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The Baby Carriage On the Inside

This is the baby carriage within core support and the innermost abdominals. Katie really helped to open up some of the pelvic floor pelvic relationship stuff, and I want us to dig in literally, to the layers of your abdomen that are that central course support for your baby. So there is a myth in the universe. I certainly heard a lot about it before I became pregnant, and that myth is pregnant. Women should not do abdominals. You guys heard this. You've been told this in the chat room. Pregnant women should not do abdominals like blanket statement, and this is one hundred percent not true. There are certain types of abdominals that are really bad idea, and then there are other types of abdominal related movements that are a really good idea. And so let me just tell you which like right off the gate, which type of abdominals tend tio actually exacerbate or become problematic for that diagnosis directly that tear down the soft tissues that are the midline of both halves of your abdomen? ...

And that is abdominal exercises that are in this spinal flexion or crunch shape. These ten toe not be very productive in there, really uncomfortable when you have this big sphere of growing baby inside of you, right? I'm looking at you, you're nodding like I wouldn't want to do that right it's like when you're coming even just the simple act of getting out of bed which is often for us on a daily basis the biggest crunch movement that we do right we can reflects our spines and we don't mean maybe roll off to the side and rollout to bed roll off the bed rollout to bed you know getting up off the floor in that manner getting up off your bed in that manner and it's it's really, really awkward to do when you've got this baby in the front and in fact the baby is going prohibit you from doing that that massive uterus so that's actually a really good indicator when you're doing core work if you feel this huge amount of inhibition coming from inside that's probably really good sign that oh this type of course strengthening movement is not the right one for me and so I mean and to get out of bed will dress this tomorrow you first you rolled your side then you take your feet off the bed then you stand up but you should do abdominals during your pregnancy and it's just blessed it we gotta bust that myth your deepest core muscles are your breathing muscles and these breathing muscles have to work well they have to be able to contract feli and they have to be able to relax fully for you to be able to have on dynamic system within you and I'll go over with those layers are will deconstruct those tissues, but you breathe about twenty thousand times a day twenty thousand repetitions of breath happened your body daily can you imagine if you did twenty thousand push ups a day incorrectly the nobody's doing twenty thousand patients? But can you imagine doing twenty push ups a day incorrectly every day? Like what would happen to your shoulders? What would happen to your neck? What would happen to your chest muscles? It would feel horrible, right? It would accumulate over time. What would we do that with our breathing by not paying full attention to how we're positioning our torso? How we're positioning those soft tissues that comprise our breathing mechanism and those deep breathing muscles are the ones that you're going to use to push the baby out. So twenty thousand bad breath it's a day is pretty inefficient and so I'm not talking about, you know your ba naka here, but we are talking about creating a better lining of your birthday suit and it's totally doable while you're pregnant. I mean, when is there a better timeto learn proper breathing right? And anybody who's had a kid knows that oh my gosh big, weird, strange, amazing breathing is a part of of my labor and delivery process, so now is the time to refine it andan ultimately this is about giving your baby a hug right and building a better baby carriage it's going to feel extremely intimate bond your baby is going to love you being a better breather oh look at that one of the tools that were going to use for helping tio awaken our reading muscles is the corgis ball and so hopefully guys if you don't have a gorgeous ball at home you can use a lead gertie ball I mentioned earlier from a toy store or you can use a saw a rolled up towel and that will also give you some of the stuff that you some of the stretch pressures that you need now what I love about this photo is created video called corgis that really detailed a lot of what we're going to be going over this inner soft tissue canister work and I think that this baby wasn't instructed in the methods you're going to learn but she saw her money doing this work now that's me pre pregnancy but she saw her mommy rolling on the balls and of course mirror neurons are so uh rule us we we mimic the way our moms move we limit the way our dad's move part of our position and posture has to do with that we've adapted our shape because we drew in modeled ourselves on their behavior so model this now so that your your baby grows up knowing oh I I can breathe into this durable amazing dynamic uh innermost abdominal architecture er I just love this picture because also the doggy is there any this is like for me this is like baby puppy porn kind of moment I just love this picture okay? It's all interconnected it's all interconnected we discovered this morning when we rolled out our foot that all of a sudden week we didn't even know that the our ability to squat was going to be improved from doing a little bit soft tissue work on the bottom of the feet let's talk about the muscles of the core so that this is super clear to you that when I talk about the inner baby carriage what I'm really referring to and I couldn't find a perfect image online this is a free image from the grey's anatomy anatomy book but your respiratory dia friend lines the inside of your rib cage lines the lower six ribs its strings its way along the lumbar spine and attach is and I'll show you some more vital attachments in a moment attach is to the lumbar and as that dia friend comes across the back it's also crossing over that so is that katie kept referring to and I'll show you a better illustration of this in a second but one of the things that this image shows us is that you see the dire fram has these up and down fibers right it's these the up and down fibers that are now encased in the rib cage and those fibers actually seem with they seem into the same connective tissue are fashionable tissue as the trans verse abdominal muscle, the transverse abdominal muscle has this orientation it's like a intercompany bun and so thiss transbourse abdominal that has its action is is this type of compression and the dia fran is literally sewn to this if you're trans verse is excessively tight because, well, you were trying to hold your stomach in all the time or actually can get loaded with sugar points if even if you have sort of like the the dumpy you know, let my baby come forward posture they could get loaded the trigger points and get very stiff. It's tension is not going to allow your diaphragm to move very well. Conversely, if you're not a good breather, your diaphragm is very, very tight it's also going to be challenging for the trans verse to move well, has that baby grows and ends up that these tissue start pulling on these tissues and everything just gets more and more challenged. You've got to figure out how to maximize the dynamic movement of your diaphragm in order to keep taking deep breaths and to not end up flipping the switch into the higher level of breathing, which I call the stress muscles of respiration those collarbone soft tissues that we rolled out earlier does that make sense? So we want to try to maximize the cabin space in the rib cage and actually the abdomen all dimensions of the admin so that we don't end up being a bad breather because it all it's all interconnected it's interconnected your physiology as well your baby's life starts with its first breath and so does yours so you got to get you've got to take this stuff really, really seriously. So what we're about to dio is eliminate all bad breath on the planet differentially differentiate your abdominal airs and ultimately build a better in her baby carriage and that has to do with pliable strength pliable strength just like this ball not abs of steel, not a shredded six pack I don't want you to shred or tear now or later in order to not shred or tear now or later you want to have excellent elasticity and I'm gonna teach you guys how to do that probably one of the most important things also that better breathing does for you is it helps you to turn on your off switch what I mean by that is your breath is is your relationship into your relaxation response when you do very, very deep breathing, it starts to arouse your drowsy whole system so we have the sympathetic portion of our nervous system we have the paris sympathetic a portion of our nervous system, the sympathetic is that flight or flight it's that very like I'm hyped up, I'm freaked out, I'm scared him in fear paris sympathetic is I'm digesting, I'm resting, I'm healing and I'm recovering and so being able to at will know which switch you're flipping is really important for your sanity, especially when it comes to labor and delivery, when things all and things start to spin out of control. Also, at a minimum, you can deal with your own reactivity in those times of what you know seems like crisis by attending to conscious breathing and trying to breathe in these downstairs portions of your breathing apparatus and tomorrow, especially when we do our power napping will be covering a lot of that off switch stuff will be traipsing back and forth in our in our exercise work today between the on in the off switch, but tomorrow we're going to get really heavy on the off switch, so let's go over the anatomy, the die friend and I would love your help with this t if you wouldn't mind coming up and being a little elastic model lady for me, so just stand right next to you for second so first of all, have you guys ever touched your diaphragm before some people have some people haven't it's actually really easy to access and katie started sneaking us underneath there and when she goes to fully embrace your die friend, by the way, if you saw the women or that I did a couple of pieces with back in january with kelly starrett maintaining your body I did a full hour on this diaphragm work so there are pieces of this even more extended that you can you can check out that weapon or from back in january so to find her dia fran you simply want to find the contours of the bottom of the rib cage and pretty much everybody could figure that out. All you do is snuggle your body your rib cage over and you would try to snake your fingers up and so in order to do this you have to exhale deeply. Can you get your fingers underneath their lord? Not anymore. Yeah. Eso eso softly exhale it's kind of a good sign. I suppose so. It's a heavily exhale and you want to try to finger your way? Not deep in but you literally want tojust snake your fingers up here and then everybody do this for me take of small inhale and then just go up and should flick your fingers out, right? Yeah, you should be able to actually walk your fingers around the perimeter of this different and honestly, this is this is someone oh, one basics for all of you whether you're pregnant or not you want to make sure that they're you're not excessively stuck or tight in this relationship of diaphragm to transfer so this is something that I learned gosh a long time ago I've been doing this stuff for decades but I always do deep abdominal massage both with my hands and the pools you also feel on one side of the other the cartilage is can move they should be mobile and he was still underneath here play around with this so these costal cartilage is they should be mobile and they shouldn't move really easily and if there's some soft tissue stiffening you'll actually feel them kind of almost like crisply almost like a like a flipping saying you want you want to feel it slide rather than almost move like a uh uh what's that called hinge you wanted to be a sautin jonah hard hinge a rusty hinge right so that's that diaphragm and to desert illustrate this relationship of the diaphragm to some of the other things you have to stay here for a second you can see here these little fingers off the dia friend that cut down and attached to the lumbar spine this is another reason why you know organizing your position as katie said again and again is still important relative to the uterus if you're if you're kind of a fear of that breather, you breathe your chest way out here the die friend gets really short in the upper back in the rib cage and so I've got all this overstretch stuff here but it's really, really tight here and it's really tight here and so that's also in and affect the hi that's also going to really affect that uterus position so we want to make sure that the back of the rib cage as well as its lumber attachments have as much harmony in the joint relationships as the front. So this is another by the way that other illustration was from one of my students harry joe kalsa who is an amazing anonymous this is the underside of the diet fram straight out of the grey's anatomy and you can see the diaphragm it's a big dome shaped muscle and it's one of my anatomy teachers gil headley calls it a stocking cap over the abdominal contents I love that image it's just like it's it's right there and that's why when you take a breath in fact put your hands on your belly when you take an abdominal breath you breathe into your guts you'll feel it bloat right? You feel it's swell because when the dia from contracts it displaces the soft tissues and organs and fluids in there and it just it pooches out balloons out when you exhale dying friend floats back up to its resting position and because it's tethered to the entire soft tissue canister down below including the pelvic floor, by the way all of these tissues then they have this little levitation moment and you get narrower. You get a little bit skinnier, you get unloaded or your un ballooning some of the deeper connections that are super important for us to understand because this is a major source of hip pain and low back pain and therefore a pelvic carriage pelvic floor carriage stuff is the relationship of the diet fran to very deep low back muscle. Hopefully you can see where I'm pointing and I know where the camera is but this muscle here is called the quadriga slim boram and this muscle here is the so is major. Let me show them to you on this because you think it would be really clear so we've got the dia fram and hold onto into this for a second tier me show you first the quadriga slim boram. So the quadriga slim boram starts at the twelfth rib and it attach is to each of the upper four low back vertebra on the side of those vertebra. So this red rubber is representing this quadriga slim born deep low back muscle and when you raise your hip to the side when you lift your whole pelvis up toward your rib cage that's the muscle that's primarily contracting to do that or if I'm standing here and I do a side band that muscle pull the ribs towards that pelvis okay so you can keep that held there and pin there and pin there cool and then this so is that katie was referring to earlier when she was using the elastic in front here that's so is actually is not on the fun of your body it's very very deep and it starts at twelve vertebra and it attach is to the inside of your femur the inside of the five um this is called the lesser tro cantor now these two muscles are sharing connected to shoot there sharing fascist so the tightness of the so is or the tightness of the quadriga slim boram are going to constantly affect one another do you have another finger a whole year so let this one yeah you can kind of let then you look at the green one goes like grab ok that took that one there you get that great all right so also right if I have ah if I have a really tight so is it's gonna pull my femur up into the hip socket? Also, if I have a really tight so is they can offset the the leverage of my pelvis they can pull it up it can tilt it forward it can also tilted back just depending on how many millions of other things were going on and then the dire fram remember this die from hasn't still across these little tales and these tales essentially the diaphragm is crossing around the back of the rib cage and then it crosses across both the quadra itis lum boram and the so is my diaphragm is totally deformed right now but that dia from crosses across those muscles before pins onto the lumbar spine so are so showing it to you sort of on the can you make the red come out here that way they can see that on the twelfth rib no one on the twelve. Okay, yeah, exactly. So's got across well, it's sort of falling apart, but hopefully you get the drift that it crosses across those two before it attaches to the spine so thiss deep in her baby carriage all of the stuff is interconnected and so if I don't breathe very well it's not just going to affect my course that musculature it's also gonna affect my low back bones and my hip bones. Also, if I don't walk well, if I wear high heels if I walk like a duck if I've got those collapses in my in my arches and whatnot, all of this downtown stuff is also reflecting upward to the soft tissues of my inner canister this stuff is all interconnected. One thing is constantly affecting others and then on a neurological level me not me being in a panic all the time we're meeting stressed out all the time is going to be creating tension in all of these tissues egg and chicken, chicken and egg we want scrambled you want an omelette? What do you want? We wanted we wanted one of the way we wanted we wanted to feel good on and we wanted to be optimal. Ok, I think I think we're good there. Thanks, tia. So here's just another illustration aa few illustrations from harry joe I love this the ribs removed you can see the loft of that dia frampton like a inter parachute and I was think of the dia friend like this inner inner parachute man and or woman or baby and maybe the baby's holding onto the current and saying, let me pull you over this way or let me pull you over that way the and again, this is just the diaphragm contracting the die from releasing and the changes in lung volume so we do want to practice learning to breathe so that the diaphragm and it's associate id corso musculature are the things that are really working for us and we want to avoid breathing in a way that leads to stress club vehicular breathing I said why we used the yoga to nut balls right away to roll out the collarbones and you being in this position all day already is fostering tension in these clavicle muscles, his neck muscles that already, in a sense, models stress models, eh? Pattern of stress breathing in our body carrying the baby it's already modelling, sort of that stress breathing pattern in the body, even if it were not breathing, there were sort of creating the shape of a stress breather, so your breath function is intimately related to core performance, whole body posture and physiology, and we want to figure out for ourselves just some of the best strategies to help us with that. So before we just drill into some of the other novel soft tissue stuff they're going to do, I want you to familiarize you with your rib cage, and you're intercostal cz so we talked about the diaphragm, which is inside of the rib cage. We also have intercostal is that we've themselves in and out of the rib cage that helped give you rib cage breathing. So this is really simple. You do this with us at home, you know you can stand, you can say whatever you want to do, take your hands, and you wouldn't bring them on to either side. Of your rib cage and by the way, we did abdominal breathing a moment ago this would be called harassed iq breathing to bring your hands up as high as you can on either side of the breasts and you want to try to collapse the ribs into each other so you literally shorten the winds of your rib cage and you press hard and then you breathe against your hard pressing hands and exhale you do that three times even higher up sally, maybe this hype is you can you really wouldn't try to compress? Uh yeah it's like the chicken dance you want to compress the side of the road, kate and breathe into just the pressure of your hands. Now when you're doing this you're different is working but primarily the prime mover here is going to be those rib cage muscles and uh intercostal breathing through asic breathing is generally given a really bad rap. Oh, you know you shouldn't breathe do threw acid breathing a sigh a general rule but you kind of you need toe have durable mobile ribs in order to maximize your lung capacity especially as as the diaphragm is more and more limited the less cat, the less amount that it can push down against the pressure that uterus is so strong that makes sense and in general and exercise you wantto be able to stiffen the lumbar the things that support your lumbar bones and be able to breathe into your rib cage so that you can breathe, so I'm a huge proponent of rib cage breathing and abdominal breathing. In fact, I'm a proponent of what's called abdominal thor asic breathing, and we're gonna do that today. So one of the first things that you're gonna learn installing because I've just eaten, and I'm about to show you something that is going tio challenge my lunch, and that is his diaphragm doesn't exist in a vacuum. You're going to learn to integrate it, you're gonna learn to eliminate bad breath, and I'm gonna teach you an exercise in these next few minutes called the diaphragm vacuum and in the diaphragm vacuum, you've literally air taking your respiratory diaphragm to its maximum stretch. How many of you? And maybe I'm asking the wrong room, because I have a feeling a lot of you practice yoga and even work with me, but how many of you stretch your dire fran daily besides, tien yasmin sort of sort? Okay, so the dia friend is a must and just like your hamstrings, and you want to be able to figure out what it's elastic elastic capacity is, again, the more durable that die friends going to be, the better off the rest of your baby carriage is going to be so I'm gonna we're gonna learn that you guys gonna learn that but I want to show you where this can go. This is called abdominal churning its own interests it's an intra abdominal massage that you can give yourself if you're able to isolate the action of the diaphragm and the soft tissues that it's connected to this is actually an exercise from yoga called nolly korea and so this is me obviously without a baby doing this gnarly created a p looks like the adam is literally churning you see this, I'll just go through those three images and then what you see here is me actually doing this action during week ten with a little baby in my belly, and so I want you guys to see what this looks like in utero. There is no footage of this on the planet. This is the only footage of this that exists. So what you're about to see, ladies and gentlemen is like a world premier of internal domina massage with a fetus in my uterus, so I'm actually churning right now you can see amniotic sac than a little baby just going slurp, slurp, slurp sort through that and you can see the undulation of the muscles around the uterus just really massaging the uterus and now I think now I stopped and then the obi joanne is sort of explaining tio me and my husband about not just like I'm crying laughing and then she literally takes her hand and she's trying to wake wake the baby up and pushes really hard against my belly much harder than what my own abdomen was doing and you can see the baby just moving just like it did when I was churning it yes and then the baby wakes up and went way was around um and then I do the diaphragm vacuum and you're not going to really see that much difference in this shape but what's cool about what I wanted what I want you to see this is because her pressure of pushing against me actually made more change in my abdomen than me doing something to myself what I'm showing you here some people may say oh, this is really risky on I'm here to tell you that this is for me because this is something that I've done for decades is a totally safe movement in fact the action of this changes the hydraulics of the way my uterus is sitting on those around ligaments and what I found is when I do this it actually can relieve some of that sir strain on the pelvis of the constant downward pressure of the uterus so I know this might seem really exotic to you and probably to most of you but I want to advocate for the fact that this is an intra abdominal movement and most of us, when we think of abdominal work, we're thinking of coming from the outside in this is working from the inside out working your inner baby carriage. Is it inside out approach? All right, so that being said, I'm not going to show you that intra abdominal massage lateral donald churning on my pregnant belly, and so we'll try to get a good camera angle for you so you can see this and you're going to actually see the wonderful oval shape of my uterus in the middle of the abbot, and you'll see these other tissues. Passover wish me luck that I don't lose my lunch didn't show up. You're freaking out, you bring in didn't show up, tio. Okay, you see the uterus shape? Ok, cool that's the that's been like the coolest things, like I used to actually see the outline of the uterus back, but like your holes like ram for good, so we're looking from the side. How about that? Definitional aside, what was that? Well, well, what you're seeing is you're seeing the interconnectedness of these layers of abdominal muscles working in concert while the diaphragm is in a dramatic stretch, and so the obliques are alternately firing as I go in this circle and it's almost like it's, almost like using the whole inner innermost abdominals to do just a sort of a clean and swipe. And so I get this elevation in the pelvic floor, so I'm creating this internal pliability, which I think I need right for that baby passage and tomorrow we're doing inside outside in approach on a pelvic floor massage. So what you're seeing is, is this sir tossing off of these soft tissues? This is actually what your body is capable of. Many really. How do you teach this? Like I teach you how to do this? We're not going to teach you how to do this today because it takes hours and hours and hours, but I just wanted to see the potential of what you're you're connective ity can dio and that having the baby there is even though it's going to get more and more limited, the larger I get having the baby there is actually is not is not an obstacle to executing intern internal abdominal work. We start slowly, we start by breathing, okay, any questions before we move on way asked in the chat rooms about this and diaphragm, stretches and things of that nature and you can nurture said I have left that shamefully overworked yikes and we're seeing a lot of it's great and so sure worked over look a little relation who does is it who does daily diet fran stretches before you or everybody into a complaint like what I had a conversation with some have a conversation with an athletic trainer I think just yesterday that the dia fram actually probably is one of the most overworked muscles why? Because it doesn't show up on a magazine cover right it's not like this thing it's not like this thing it's not like you know that thing die from this hidden it's hidden from view is kind of boring right and you take it for granted because you breathe twenty thousand times a day whether you want to or not right it just happens but it's trainable and it is a central organizing muscle of your body of your axis of your skeleton and your heart is sitting right on top of it in your hearts position your heart's position in your body is also dictated by the torch ins and your diaphragm the uterus that's growing down below is also altered by how that diaphragm is hanging out in your rib cage how's your periscope isn't looking into rib cage like katie was talking about the rib cage relationship to the pelvis we're saying the same thing using just slightly different terminology so let's not overlook training the diaphragm during pregnancy that was not overlook it I love l l babylon whose says I do stretch but nothing that intense supercool this's beyond aside bend right way are but it's beyond aside then it's getting inside of it and helping its pliability also those of you that are dealing with a lot of indigestion which is you know as your house did it it is pushing stomach higher and higher the pathway for food to go from your esophagus and your stomach it punctures right through that diaphragm so you have this wonderful tendon at the top of the dia from the central tendon and that that tendon can be too loose and and food will just easily just slip right back and over and you start to have that asked reflux and to the tone it's of the the tendon and its relationship to how it manages the esophagus and the sphincters of the stomach also have a lot to do with with actually with this exercise so it's a it's a physiological exercise in that it can help and improve that this sort of isaf ajeel junction as well all right so it's not just breathing muscle there's other things that it does cardiac as I mentioned stomach e and then relaxation we had a question about the diaphragm errol says what do hiccups mean about the diaphragm mers that think that that is a spasm of the diaphragm so that would be the other time when most of you are aware of your diaphragm is when you right that's when the diaphragm is yes thousand great thank you and I so funny it took me um it took me tell him about my husband to figure out how to get rid of hiccups like I just nothing ever got rid of pickups but my husband has the smartest reason just just hold your breath anyway it works like now I know I know and my mom didn't give me that information that my husband did but of course, because I'm just trying to like talk to the dia friend specifically you know you can nurture is nurture is also curious about how far into pregnancy that action would be safe so I'm going to teach you all the the chap the biggest challenge that I've talked to a lot of different therapists and physicians and and different physical therapist about the action itself and chiropractor friend of mine a couple different chiropractor friends of mine and there have been different opinions the biggest concern that anybody really has is the amount of time that you're without breath because this action it actually happens at the end of ex elation so you breathe right you inhale at the end of your inhale there's a natural pause this I'm just talking about normal breathing then you exhale and after you exhale there's kind of a natural pause, right? A lot of you aren't breathing right now neither in nor out you're in this natural pause and so the duration of that pause after exhale before inhale is where the die from vacuum takes place that were not free divers here we're not going underwater and holding our breath for four and a half minutes actually train a champion free diver he just broke a knauss trail yin record we'll talk afterwards so very, very proud of him were not doing free diving here we're going to do very short holds without air in our body but it's not gonna be that much longer than what you're doing right here sitting passively. So the challenge that was a concern for some of my colleagues was how long are they going to not hold their breath because he really can on lee do it when you're in that vacuum? But I would say it's safe and I just had a friend deliver and she did it through both of her pregnancies all the way up to the end I would say it's safe to deliver to do it all the way up to delivery um also you think about like an action like laughing, laughing is almost is actually much more stirring aggressive action on your body than what I'm about to teach you and I hope that you're getting plenty of laughter well, you're pregnant, so that's all I want to see one of the best sort of it was like it's. Not totally equipment, but it's an equivalent. Yeah, or singing, holding a note for a very long time on the way out. Yeah, we follow up question to the hiccups question and a roll ask. Is it bad for your diaphragm to spasm? Or is it a sign of weakness? Um, you know, I don't know enough about hiccups, okay, tio, be able to answer that. Well, well, I think if he researches hiccup yeah, he will also find himself with not very clear answers to that. Okay, yeah, through its like hiccups and eyebrows are two very un understood areas of the human body. I'm not kidding. I've asked this question about eyebrows outcome to my dermatologist. How come when I wake up some mornings I have a two inch eyebrow going like that and it wasn't there the night before she turned to me and you said, you know, jill, the medical community, we really don't understand that much about eyebrows. It's like fine that's. Fine with me, I don't know is the answer.