Hey everybody, its Dr. Brian with Beyond Bones. And we’re going to talk today about the number one most important stretch that you can do as a pregnant woman and it’s for muscle called the psoas muscle. It’s a muscle that attaches to your ribs at the back, and runs all the way through the inside of you and hooks up to the front parts of your thighs here, that muscle that really is important when it comes to the opening of the hips and the flexing and movement of your your legs, your hips and your lower back.
With pregnancy in particular, this is a problem for all sorts of people who spend a lot of time sitting but in particularly with pregnant women and the way the center of mass changes as the baby grows inside it can become a real problem can cause low back pain can be related to sciatica that comes along with pregnancy. And it’s a really good, really simple, really important stretch to do. So we’re going to have Sara come on over. Sarah is going to have her first baby is lie down on your back there, put your legs up on the chair. Exactly, and she’s just doing this, she’s just doing this perfectly correctly, just slide forward toward the chair a little bit more good. So we can see that Sarah’s got her hips here, her thighs and her hips at as close as she can to a 90 degree angle. So maybe squeezed forward just a little bit. And that’s good. And then her knees just kind of there extending forward. And this is the stretch that takes all of the sort of the pressure off of her psoas muscle and allows things to relax and this is what we want a relaxed psoas will allow for a relaxed and as smooth and peaceful a pregnancy delivery and recovery as possible. We want to do this for five minutes per day if we can, not more although it’s going to be tempting because it feels good. We can see underneath here that I’m barely able to slide my hand under Sara’s low back yet. You don’t need to try to press it down. If your back is arching up off the floor for now that’s totally fine. Over time as the Soyuz relaxes, your low back will relax down into the floor as well and make an even deeper stretch.
And that’s it. Five minutes a day, it’s going to change your pregnancy and your life!