From strengthening your pelvic floor to stabilising your hips, a Pilates teacher and prenatal fitness expert reveals the best moves to prepare the body for pregnancy.
Prenatal Pilates is an extremely popular and effective way of strengthening and supporting key areas of the body for pregnancy — but instead of waiting until your second trimester (most classes won’t allow you to start during the first), why not prepare your body while trying to conceive?
Here, Hollie Grant, founder of The Bump Plan, details five Pilates moves that you can do at home before your pregnancy…
Read more: The best exercise to do at each stage of your pregnancy — and what to avoid
1. Hip Hinges
I’d give these to every human being if I could. Hip hinges activate the hamstrings and glutes, which given our modern-day lifestyles (that include too much sitting down) can become weak/lazy. During pregnancy, it’s these muscles that will support the pelvis as the uterus grows.
How to do it: Find your neutral standing position, then bring your arms to prayer at your chest. Make sure your knees are soft and when you’re ready, imagine that you are bowing. Push your bum back and hinge at the hips until you can go no further and then hold. You’ll get to this bite point where you feel a hamstring and a glute stretch, but if you did go any further, you’d have to bend your knees or round your back. Keep your back neutral. In this position, the knees are soft and the feet are in contact with the floor. As you exhale, bring yourself back into a natural standing position and then repeat.
Read more: 5 yoga poses said to boost fertility (for men and women)
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2. Hip Lift
Too much sitting down in our modern lifestyles can leave our hip flexors feeling tight and weak, but for pregnancy we need strong and flexible hip flexors to support our pelvis. This exercise targets the concentric (shortening) phase and eccentric (lengthening) phase of muscle activation and helps improve the function of the hip flexor.
How to do it: Stand in a natural position, shift your weight to your right leg (without locking your knee), hands in prayer. Exhale to lift the left leg up to tabletop and hold, balancing on the right leg. Inhale to tap the floor, exhale to bring it back up and repeat. Keep the pelvis fixed and make the leg move in the hip socket, so nothing else moves.
3. Quad Stretch
This is a great exercise for learning how to stabilise the pelvis, and it also works the glutes and abdominals. Pelvic stability is really helpful as the bump grows, and so strengthening our pelvic stabilisers (our pelvic floor and transverse abdominis) will make a huge difference ahead of pregnancy.
How to do it: Find a neutral standing kneel. Engage your core and imagine you’re doing up a corset, which fires up your transverse (inner abdominal muscles). Bring your arms up in front of you to shoulder height, relax the shoulders away from your ears. Imagine a line going from the crown of your head down to your knees. As you inhale, start hinging backwards and maintain that line. As you exhale, bring yourself back to the start position. You should feel the effort in the core. Keep the abs and glutes engaged.
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@gowithjofitness Kneeling Sissy Squats | Strengthen your Quads | Knees and Hip Flexors #homeworkout #fyp #gymtok #strengthtraining ♬ Made You Look – Meghan Trainor
4. Side-kneeling leg lift
This exercise is a spicy one and works the hip abductors. Lift the leg as high as you can manage without making the rest of the body move, so you can be sure you are targeting the correct muscles and not just muscling through with your back. Again, this is a great exercise for strengthening the pelvis and its supporting muscles.
How to do it: Come to a standing kneel and find that neutral position, arms out to the side. Lean sideways onto your left hand, putting that hand on the floor, and extend the right leg along the mat. Bring your hips forward to keep them neutral. Right arm towards the ceiling, exhale and lift your right leg up towards the ceiling and inhale, then control it back down with your toe pointed. Slow on the way up and slow on the way down.
Read More: Krissy Cela on bump-shaming and working out while pregnant
@kianafotoohi lift leg up x 6 & repeat on the other side; inhale on the down & exhale on the lift😌 #pilates #pilatestiktok #pilateslovers #pilatestok #matpilates #pilatesathome #pilatesmat #pilatesabs #pilatesbody #pilatesforeverybody #pilatesinstructor ♬ It girl x just dance – jovynn
5. Arm Reach
This is a great exercise for teaching spine stability. During pregnancy, our growing uterus can pull the pelvis forward at the front and cause us to lean backwards. This happens as the abdominals at the front lengthen and stretch, and struggle to support the spine. Arm reach is a great exercise for teaching core activation that stabilises the spine and reduces this ‘leaning back’ symptom in future pregnancies.
How to do it: Stand in neutral and as you exhale, reach your arms up overhead and hold for a moment. Stay in neutral (don’t lean back) then inhale, lower your arms back down and do it again. By staying in neutral, you are working your abdominals at the front.
Feature image credit: Freepik
