Short Practice for Pelvic Pain

For those of you who are dealing with pelvic girdle pain, you know how much pain and discomfort just everyday movements can bring on. And so here are four movements that you can modify just a little bit to find some more comfort. So if you're standing and experiencing pelvic girdle pain, then you find a gentle sway side to side. And in that, when you come to center, both feet are there and then start to press into one heel, maybe lifting the other heel. Think about a bend in the knees staying there and going side to side with that sway.

So if you want, you could put on some nice music, you can move your arms in it. And what this helps to do is bring the SI joints, the sacroiliac joints, kind of back in their happy place where they're not as aggravated. So the pelvis is really strong and stable, but it comes into places where it's being more protective, more sensitive. We want to see if we can look after it when it's feeling protective and sensitive. So another common thing that we do that can aggravate the pelvis is that we go to lift something.

So if you are going to lift a toddler or lift something heavy, start to bend the knees. And as you lower down to pick something up, we'll practice it here now together. And we're going to inhale as we lower down. And on the exhale, we can imagine picking something up and we're going to engage and lift on the exhale. So inhale, lowering, great.

And then exhale and engage as you lift. We'll do that another time. So inhale, lower, and then exhale to lift up, fantastic. Another really common place where we feel pelvic girdle pain is when we either move from sit to stand or stand to sit. So if you have a chair at home or go find a chair, and we'll first come to sitting and we'll start from there.

So when we're sitting, and this will often happen when we've been sitting for a long time. So if we are sitting back in our chair, just scooching forward so that we're at the front of the chair. So then we'll bring the feet back so that the balls of the feet start to come back behind the knees, somewhere where we feel supported still. Bring the hands to the tops of the legs and we'll make some little lion claws with the hands and find an inhale here first. And then on the exhale, press through the hands and exhale as you come to stand.

And to come down to sit, we're going to do the exact same thing, just in reverse. So we take our inhale here, we find our lion claws, and we exhale. It can be helpful as well to add in an S breath to this, but it might be weird to do that out in public. So you also don't have to do an exhale through the mouth, but it can really help. So if you're feeling a lot of pelvic girdle pain, then you can try and inhale through the nose and exhale making an S sound.

So we'll take our inhale here and exhale. So just being mindful of that when you go to move that we're not holding on to, sometimes we brace for that pain and we hold on to the arms of the chair. So instead we're going to really focus on those lion claws for that one. And we'll take the chair away now because we don't need it now. And then making our way down to the floor, really take your time.

We're going to come all the way to lying on the back and cover one of the poses that can be really difficult and that can be rolling over, getting up out of bed. So another movement that can be a little tricky when the pelvis is sensitive or protective is getting in and out of bed. So we're going to imagine that our yoga mat has now become a bed and it has an edge and we're over towards the right side of our bed, extending the right leg out to straight. So what's so common here is that we just start to roll over, we bring the left knee into the midline, but instead of doing that today, we're going to let the left knee open a little bit to the side, so it's not right at the center, it opens a little bit to the left side. And we'll push through the right foot here until we can feel the pelvis lifting up.

We might lift the left hand as well up towards the sky, sometimes that helps. And we roll over to the side. And we're still on our bed here, we're going to use the hands against the bed to push up to sitting. And if this really was a bed, then my feet would dangle down and be on the floor now. So to come back down to lying down on our bed, it would be the same thing.

Our feet would be dangling on the floor and then we would bring the legs up onto the bed as we lay down onto the side. And we would roll over, so we're going to roll over, but place that left foot down to give you that support to lift the pelvis and to come back to lying down on your back. So the things to remember are to extend the leg out to straight in the direction that you want to roll, to open that knee instead of closing it, to open the opposite knee instead of closing it, and to push through the foot as you lift the pelvis and come over to the side of the pelvis to then come up to sitting. So I hope those movements, those forward movements really help you to move without the pelvis being in an unhappy place.