Unless you suffer from severe asthma, you probably take breathing for granted. It’s not glamorous; no awards are given nor bragging rights acknowledged. However, breathing is a very beneficial exercise, especially for pregnant and postpartum women.
Pregnant women can reap childbirth benefits from breathing exercises during pregnancy. I recommend reading Ina May Gaskin’s Guide to Childbirth. A yogi friend of mine turned me on to her, and I felt a lot more in control during the pushing phase of my second childbirth experience.
After childbirth, mindful breathing is just as, if not more, important. Pregnancy does a lot of damage to your core muscles (abs, muscles around your spine called the multifidus, diaphragm, and pelvic floor). As your baby grows, your uterus expands, and everything surrounding it has to go somewhere. Some rearranging occurs and your core muscles “lose touch”, meaning they stop working together, which is necessary for core stability. After birth, you have to do some work to retrain these muscles to work together again. This is where breathing serves as the connector.
Exercise is as much mental as it is physical. Breathing to retrain your core requires you to visualize your core muscles working together. Practice by visualizing all of those muscles expanding as you inhale, and softly contracting as you exhale. This is where you can add in those kegels, on the exhale. Again, the contraction is gentle. You’ll never need to lift a car with your vagina, so don’t squeeze your pelvic floor muscles like they’re the jaws of life (cue birthing joke?).
Practice your breathing every day in the crucial first weeks postpartum, and make sure you feel confident in your core muscles’ ability to work together before starting a more rigorous exercise program (meaning walking is ok, but running will set you up for injury).
So while it may feel like you’re not really exercising, mindful breathing is an essential first exercise post baby, and a power booster for more rigorous exercise in the future!