health physiotherapist, Aileen has an extensive experience and evidence-based knowledge with running the clinical pilates (exercise) classes for pregnant women. She challenges you to the limits for your strength but also ensures that the exercises remain pelvic floor friendly, and within the guidelines of safe exercise during pregnancy. She incorporates her knowledge of pelvic floor friendly exercises with her musculoskeletal knowledge to help you with improving your core, pelvic floor, lower body and upper body strength.

Pregnancy or Prenatal clinical pilates exercise is a great way to improve core, lower body and upper body strength during pregnancy.

Core strength: good core strength can reduce the width of your tummy separation postnatally, improve your posture and reduce your chance of getting back pain/pelvic girdle pain. During the clinical exercise (pilates) classes,physiotherapist Aileen focuses on you having a good core activation whilst controlling your tummy separation and ensuring that all the exercises remain pelvic floor friendly.

Lower body strength: During pregnancy, a women naturally gains up to 15-20kgs of weight. As a result, pregnant women can find it more challenging to get on/off the chair, ascending stairs and doing incline walks. Strengthening the lower body, especially the glutes can also aid with improving and preventing groin pain and pelvic girdle pain. Furthermore, early postnatally, a mother would be lifting from awkward positions, carrying an ever-growing baby, and squat and lunge all the item to pick up the capsule and the pram from the car.

During pregnancy, the ribs of a pregnant women moves upward to accommodate for the growing baby, and the breasts grows as well. This places more pressure and weight for the postural muscles in the mid back, shoulders and neck. Furthermore, once the baby arrives, there will be further strain on the upper body, shoulder and neck due to sustained breastfeeding postures, lifting and holding baby. Thus, pregnant women need to work on their upper body strength to improve their postural endurance and to prevent development of upper back, neck and shoulder pain.