Birth Preparation

You’ve been told you should see a women’s health physio to help prep for birth but unsure why…

Let us explain.

At Kin we have undergone additional birth preparation training to understand the stages of birth, how to use hormones to your advantage, how to prepare your pelvic floor for birth and reduce the risk of birth injuries.

Pelvic Floor Preparation:

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

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.

Having an awareness on how to contract and relax your pelvic floor can improve birth outcomes and recovery postpartum.

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

Perineal Massage:

We can teach 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.