Today we’ll discuss relaxing inside the pelvis with an exercise called the pelvic clock. By now you’re 31 weeks pregnant and your baby is growing.
Your baby’s head is no longer the size of a golf ball or a peach that’s for sure. In fact your baby’s head is almost a full term head and a full term baby is a pretty big object, particularly the head. Some people joke that giving birth is like having a watermelon come out, but that’s exaggerating.
If you put your thumbs together and your index fingers together and make a circle, that’s how big your baby’s head is at term and that’s big enough without the exaggeration.
If our baby just had to fall through the hole in our pelvis, none of them would get stuck. Often our stuck baby is most often due to the tension inside the tube. Every bit of our bony structure’s covered with soft tissue. One part of soft tissue is our 500 muscles.
There are some muscles inside, tighten up your bottom and you’ll feel some of them. Some of us have tension inside our body just like some of us aren’t as flexible on the outside of our body. It’s just more obvious who can do the split. Internal tension can’t be seen; sometimes it can be felt, like when you tighten up your bottom.
Because we are not blobs that ooze on the ground, we easily develop tension just to hold ourselves up. All of us women and men can recognise internal tension if we are taught and then how to relax it.
For example, sit down on a comfortable chair, pay attention to how you feel in these specific areas, your lower belly, the muscles on the outside of each hip, the space between the bones you’re sitting on and your bum muscles.
Now as you stand up and while you are making that action of standing, notice how you begin to develop tension in some or all of those specific areas. When you are sitting down you’re not weight bearing and when you begin to rise and come to a standing position, then your muscles have to create tension in order to create motion and to hold you up.
So our primary job in labour, even in very painful contractions, is to relax inside the pelvic tube. Once we learned a simple skill called the pelvic clock, then all we have to do is apply that skill during contractions and between them. And what’s neat about the skill what you’re about to learn is that it can be done whether you’re walking, sitting, standing, bending over or lying down.
Since you can’t reach inside the tube of your pelvis, you have to picture to yourself or imagine the inside of your pelvic tube. Simply break the inside of that tube into specific areas and then soften in each area. For example, soften under your pubic bone or inside your right hip.
Go around the tube in a circle, soften each specific place, now sit down and soften in five or six places inside your pelvic tube. Once you’ve gone around the circle and feel relaxed, just pay attention to that feeling so you can duplicate it in labour, and now stand up.
You’ve already noticed that when you stand up tension naturally occurs, so once you stand up go around the circle again, softening those specific places. If you want to gain more expertise, then walk around a little, continuing to work around the internal circle.
This simple skill assists in the dilation of your cervix; the cervix which has to open in order for your baby to move down into your birth canal must retract into the inside of the tube. When you relax, the tissue inside the pelvis or the tube, then it’s easier for the cervix to retract during each contraction.
If you’re not certain you’re relaxing or softening, just tense up inside and then relax the tension in those specific areas. But in labour don’t tense up, you want to be relaxing.