Birth Preparation

You’ve been told to see a women’s health physio to help prepare for birth but you’re unsure why…Let us explain.

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How can pelvic health physio help prepare you for birth?

  • Your pelvic floor needs to lengthen to allow baby to pass through the pelvis.

    Knowing how to contract and relax your pelvic floor prior to birth has been shown to decrease the second stage of labour.

    Pelvic floor muscle training is also recommended to dfecrease the risk of perineal tearing.

  • This 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

    One of the hardest things we hear about perineal massage isn’t the massage itself, it’s being able to reach. We will teach you the easiest ways to get this done.

  • We can teach you different ways to move to help open up different parts of the pelvis.

  • At Kin we have undergone additional birth training to understand the stages of labour and how to use hormones to help labour to progress.

Preparing for Early Postpartum

We 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?

The earliest time point we would recommend seeing your pelvic floor physio is 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.

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