Supporting postpartum players
Gráinne Donnelly is an Advanced Physiotherapist with a focus on pelvic health. In a recent podcast, I chatted to her about returning to sport postpartum.
Pregnancy and childbirth are one of the biggest transitions women will navigate. There's huge physical, physiological, psychological changes that occur to a woman when she's pregnant and enters into motherhood.
It's a huge life shift. You come out of motherhood with an extra job that you didn't potentially have beforehand.
Getting back to sport and physical activity is really, really important. We know how good it is for our overall well-being. For anyone returning postpartum, it’s important to give yourselves due consideration and recovery time.
It’s important to honour that postpartum healing journey, and have the right load at the right time.
Until the last few years, there's been very little information to guide postpartum women.
All sports and particularly contact sports and team sports like rugby involve elements of running. That's a component that people need to be ready for.
Whether people have had a baby or not, running is one of the activities that might provoke pelvic symptoms. This is because there is a higher impact and load when we hit the ground and particularly if someone is running faster.
Women often first notice their symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction when running. This can be leaking from the bladder or heaviness or pressure down below or pain in general.
For a player looking to return to sport postpartum, it needs to be a graduated response. If the player slowed down and wasn’t running during their pregnancy, they’re unlikely to want to go and run a 5k.
I often think we need to take a common sense approach and consider postpartum return to sport similar to a return from injury
If you have a rugby related injury, the player needs to give it time to recover. Then they will need to ease back into training, not going full throttle.
Having a baby is no longer a milestone that you’ve finished your sporting career. It's really exciting and empowering to realize that this is actually a normal and natural thing.
Women’s bodies are very resilient. However, its also important to consider, that even if someone has a really smooth pregnancy and delivery, they’re going to have micro trauma.
They’ve had significant stretch on the pelvic floor and on the abdominal wall.
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