Pregnancy Exercise For Easy Delivery

Hey guys, welcome to Pregnancy and Postpartum TV. Today we're going to be doing a series of exercises to prepare for an easy delivery. I put out new videos every Wednesday and I'm always adding to prenatal yoga and fitness and labor preparation, so if you like videos like these, then consider subscribing and hitting the notification bell to get notified every Wednesday when I put out a new video. We're going to start with our feet fairly wide apart, toes pointed slightly out, and we'll bring our hands up to heart center, and inhale, our arms up, looking up at our thumbs, and on the exhale, bend your knees, bring your hands back to heart center, and inhale, straighten, looking up, and exhale into a squat, and inhale, hands above, and exhale, squat, and we'll take a breath here, and inhale, straighten your legs, and now we're going to pigeon toe our toes in. You can take your hand to your hips and lift up your chest for a little back bend, and then hinging at the hips, exhale, fold all the way forward, and you can either bend your knees or keep your knees with a micro bend, and reach your hands towards the ground, and we'll take a couple of breaths here. If you wanted to shift your feet out a little bit, if that's more comfortable, that's absolutely okay. Relaxing your neck, and your head, and your face, and we'll bend our knees now if they're not already bent, and roll at one vertebra at a time, inhale, arms out to the side, and taking your hands to your hips again, lifting your chest, and hinging flat back all the way forward, and this time you can either reach for your legs or if you can, reach for your big toes, and inhale, lift and find length in your spine, and exhale, fold forward into a wide leg forward fold, and you can release your toes if you're hanging on to your toes, bend your knees, and roll up again, one vertebra at a time, and inhale out, and hands on your hips again for our last forward fold, and folding all the way forward, and we'll place our hands on the ground in front of us, and you can twist your hips, and we'll just open to the side for a very gentle twist here, don't twist too deep, and bringing that top hand back down in front of your face, and gently opening up to the other side, back down to the ground, and bending your knees, hands on your hips, and roll all the way up, good, so now we're going to move into triangle on the right hand side, so you can turn your right foot open, bring your hand out to the side, and reach towards the top of your mat, and let your bottom hand fall in front of your leg, and then reach up with your top arm there, and on your next inhale, activate your core, and bring yourself back up, and we'll open our stance a little bit wider, and face our hips towards the front, and bending your knee for warrior two, and breathe, and we will tip back for a gentle side stretch here, and coming back, straightening the leg, and now we're going to twist our hips to face the top of our mat, and take your hands on your hips, and slight back bend again, and then lengthen spine, and fold forward, so you can either stop here, or if you have more flexibility, or it's comfortable for you, you can fold deeper down to however far is comfortable for pyramid pose, and on the next exhale, we're going to bend our front leg, bring our hands down to the ground, and we're going to find our balance over our front leg, and slowly lift the back leg off the ground, and you can either stop there, or if you'd like a little bit more of a challenge, you can lift your arms up into airplane pose, and exhale, coming back down, and from here, we're going to shift, and walk your hands over to the center, and we'll shift into a yogi squat here, so if you want to put something underneath your heels, you can get a couple of blocks, or if your heels touch the ground, or you can find toilet paper rolls, whatever's comfortable, and if you can bring your hands to heart center, this really opens up your hips, and helps prepare for birth and labor, and so we're going to hang out here for two minutes, so find a comfy position, if you want to shift your weight back and forth, that's absolutely fine, and breathe, now we're going to do that sequence on the other side, so you can take your hands down in front of you, and roll up to a standing position, and we'll do that on the left hand side now, so turning out your left foot, and opening up your arms for triangle or trikonasana, reaching forward, and dropping your lower hand, and looking up at your top hand if that's comfortable, and on your next inhale, coming up, and a little bit wider of a stance, and bend your front knee for warrior two, and we'll reverse for a little side stretch, and inhale, coming up, and we'll shift our hips towards the top of our mat for a pyramid, and inhale, a little mini back bend, and folding forward, you can stop here if that's comfortable for you, or if you want to fold into a deeper pyramid pose, that's absolutely fine as well, and on the next exhale, we'll release, bend that front knee, and we'll find our balance over top of standing leg, and lifting that back leg off, and you can either stay here, or lift into airplane pose, and exhale, slowly release down, and we'll bring the feet hip-width distance apart, and roll up, and this time we'll inhale our arms up, and then sit back into chair position, activate our pelvic floor, activate our core, and breathe, and inhale, coming up, hands to heart center, exhale, and inhale, arms up, and sit back into one more chair position, one more breath here, a little bit deeper, and exhale, bring your hands to your heart center, and folding all the way forward, and from here, we'll go down to hands and knees, tuck your toes, and press into our first downward dog, you can take whatever movement feels good here, and exhale, coming down onto all fours, we'll do some hip circles, and work on opening up those hips to help let baby out, and other way, and we'll take our knees really wide, and toes together, and relax into child's pose here, and take a couple of breaths, and here we're going to bring our attention to our pelvic floor, and we're going to work on strengthening your pelvic floor, if you are 36 weeks or earlier, you can do kegels with me, or if you're 30, you're after 36 weeks, then you might want to just work on opening and relaxing your pelvic floor, so we're going to a raisin at the opening of our vagina, and we're going to pick the raisin up, and suck it up into us, and then release, and we'll do that 10 times, just at your own pace, and now we will pick it up, and hold, and so pick up the raisin, and kegel, and hold for 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and release, good, and our next inhale, we will come up, and walk our hands up, and we're going to get down on our side, so always carefully to protect our core, getting up and down on our sides, on your right hand side, and we're going to strengthen the muscles around our hips, depending on how you labor, a lot of women are laboring on their side, maybe using a peanut ball, and so we're going to do some clamshells to strengthen these muscles in preparation for labor, so we'll do 10 of these again, just on your own time, and when you're finished, you can lengthen out that leg, and we'll do some tiny hip circles, also activating your core, pulling your baby into you, and little tiny circles the other way, good, and we'll bring our knee in, and you can do some bigger hip circles, just opening up, and you can grab onto your leg, and stretch your leg out, so it doesn't matter where you are, but just to get a nice stretch, and bending your leg, grabbing your ankle, and we'll stretch our quad, good, and we'll carefully get up, and flip over to the other side, and starting with clamshells again, 10 of them, good, and when you're done, you can straighten your leg, and little tiny circles, and the other way, and taking your knee, and bigger hip circles, and stretching your leg up, just wherever feels good, and when you're ready, bending that top knee, and moving into a nice quad stretch here, good, and when you're done, again, carefully pushing your body up, and move into a wide leg stretch, give yourself a little bit of a boost to sit up nice and tall, and then you can either stay here, or if you want to walk farther forward, you can do that as well, feet are flexed, and toes are pointing up towards the ceiling, good, and when you're ready, you can walk your hands over to one side, stretch, hands over to the other side, and coming back to center, we'll bring our feet together, and open up our knees for baddha konasana, or butterfly pose, and inhale, and fold forward, and coming up, so now we're going to practice pushing, so you can get into a position maybe that you want to practice laboring in, so that could be hands and knees, it could be on your side, it could be using a birthing stool, or I have a squatty potty here, so for example, if I was going to use my squatty potty as a birthing stool, I might sit over it like this, and so whatever position you think you want to, but we will practice pushing here, so what we're going to do is we're going to take a big inhale in, and we're going to push as if we're pushing out a big poo, because that's how it's going to feel when you push your baby out, and we're going to hold that for 10 seconds, of course when you're actually in labor, you want to wait until you feel your body pushing, and then you're going to support that so that you're not exhausting yourself, so we're going to take a big inhale in, and we will push for 10, and release, so see how I'm not only using the air in my lungs to push, but I'm also compressing and using everything to try to put pressure and get that baby out as easily as possible, so we'll do that again, and a big inhale in, and push, and release, and we'll do that one more time, inhale in, and using your core, and push, and release, great job, so now we'll move into shavasana, and we'll practice relaxing, which is going to be helpful for the other parts of our labor, if you want to grab a pillow or a bolster, or under your knee, and under your head, get down carefully on one side, and put your hand on your belly, connect with your baby, and feel your whole body relax, scan through all the different parts of your body, from your face, and your toes, your pelvic floor, and just relax everything, so for parts of your labor, this would be really helpful to be able to relax, go inside yourself, and focus on just relaxing, opening up your cervix, a lot of women find it helpful to move around a lot in their labor, and they have sort of a, they walk, and or they might do dancing with their partner, kind of like slow dancing, or bounce on a ball, but for parts of it, when you're getting exhausted, being able to relax, and focus on your cervix opening up, and totally relaxing, can feel uncomfortable when you're going into a contraction, and so really just going into it, and accepting it, can be helpful, instead of shying away from the pain, and not letting your cervix to open up, so really practicing relaxing your pelvic floor, and your cervix, and everything can be helpful in labor, so we'll just focus on relaxing right now, and imagining what it might be like, and preparing on being relaxed, and when you're ready, wiggling your fingers and toes, stretching your toes, and your fingers in the opposite direction, and opening your eyes, and making your way back up to a seated position, so the pregnancy yoga card for today is, my body knows how to birth my baby, and I'm preparing my body daily for an easy delivery with movement and good nutrition, so if you want to grab your own copy of your prenatal yoga birth preparation card, I will put a link for a free download below in the description box, we also have a complete guide to how to cope with pain in labor, or there's pregnancy meal plans, or if you just want to get notified every time I put out a new pregnancy exercise video, I will put the links below to that. I hope you're feeling really confident and prepared for your upcoming labor and birth, and really excited to meet your baby, so let me know in the comments below how you're feeling about your labor and birth, and if you do have any questions, you can also feel free to put those in the comments, and I will answer them as well, so namaste to you, and namaste to the babies, thanks so much for joining me today, if you like videos like these, then make sure to give it a thumbs up, you can also subscribe and hit the notification bell to get notified every time I release a new video, and thanks for sharing your practice with me today.