Pelvic & Lower Back Pain & Pregnancy
Pregnancy related pelvic girdle pain or lumbopelvic pain affects one in two pregnant Australian women.
Pain is typically felt into the pubic bone, buttocks, hips and lower back and can occur at any time during pregnancy.
What doesn’t cause pelvic girdle pain?
Previously the hormone relaxin was blamed as being the cause of pelvic girdle pain. However, all pregnant women produce this hormone during pregnancy and not all women experience pelvic girdle pain. Unfortunately this hormone is still blamed even though years of research has shown that it is not the cause, it does just appear to be a very poorly named hormone.
So what does cause it?
At this stage we believe that this pain is mulitfactorial (in that there are several contributing factors). This can be due to a change in mechanics and how we move and therefore challenge different parts of the body. It could a decrease in strength through the muscles surrounding the pelvis and pelvic floor. It may also be due to less sleep, we know where sleep is where a lot of our restorative processes take place. Pregnancy for some mum’s to be can be a time of increased stress, we know our thoughts and our feelings can influence our experience of pain. For a small number of people it may be due to where baby is resting or hormonal changes. However, we think the hormonal changes are related to changes in estrogen, not relaxin.
Signs and Symptoms of Pelvic Girdle Pain include pain with:
rolling over in bed at night
getting in and out of the car
with walking and going up and downstairs
getting dressed standing
pain typically feels worse at the end of the day
What can we do to help?
Generally the sooner you can seek help the better.
One of the easiest things that you can do at home is to modify your movements to reduce pain.
This may include:
sitting down to get changed
taking slower smaller steps when moving
when standing, rocking pelvis back and forward and then squeeze glutes to stand
taking both legs together when getting in and out of the car
Physiotherapists may recommend heat or ice therapy depending on the location of pain.
They can also provide strength exercises to help ease pain.
Generally strength based exercise such as weights or Pilates as long as it does not exacerbate your pelvic pain has been shown to be beneficial to help prevent and reduce the severity of pelvic girdle pain.
Physiotherapists can also provide advice about compression garments or support belts to help. Our favourites are Everform and GRDL.
They can be found here: http://everformwear.com.au/ and https://grdlbelt.com.au/
