How can I maintain good posture through my pregnancy?
Part of the solution to the posture challenge in pregnancy comes from the members of your healthcare team. You need passive intervention. Your body needs to be stretched, strengthened, moved, touched, kneaded, and treated.
Your team needs to alter and coordinate the proprioceptive receptor signals governing your spine. Using their skills, they will essentially reboot your receptor-to-posture mechanism so your upper motor neurons can accept your signals of shifts in your center of gravity that will initiate appropriate alterations to the curves in your spine.
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“Your body needs to be stretched, strengthened, moved, touched, kneaded, and treated.”
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Because these members of your team work with skeletal muscles and connective tissues in different ways, they can each play a role in helping your back compensate for your pregnancy.
- Your massage therapist. Getting the muscles and ligaments passively worked while in a prone position is one of the best ways to allow down time for the brain to receive new information about the pressures on your spine. In effect, you’ll trick your body into changing its neurologic firing to accept your new reality.
- Your acupuncturist. Focusing your nervous system to accept a new reality of posture. This therapy maybe longer lasting due to stimulation time of the muscles and ligaments.
- Your chiropractor. Working specifically with the spinal column where most of the input is exchanged, your chiropractor will essentially recalibrate the joints and surrounding muscles and ligaments by realigning the spinal column.
- Your physical therapist. By starting a stretching program or low impact strengthening program recommended by your physical therapist, you will start firing more receptors in your body so your brain and spine can better calibrate what’s happening with your body.
- The baby’s dad. Finally, something for him to do! Touch is a significant factor when dealing with the spinal column’s impact on posture. Your partner needs to diligently and effectively stimulate the largest organ in your body: your skin. This will require him to do things like apply lotion to your back and legs. He’ll need to rub your feet. He’ll have to do whatever he can to refresh your stimuli receptors and start sending renewed signals to your brain. His concentrated touch is a process that you can do on a daily basis to clear out all of the confusing signals your brain has had to deal with throughout your day and update your center of gravity database.
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