An at-home routine for low back, pubic bone and pelvic girdle pain during pregnancy and postpartum.
Hey guys! It’s Dr. Sarah and Dr. Olivia here, from Oona. Today we wanted to talk about something that we recommend to most of our patients. That is something called Rost Technique or pelvic balancing.
Rost is actually really easy to do. The idea with Rost Technique is that we are going to basically balance the pelvic girdle. The way that we’re going to do that is by spending some time in a couple of positions. The pelvic girdle is your entire pelvis, from the very back, all the way to the front to your pubic bone. So your SI joints and your tailbone in the back right around to kind of your crotch in the front. Generally speaking, if someone has pregnancy-related pain, it’s often pelvic girdle pain. This is a really nice way to deal with it.
To do Rost Technique, we recommend doing this usually at least once a day, if you have pelvic girdle pain. In the evening is a good time to do it, on a mat, on a yoga mat on the floor would be good. If you’re doing it in your bed, that’s okay, but the problem with doing it in bed is that you might fall asleep. So a yoga mat on the floor or a carpeted surface would be great.
The starting position is just lying on your back, just like Dr. Olivia is doing here. She’s doing it on a chiropractic table. Then what you’re going to do is you’re just going to drop your knees into a butterfly position. You’ll see that her feet are touching, and her knees are in a butterfly position or full openness. Some of you may find that this is a bit too intense, and if that’s the case, you can stick a pillow
just underneath your knees on either side, and that might help to ease some of the discomforts for you. But you’re going to hang out in this position for roughly 20 to 30 seconds. That’s what we usually recommend. While you’re here just kind of think about what you feel.
Do you feel tightness in the front?
Do you feel pinching in the back?
If you’re really uncomfortable here, which some of our pregnant patients are.
You can stick your hands underneath your low back, and that just looks like that.
If you’re a pregnant patient that really cannot tolerate lying on your back, you can always pop a bolster underneath you or a bunch of pillows or something. Just so that you’re sort of semi-upright. You’re hanging out in this position for 20-30 seconds. While you’re there, if you feel like it, you can squeeze your butt cheeks. You would squeeze your right butt cheek, you would squeeze your left butt cheek, you’d squeeze them together. And again, really just feeling what that feels like. Not being too concerned about it.
After you’ve been there for a little bit, you’re going to bring your knees back up to neutral, some of you might find that really uncomfortable, not everybody. And then in this position, I’m going to have you squeeze your knees together three times in a row. So squeeze and relax, squeeze and relax, and squeeze and relax. Lovely.
The last piece of this thing is doing a bridge. So you’re going to bring your feet hip-width apart, bring them a little closer into your bum if you need to, and then even though it looks like Dr. Olivia is bracing with her hands, she’s not using her hands for that. She’s squeezing her butt cheeks and pushing herself up into a bridge, and she’s going to hang out there for about 10-15 seconds. Not too, too long, and then come back down. Lovely. Then basically wash, rinse and repeat. You’re going to do this eight to ten times.
It’s one of these things, the first couple of times you do it, you might be like oh my goodness, this is really not comfortable. But generally speaking, by the time you get to repeat number eight or nine, things should be feeling quite a lot better. Even though it might not fix the problem per se, at that very moment. Especially if you do this in the evening when you have a day where your low back is just super uncomfortable. When you do this before bed, generally speaking, you’re going to have better sleep, and you’re going to feel better in the morning.
The key here is that do not to do that butterfly without doing the bridge. So even if you spend the whole evening hanging out in butterfly, which I don’t actually recommend, but if you do that, you always want to make sure that you end with a bridge because that bridge is just going to lock that SI joint back into place.
All right, you know where to find us.
If you have any questions, get in touch.
Thanks, bye!
