Say goodbye to peeing your pants when you run, jump, laugh, sneeze....well you get it. Kendra Fitzgerald and Nicole Coons, founder of Devoted Mamas, guide you through their 4 key techniques to repair your postpartum body, no matter if it has been a few weeks or a few years after giving birth, it is never to late. This powerful sister duo has trained and coached women across the globe through their online virtual programming and are here to help military moms get back to their desired fitness level, not just for our careers but so we can live everyday without limitations. Devoted Mamas have been featured in many forums to include SHAPE, CURVE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness Hers magazines, as well as CNN and the NY daily News...just to name few.
What if….
-You could have a healthy pregnancy & a healthy baby with as little pain and discomfort as possible
-You felt ready to rock your birth, confident you could handle any curve ball like a boss
-You could recover fully in postpartum, get your core and pelvic floor strength back and be STRONGER than before you had kids!
In this episode, Kendra Fitzgerald and Nicole Coons instructs you on how to strengthen your core and pelvic floor by using your every days movements as well as guide you through their 4 key techniques to repair your postpartum body, no matter if it has been a few weeks or a few years after giving birth, it is never to late.
Prenatal Yoga Course : Go from overwhelmed and achy to energized, calm and strong by preparing your body and mind for the marathon of birth with easy at-home practices. Get started now for only $49
Birth with Confidence Course [Self-Study Course] Overcome fears and anxieties by preparing yourself for your best birth. Feel confident, unapologetically in charge and totally prepared for the wild adventure of childbirth and motherhood. Over 9 weeks, practice the physical, mental, emotional, and energetic work required to be the boss of your own birth. Get started now for only $249
Postpartum Repair Course [Lifetime Access!] Bring life back to your core and pelvic floor, safely, with targeted corrective exercises and workouts you can do at home. With lifetime access you can use this now and with any future pregnancies! Get started now for only $249
New Virtual Group Classes: these weekly classes are an opportunity for mothers to congregate and practice together with us.
LINKS AND RESOURCES IN THIS ARTICLE
FOLLOW DEVOTED MAMAS
Website | devotedmamas.com
Instagram | @devotedmamas
Facebook | devotedmamasworldwide
QUESTIONS?
Send the Devoted Mamas an email at
Kendra@devotedmamas.com
Nicole@devotedmamas.com
How do we adapt to our new body after birth? I mean that is what we are dealing with right? Our joints have been softened, our bone structure has been expanded, and not to mention the major abdominal stretching that occurred. To answer all your questions about postpartum repair and provide you with resources and information is the powerful sister duo, Kendra Fitzgerald and Nicole Coon's, founders of Devoted Moms.
The Devoted Mamas have set up an exclusive affiliate link for YOU as a Military Working Mom to sign up for their courses; Prenatal Yoga, Birth Education, and Postpartum Repair. By using the course links at the end of this article you help The Military Working Mom site continue to provide you the resources you need to balance your mom, wife, and military life.
Kendra is a pregnancy and postpartum corrective exercise specialist, personal trainer, yoga teacher and mom of two boys. Nicole is a pregnancy and postpartum yoga teacher, corrective exercise specialist, childbirth educator, spinning babies enthusiast, and trauma-informed professional as well as a mom of two kiddos. The Devoted Mamas have been featured in SHAPE, CURVE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness Hers magazines, as well as CNN and the NY daily News… just to name a few.
Devoted Mamas was founded in 2017 and we really created it to address the gaps that exist out there in information and support for mothers who want a full recovery after having children. And we're talking about looking at the four pillars of your physical well-being, mental well-being, emotional and energetic. All while providing not long drawn out complicated processes for doing all of these things, but really effective ways to make the most of the time you have to care for yourself, and doing so with a lot of support and a community of other devoted mothers who are on the same path.
Meet Nicole Coons: This journey has been informed by our own life experiences as mothers. Kendra and I are both mothers, but we're also sisters. We have a lot in common that were informing our work, our survival, and our recovery of postpartum. But we discovered there was a lot of information that was overwhelming, as there were gaps in the information on recovery. Some of the exercise information that's out there is not anatomically sound. Doctor's will often give us information like, "OK, you're cleared exercise." But then what? And now what? And how? There's a lot of unanswered questions that we need and we're on our own to figure out. So Kendra's been a great resource for me, and I for her.
I've spent a lot of time preparing, especially for my second kid. I had depression after my first child. I suffered and was really struggling as I felt very isolated. The birth went fine, but the recovery was a shock and I had a hard time getting through it. So the second time around, I dove into more traditional around the world theories, finding other ways that mothers survived and found some really wise practice and tradition in your Ayurveda tradition, lifestyle yoga. So I started doing that with her and then this sort of partnership as sisters supporting each other really gave birth to Devoted Mamas that you see today.
Meet Kendra Fitzgerald: My side of the journey to Devoted Mamas is that I came to it very honestly from my own experience. When I had my first child, it was a shock of what happens after you have a baby, because I have been in this fitness profession for a very long time. I had been a trainer for 10 years when I had my son and I was like, “oh I got this, I know the body, I know exactly what to do.” And so I went ahead and did what I thought I should do, and I ended up giving myself prolapse and had to stop running. I had to cancel a race that I was signed up to do, and it was incredibly defeating. I thought to myself on many occasions, “Will I ever feel like myself again?” It felt really sad, and I felt like I lost a piece of my own identity not being able to run anymore. So I threw myself into the study of what it means to be postpartum and how that is affected with, and how you repair your body well.
Nicole and I both have studied with a Pelvic Floor PT, and everything that we teach is based in science and on physical therapy elements, so it's a very scientific method. And so, I got to try it all out again on my second kid when I got pregnant! I used all of these techniques through my entire second pregnancy and in my postpartum recovery, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that they work; every one of these work. And so I feel like our experience for ourselves can bring a very understanding point of what all the mothers are going through. We've been there and we understand it.
Postpartum is a word flung around but not fully understood. Postpartum is not only what your body is going through immediately after birth but the changes it undergoes for your entire life after birth! As the phrase goes “Once postpartum, always postpartum.” Military moms have only 6 months to one year after birth before we are expected to be back our “normal” selves, in a physical sense; but to begin to repair our body we need to understand what it just went through.
Women endure a lot postpartum; pregnancy, birth itself and then layering onto that, postpartum challenges of just caring for your baby. You know, they're intense and we actually like to think of pregnancy and birth like an injury. You know, if you think about what happens to the body when the baby grows, you have your ribs which spread, the diaphragm which is a muscle at the bottom of your rib cage, it is compressed so our breathing gets shallower. The internal organs get squished; they get moved around. Our abdominals get stretched out. Our back muscles are compensated, they get locked down. Our posture changes. Our pelvic floor, of course, takes on a large amount of pressure. So our pelvic floor is not just weaker because of delivery, it's actually because of carrying our baby for nine months in our body. Our hips widen, they stretch. Our hormones cause our ligaments and tendons to loosen. And then, of course, later on, sleep deprivation. So we want to treat pregnancy and birth kind of like an injury.
With that in mind, we're like, okay, that's bad news. How do we turn this around to be good news? I think what's important is that we take a look at how we're defining postpartum and how do we define postpartum recovery.
So lets define postpartum recovery. I think it's really important to redefine what postpartum recovery is, and not a lot of us even have a definition of it. Like, you know, you're given a green light at six weeks that is like go back to doing what you were doing before. But what does that mean? Postpartum recovery is a much longer term thing than we really realize. Because once postpartum always postpartum, you know, we have a lot of moms who come to us two years postpartum or four years postpartum and they think “it's too late for me,” but it's really not, because whether you're six weeks, six years or 60 years postpartum, it's all postpartum. And, you know, I think the idea of what we aim for postpartum is really important. There's a lot of messaging out there that tells us that we should be getting our body back, or bouncing back like we are basketballs, which we are not. And really our viewpoint is that we should aim for a body that works, and then add in intensity and get ready for your fitness test military women have to prepare for. We have to establish that foundation in the baseline first and then be able to add intensity from there. So there's definitely a different way to approach this than just your regular exercise program that you would pick off the shelf and do. In postpartum, no exercise is really off limits. I know we see a lot of people say, “Avoid this” “Don't do this” “Don't do that” kind of thing, which we should proceed with caution. But if we set a good foundation and we go within our own limits and listen to our own bodies, then we can do exercises appropriately with the right progressions that make sense for our body and where we are in terms of our recovery.
For C-section moms, it's slightly different. The timeline is usually the most different variable because you're recovering from major abdominal surgery. One of the misconceptions is that C-section moms don't have to do any pelvic floor work because they didn't have a vaginal birth. However, you carry the baby for 10 months and that pressure in the belly and within the abdominals can impact the pressure that was on your pelvic floor. So your pelvic floor certainly got a lot of pressure throughout the whole 10 months. And perhaps your mom who pushed for 10 hours and then had a C-section, so you might still have some pelvic floor issues even if you didn't have a vaginal birth. The other thing to know is obviously we want you to follow your OB’s and midwives guidance in terms of when you go back to exercise and really being cautious and paying attention to your scar tissue, because scar tissue can have a really big impact on how your core and your pelvic floor work together and how the whole system works together, which is something that we go through a lot in our virtual courses. But, you know, there is an element of massage and scar tissue release that we can do to help move a C-section scar recovery along. Especially if a C-section mom is not feeling anything or they feel a numbness in that area or like they just can't connect to the lower core. That scar massage can be really important. Additionally, it's also a place that we hold a lot of energy and maybe some stuck energy or, you know, just an area that undergoes trauma and an injury that has to be fully recovered.
First of all, you to even have the idea that you can and should start moving before doing something the right things before too much time passes, is the right mindset to have. I You know, in the research we've done regarding recovery from an injury even is that it takes only two weeks of inactivity to start losing muscle tone and function. And Then we take all of the issues that we talked about earlier, right. From pregnancy and then postpartum where where we're compounding, you know, neck pain, back pain, and just aches and pains. And we sit for two weeks or longer and we expect our bodies to be fit for exercise like before. It's no wonder that we get frustrated very quickly.
So first, we want to open the discussion of, what can you do before your six week checkup? Now, we're not suggesting going running or an actual high intensity exercise before you're six weeks or eight weeks week clearance,. B but there absolutely are things that you can start doing right away. From the moment you give birth, y. You can start increasing your awareness again of your pelvic floor. It's going to be a little different than. Like how you connected with your public pelvic floor or and how you connect with your core before pregnancy are going to be different. It's going to feel different, but starting the process right away is important and very doable. Once you have that other out of the way, and have established that, yes, we you can do and should do movement, and there are things you can do start to work on.
Here are the four keys to getting your pelvic floor and core turned back on. If you don’t know how strong or weak yours is, go ahead and take our free postpartum pelvic floor & core strength test. So the first is alignment. I'll talk about what these mean in a second.
-ALIGNMENT: First [00:15:29] we're going to work on posture and alignment of the body; . So making sure that that rib which got flared and the pelvis that got out of whack can go back to where it is supposed to be.
-BREATHING: Second, is to start working on your breathing. Your breathing is connected to the muscles of your core. Your diaphragm is also connected to the muscles of the core and pelvic floor. You can think of your pelvic floor like the diaphragm of your core canister. Your diaphragm is below the lungs and the pelvic floor is below the core. So breathing is really important. We teach proper breathing and how to do it; how to use breathing to engage the core and the pelvic floor. Plus, breathing has benefits for stress relief, boosting your immune system, helping you digest and rest naturally.
-MUSCLE ENGAGEMENT: The third key is muscle engagement through movement. This is where we're retraining the muscles to work within the correct alignment. So, we can be all out of whack with our alignment and work those muscles that way. But, if we put the body into alignment first, activate the breathing to turn the muscles on, and then add intensity on that, I can tell you you're going to be exhausted and feel those muscles work.
So, first align, add breathing correctly, and then engage your muscles through movement. Begin working on static muscle engagement and then start to add movement. Try to keep your alignment and breathing in consistent as we layer on complexity in the movement.
ENERGETIC BODY REST: Finally, the fourth and most important key is energetic body rest. We have to reflect on how much we're go, go, go, go, going every single day, caring for our babies, moving our bodies, repairing our bodies and making sure that we're balancing it with an adequate amount of rest every day. Guided meditation is a great method to relaxation.
We include all these four elements in our postpartum repair program. But an important component of your recovery is to balance the effort with the rest.
Specifically an exercise we teach that you can do right before and after birth are abdominal canister breaths. It's thinking of your deep core muscles, your diaphragm, and your pelvic floor like a cylinder. The whole container of your diaphragm, pelvic floor and deep core is a pressurized system that we have to re pressurize after giving birth because the baby has moved things all over the place and the pressure goes a little haywire.This is when we get diastasis recti, pelvic floor problems, and other similar types of issues.
We have to retrain the muscles to work within the alignment that we give it. Some of the exercises are this abdominal canister breathing that you can do in the hospital bed right after giving birth. It coordinates the diaphragm, the pelvic floor, and the deep core. Kegels, which we don't like to call them Kegels, as they are more like pelvic floor breaths. Kegels tend to be performed incorrectly more often than not. Thus we have instructions with visual images on how to do them correctly and abdominal canister guide you can check out.But those two simple exercises are the best way to get started. And it sounds really simple, but they're so deep. And when you start practicing them, you will start to feel the effects immediately. It's so empowering to be able to sit in the hospital bed four hours after having given birth and start to use your pelvic floor muscles and get to know them again. Maybe you won't be able to feel much at all, but just the idea that you can start to use your brain to send signals back to your pelvic floor creates that energy we need to start saying “hey, it's OK to start using these muscles, let's reactivate.”
A lot of things can happen if you don’t decide to utilize exercises like the canister breaths because issues can occur from the “injury” of birth. The body has spent 10 months getting into the place that we are when we give birth. Plus, you layer on top the injury of childbirth and the issues that can happen is we can end up with a shallow breathing pattern. This means that we're breathing really high into our chest and up into our shoulders, which caused neck and shoulder issues. We can have prolapse, which is the internal organs of either the bladder, the vagina or the rectum falling into the pelvic floor or wall. You can have things like peeing when you jump, sneeze, laugh and cough. Which for this one, I have to say that many moms think it is just something you have to live with after being a mom, and it's become a joke. So, I will say that it's common, but it's not normal. It's something that you can fix and something that can be can be worked on; you don't have to live with it forever.
Some other things are pelvic pain, hip pain, low/mid/upper back pain, neck pain, because our systems are all connected. If one part of our system is slightly off, the other parts of our systems are going to compensate and we can get a lot of tightness and imbalances in our muscles and how they work.
There's also ab separation, which is diastasis recti. This is the abdominal separation of your core muscles in the front. There's connective tissue between your six pack muscles and when you're pregnant, those muscles separate and you basically get a separation in the connective tissue down the middle, which can be separated in varying degrees. We have a video on how to test yourself for diastasis recti on our site as well that I encourage you to use even if you don’t think you may have it. It's really important that we test ourselves, by ourselves, because we can get a number from our pelvic floor PT, or our O.B. or mid-wife, but if we don't know how to test ourselves, we can't see the progress that we're making. And then we won't be able to be in charge of our own recovery. I mean it's not often that you go back to your O.B. or your mid-wife every six weeks and say, “check my diastasis.” So it's up to us to do it for ourselves.
I think it's also important to know that for diastasis there's actually two different ways to check it. It's the width and the depth of the diastasis, and the depth is actually more important than the width. So how far down your fingers can go in-between the line is more important than how wide it is. We've gotten into this myth where it's all about the width. Where I could have a four-finger width gap, but if it's not that deep, you're in a better position than someone who has a two finger gap that goes really far into their core. Again, I highly suggest you check out our free postpartum pelvic floor & core strength test to test yourself and be educated on your body so you understand what your repair process will look like as you press forward.
One other thing I want to have women understand is that you can work it to close up. So just because you have diastasis now doesn’t mean you will have it forever. Especially with the work that we teach in our online postpartum repair course, you can work that to close. The pace of recovery certainly varies by mother and the intensity that a mother puts into doing that work. But if you're doing it correctly with our guidance, the program that we have in place has had many mothers who have seen great gains in closing their diastasis.
As military women, focusing you mind on getting back into shape for that fitness test after pregnancy can be daunting. All service branches include some sort of running and core strength which can be troublesome if you have core or pelvic floor issues. Additionally, with little time to work out after coming home from a full time job and now caring for a baby, we understand you may not have time to go to the gym. But there are exercises to help that can be executed in your daily activities.
We are huge proponents of integrating this work into our everyday life because we understand it takes a lot of effort to do 10 minutes of dedicated exercise. So we've come up with many different ways that you can integrate this work into lifting your kids, lifting groceries, etc. The best way to think of this, is to learn the abdominal canister breath and how your pelvic floor is working and start to integrate that into your movements. Practice the abdominal canister, practice the pelvic floor, get in touch with what your body is doing and learn how it works for you. Then start to use it when and you are picking up groceries, which can be upwards of fifteen pounds each. Can you exhale when you lift up the grocery bags, while lifting your pelvic floor draw your core muscles back? When you're picking up your baby out of the crib, can you inhale, reach down, exhale, and bring them up while lifting your pelvic floor and core? It's finding opportunities during the day to integrate the work. When you're walking up the stairs for the hundredth time one day, can you use your glutes? And notice your alignment of your ribs over your hips or are your ribs flaring? Are you leaning more to one side? How are you using your body in your everyday life? I have to say, motherhood is a weighted adventure, because we are basically carrying around fifteen, twenty, twenty-five pound kettle bells all day long. And so if you can think of it that way, your toddler who's eighteen pounds and maybe around six months and wiggly in your arm, you are constantly having to engage your core. When you're carrying them, can you carry them with your arms, keep your core engaged, and then walk up the stairs in an engaged position? Use your glutes, use your core, use your upper body; it's amazing how well this works, because if you're going up and down the stairs one hundred times, we might as well take advantage of it and use it like exercise.
With my second, when I was getting him to sleep, I was doing shhhhh breaths as I would rock him back and forth on my chest. When I would rock him, as I was shifting I would use that shhhhh breath for integrating your abdominal canister. It's actually a breath that we use to engage your deep core, because the more you exhale, the more you engage the pelvic floor and the deep core. So every time you do that, shhhhhh, you can go all the way to the bottom of your exhale and think of lifting from your pelvic floor and your deep core. You don't have to be in a gym to be working out. This is one of the best ways of integrating it into mom life which is so important. Yes, we give workouts and have classes that you can follow, but it's really what you learn during those classes and how you can then integrate them into your life?
One more body part that is essential for focusing on core strength, we want to make sure the glutes are turning on. So that flat “mom butt” needs help because we lung forward thrusting our hips forward, we lean our babies on our chest and we walk around with our butt tucked under all the time, aka turning off the backside, which is our power house. So we never instruct moms to stick their butt out. You may see that instruction a lot because sticking the butt out allows the belly to hang over, but that has the opposite effect of what we are aiming for. What we want is exercises that strengthen the glutes; squatting knees, parallel, hip hinging (bending over at the hips without rounding your back) which we teach in our yoga class.When you're doing your daily activities hinging down from the hip increase that glute activation. We also teach a lot of different variations of lunges to activate the glutes. But getting the glutes firing incorrectly and turning on is going to take away some of the pain that your back might be trying to compensate for, and if you're working your core and pelvic floor the way we described and using your glute muscles when they need to be working, you're setting yourself up for a really balanced body and are really to awaken a body that's ready to move. So my top priority for women would be to engage the core and pelvic floor throughout your day and then add in your awareness and any movements that you might do for your glutes. Activating those glutes is another huge piece of the puzzle for finding strength again early and quickly postpartum.
The Devoted Mamas have been featured in many forums to include SHAPE, CURVE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness Hers magazines, as well as CNN and the NY daily News just to name few. If you are postpartum, no matter if it has been a few weeks, months, or years and you are suffering from a weak pelvic floor or core, take advantage of the Devoted Mama’s free resources on their website to include their Core and Pelvic Floor Strength Test.
The Devoted Mamas have an exclusive affiliate link for all the Military Working Moms to sign up for their courses. By using the links below you help the Military Working Mom site continue to provide the resources you need to balance your mom, wife, and military life.
Prenatal Yoga Course : Go from overwhelmed and achy to energized, calm and strong by preparing your body and mind for the marathon of birth with easy at-home practices. Get started now for only $49
Birth with Confidence Course [Self-Study Course] Overcome fears and anxieties by preparing yourself for your best birth. Feel confident, unapologetically in charge and totally prepared for the wild adventure of childbirth and motherhood. Over 9 weeks, practice the physical, mental, emotional, and energetic work required to be the boss of your own birth. Get started now for only $249
Postpartum Repair Course [Lifetime Access] Bring life back to your core and pelvic floor, safely, with targeted corrective exercises and workouts you can do at home! Get started now for only $249
New Virtual Group Classes: these weekly classes are an opportunity for mothers to congregate and practice together with us.
Special Military Working Mom Podcast Program- Slide deck with illustrations & links
The Pelvic Floor: The “Super hero” for full recovery
How to check yourself for diastasis Recti
5 Things you didn’t know about diastasis recti but should
How to know you are doing core work correctly and incorrectly
Video: How to do a proper kegel
Video: Micro Workshop! Your abdominal canister
Website | devotedmamas.com
Instagram | @devotedmamas
Facebook | devotedmamasworldwide
Send the Devoted Mamas an email at
Kendra@devotedmamas.com
Nicole@devotedmamas.com
Please note that some of the links are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, The Military Working Mom may earn a commission. Know that we only recommend products and services we have personally used and believe are genuinely helpful.