Being a woman, we get to experience a couple special things:
Pregnancy, nursing, being a mother, and menopause. All of these life experiences add joy and wonder to our lives, but can at times, bring pain, stress, discomfort, and emotional or hormonal imbalance.
These days a woman is often expected to be the mother, homemaker, and caretaker while also having a great career. Keeping yourself healthy and feeling your best is important not only for your quality of life, but for your family’s too!
In honor of National Women’s Health Week, we would like to share with you some of the ways physical therapy can benefit you, and help spread the word about how you can feel your best during and after pregnancy, and during the later life changes of peri-menopause and menopause.
Managing your pain and your emotional balance is easy if you get the right people in place to help you through the special changes in life that only women experience.
Erin Pass and the Acupuncture Clinic of Boulder, Inc. (ACOB) team provide amazing care and deliver incredible results to help young women get pregnant, feel their best during pregnancy, and restore their Qi postpartum. In later years, acupuncture can lessen the ups and downs and severity of symptoms that go along with peri-menopause and menopause.
At Coal Creek Physical Therapy (CCPT), we work side by side with the ACOB to help women with the mechanical side of pregnancy and postpartum pain. All the physical therapist at our clinic are manual physical therapist. This means they have extensive training in the evaluation and treatment of the cause of your discomfort and always evaluate your spine health. Later on, physical therapy can assist in reducing pain and emotional imbalances that commonly occur with peri-menopause and menopause.
Together, the goal of the ACOB and CCPT is to help women feel their best in all stages of their lives.
Here is how Coal Creek PT can help!
Pregnancy Care
Pregnancy PT – during pregnancy your body is rapidly gaining weight, primarily in your breasts and belly. The typical aches and pains that show up with this are foot pain, low back pain, neck pain, rib pain, numbness and tingling in your arms and hands and/or headaches. We can provide safe and effective hands on treatments and show you how to care for yourself throughout your pregnancy. This will help your muscles and joints remain pain free as you take on the load of your new little one!
PostPartum Care
Postpartum PT – every single woman should check in with a physical therapist to evaluate their hips and pelvis after their delivery. We recommend you do this in the first few weeks postpartum. It only takes two or three treatments to get your spine aligned. Your ligaments loosened with hormones during your pregnancy and delivery allowing your baby to pass through your pelvis. As you tighten up we will make sure your alignment is in a neutral position so you are pain free. Along with adjusting your joints, we release your tight muscles so you can regain your normal posture. In addition, we will prescribe an individualized exercise program to restore your life-long spinal alignment. This will allow you to get back to pain-free activity and fitness as soon as possible and prevent low back pain from setting in as you nurse, feed or carry your little one around.
Common Post-Partum Conditions
Diastasis Rectus or “The Mummy Tummy”: Pregnancy shuts down your pelvic floor and your transversus abdominis (deep abdominal) muscles. These are the two most important stabilizing muscles for your low back health for the rest of your life. Very commonly, women sustain an injury to their abdominal wall called a Diastasis Rectus. A diastasis is a split in the abdominal wall which occurs in response to excessive stretching of the belly as your baby grows throughout pregnancy. This diastasis can be healed efficiently and effectively through hands-on therapy, an individualized exercise program, and taping techniques. If not healed, this injury destabilizes your low back indefinitely and leads to early onset disc degeneration and a predisposition to low back sprains. Not to mention, the look of a “jelly belly” or the pooch that won’t go away no matter how much you exercise.
Incontinence or Pelvic Pain: The weight of the baby and/or the stress of delivering the baby can sometimes stretch or tear your pelvic floor muscles (the muscles that hold your organs in). What you notice is: stress incontinence or leaking urine when you cough, jump, run, or in some cases, all the time. You might also notice pain deep in your pelvis that won’t go away. A physical therapist can rehabilitate the function of your pelvic floor muscles with hands on work and specific exercises in eight to twelve visits. The sooner you get in, the easier it is to rehabilitate. If ignored, this condition can lead to organ prolapse (descending or drooping of the organs).
At Coal Creek Physical Therapy we are passionate about getting the word out that immediate postpartum care to align your spine, and rehab your stomach and pelvic floor muscles, will set you up for return to your post-baby body as soon as possible. Additionally, postpartum physical therapy prevents unnecessary low back pain, incontinence or leaking when you are active for the rest of your life!
Peri-Menopause & Menopause Care
Pain: When hormones fluctuate, women’s nervous systems become more sensitive to pain. Previous mild aches can become intolerable. Physical therapy will optimize spinal alignment and joint and muscle function so you have the least amount of stress on your body during these years. In just eight to twelve visits, physical therapy evaluates and identifies the source of the pain, allowing your physical therapist to rid you of your pain once and for all.
Hormone Imbalance / Stress / Insomnia: Fluctuating hormones can lead to unpredictable emotional mood swings, stress and insomnia. A ground-breaking treatment in physical therapy was introduced in 2010 called The Associative Awareness Technique (AAT). This technique brings the central nervous system in to balance with a comfortable hands-on treatment and helps you manage emotional ups and downs and insomnia with easy techniques you can do at home.
We want to celebrate National Women’s Health Week and the many joys of being a woman! We are committed to helping every woman feel their best in all stages of their lives. We enjoy working in conjunction with the Acupuncture Clinic of Boulder., Inc. In honor of this week, we invite you to come in for a Free Women’s Health Consultation and Treatment to see how PT can help you start feeling better and living a life you love! There is no expiration date to this offer, come in whenever works best for you – and please mention this ad when scheduling.
We look forward to meeting you!
