Pregnancy & Birth Preparation

We believe that all pregnant women should be supported by their pelvic health physiotherapists during pregnancy and postpartum. We will support whatever type of birth you hope for, whether this be home birth or elective c-section and everything in between.

Here's how a pelvic health physiotherapist can support you:

  • Pregnancy Related Aches and Pains: We treat your musculoskeletal pregnancy concerns, including pelvic girdle pain, back pain, and neck pain.

  • Preparing for Birth: We can teach you perineal massage and help you prepare your pelvic floor for labour. See more detail below!

  • Staying Active: We'll provide safe and effective exercise guidance throughout your pregnancy to keep you strong and healthy.

  • Managing Concerns: Worried about leaking or heaviness? We can assess and manage any pelvic floor symptoms that arise during pregnancy.

  • Postpartum Support: The journey doesn't end after birth! We'll educate you on caring for your body and pelvic floor in the early postpartum period.

Birth Preparation

You’ve heard that you should see a women’s health physio in pregnancy to help prepare for birth but you’re not quite sure how they can help.

Let us explain.

We can help you prepare for birth in the following ways:

Pelvic Floor Preparation:

There is more and more research coming out about the role of pelvic floor and birth outcomes.

The pelvic floor is a group of muscles which sit at the base of the pelvis. They start on one side of the pelvis, wrap around behind the back passage and attach onto the other side. They sit below our pelvic organs to help provide support.

There is a common misconception that the pelvic floor helps to push baby out. But it is the uterus that contracts to help push baby out, the pelvis floor needs to relax and lengthen to allow baby to pass through.

Women’s health physiotherapists can assess your pelvic floor during pregnancy to ensure it can contract and relax and lengthen to allow for passage of baby.

Perineal Massage:

Another way we can help is teaching you perineal massage. This is massage that can be done from 34 weeks of pregnancy, only takes 5 minutes and should be done a few times a week leading into pregnancy.

Perineal massage has been shown to:

  • reduce the risk of episiotomy

  • reduce the risk of grade 3 & 4 perineal tears

  • decrease the severity of postpartum perineal pain

  • reduce the risk of anal incontinence

  • reduce the second stage of labour

Preparing for Early Postpartum:

We also believe that pregnancy is the best time to discuss early postnatal care.

Often if you are seen on the ward by a women’s health physio, it is in the day or two following birth. For obvious reasons, this is not the most optimal time to take on new information.

We believe that discussing early postpartum care in pregnancy, better prepares you to take care of your body in the early days following birth.

So when should I book in with a women’s health physio?

For birth preparation, the earliest time point we would recommend seeing your pelvic floor physio would be 13 weeks.

For those who already experience pelvic floor dysfunction, such as pelvic pain, painful sex, leaking, constipation etc the sooner we review the more time we have to optimise your pelvic floor before birth.

Otherwise reviewing around the 20 week mark is perfect as it gives us a good amount of time to make changes if need be.

We would always recommend a review around 34 weeks to teach perineal massage and discuss postpartum care.