April 28, 2021

Everything you need to know about postnatal Pilates

During pregnancy your body goes through so much physical change – postnatal Pilates is a supportive practise to help you reconnect with your body. Our KICBUMP program will help you restore your core and pelvic floor from the deepest muscle layers out, and rebuild your strength from head to toe with graduated supportive movements.

It’s important to remember that everyone will be different in their postnatal recovery but generally you can consider making a return to low impact exercise like postnatal pilates after you’ve had your six week postnatal medical checkup and you’ve been medically cleared and given the green light to make a return to exercise.

Our postnatal Pilates is a little different to our usual KIC sessions! It’s a 10-week program, where our sessions are developed to be completed in order from session one to ten. We recommend completing each session three-four times before moving onto the next. No matter where you are on your postpartum journey we recommended beginning from session one.

The program explores lots of pelvic floor and deep core focused exercises, lower body and glute strengthening exercises, as well as middle back, side body, posture and mobilising exercises. KICBUMP’s postnatal Pilates exercises are designed to leave you feeling stronger, balanced and reconnected with your body.

There are so many incredible benefits of the KICBUMP postnatal Pilates program:

Rebuild pelvic floor awareness and strength: During pregnancy, your pelvic floor and deep core muscles have to stretch to accomodate for your growing baby. The type of delivery you have can also put varying stress on these muscles. The KICBUMP postnatal Pilates program focuses on rebuilding this strength and awareness with the most basic exercises and graduated progressions.

Postural re-education: Your growing bump changes your posture so much! The growing weight of your baby increases the curvature (or lordosis) around the lower back. Postnatally, the body needs to readjust itself and find what ‘neutral alignment’ means all over again. Postnatal Pilates can help to support this. Also, the postnatal period often means a huge amount of carrying, feeding, and being in rounded positions through the middle back – KICBUMP’s postnatal Pilates includes mobilising and stretching exercises to help keep the spine feeling good.

Whole body strengthening: Postnatal Pilates focuses on re-strengthening the body from head to toe with graduated exercise progressions, and key cueing that focuses on alignment, breathing and core awareness. The goal is to help you set yourself up with the best foundations possible as you make your way back to exercise.

Time for you! Postnatal Pilates is your time to reconnect with you – as a new mum there is such a huge amount of energy and time that is put towards your beautiful bundle of joy but it is still important to take time out for yourself to honour your body and all of the incredible things it’s capable of.

For any new mummas out there who are apprehensive about getting back into exercise, we cannot stress enough the importance of speaking to someone. Sharing your concerns with your relevant health professional can help reassure you of any concerns you might have, as well as offer you any additional support you may need.

Mummas, we can’t wait to see you in the KIC app. See you when you’re ready!

Everything you need to know about postnatal Pilates

Mari Yammas