Goddess Pose

Why goddess may not be your friend during and after pregnancy.

Goddess pose, a standing pose opening the chest squatting with the toes turned out to the side in a wider stance. 

Utkatakonasana in sanskrit which translates to “powerful” or “fierce” angle pose is said to open up the hips, lengthen the inner thigh. The body feels expansive the expression is big here which in turn can make you feel strong and powerful. For more info about the pose in relation to yoga check out Yoga Matters blog by Emma Newlyn “Meaning behind the posture: Goddess pose.”

I see this pose a lot in pregnancy yoga adverts, and I know colleagues often favour this pose including it in EVERY session to empower the mothers that attend. And in essence I love this pose I think it can be a BEAUTIFUL one to master. BUT in pregnancy it might be a pose that causes you pain. Especially if you are suffering from pelvic girdle pain. 

Pelvic girdle pain or PGP or SPD you may see or hear it referred to is the name for the common ailment many women suffer from in pregnancy. There has been little research done into the causes of pelvic girdle pain and although there are lots of leaflets that the doctors and physios give to you to help you deal with the pain there is not a huge amount of advice about how you might combat it. Which when pregnant is rather frustrating. The biggest piece of advice given is not separate your legs to far apart from one another… Which is pretty hard to do when you then think about daily activities like getting out of bed, getting dressed, getting in or out of a car, going up stairs… If you have a child already you are told to avoid carrying them on one hip. or Avoid carrying completely… Now while avoiding taking your legs to far apart from one another and not lifting your children may mean you are less likely to experience pain it doesn’t stop the cause of the pain. 

And if you attend a yoga class with SPD your yoga teacher may tell you to take a narrower stance in the pose. Even I do this in my online yoga course as generically it is a good way to avoid the pain. However as someone who suffered with SPD in both pregnancies I also wanted to find a resolution or at least something would help to combat the sensation. 

In order to understand what happens and why pain is caused we need to look a little deeper than the leg muscles and visit our beautiful pelvic floor and it’s relationship with the rest of our body.

Here you will see that the pelvic floor is split into 2 then 4. 

First we have the anterior (front pelvic floor )

Then the posterior (the back pelvic floor)

Then we divide them through the middle so we have left and right side.

IF we were all perfectly aligned what should happen is that our diaphragm and our pelvic floor work together. As our diaphragm pushes down when we inhale so does the pelvic floor and as we exhale and our diaphragm pushes up so does the pelvic floor. In order for this to happen we need our ribs stacked on top of our pelvis. (You will undoubtedly have heard this as teaching cue in yoga or exercise classes) BUT we have a lot of external forces on our body, organs that sit on one side of the body and we also have gravity and our general movement patterns / holding habits. These all effect this stacking and thus how we manage the air pressure in our bodies as we breathe.

Many of us will chose to stand on one leg more than the other usually our right. This pushes our right hip back and shifts our tail bone to the left lengthening our right posterior pelvic floor and shortening our right front pelvic floor. This shift causes the left glute to contract and tighten too! 

And in general many of us favour a tucked pelvis position due to weak glutes as a result of lots of sitting and general stress! 

And coming to stress think about what happens to your body when you are anxious, stressed or tense your jaw tightens, your mouth and your pelvic floor are connected by lots of muscle facia and tissues they are created at the same time in the womb so if you clench your jaw, purse your lips, grind your teeth your pelvic floor will also experience tightening. 

How does this then transpire into pain when you open the legs?

If all of the pressure when you breathe cannot travel up and down in a piston movement like it should the pressure starts to disperse in other ways if your glutes are tight then the chances are the pressure of your breath is going to go down and FORWARD into the pelvis now if you do have a tight right front pelvic floor (or left for that matter if you favour a left leg stance) then the additional pressure when you breathe will put additional strain on an already tight anterior pelvic floor muscle. Possibly causing pain. 

If you then open your legs and compress the back of the glutes further pushing the pelvis forward even more that will only add to that pressure potentially causing more pain. 

If this is you rather than avoiding all things that cause you to take your legs apart from one another you might want to start with lengthening and opening the glutes to allow the glutes to relax and thus the pelvis to find a more neutral position and realign the diaphragm and pelvic floor.

The good news is that we have some really easy ways to do this. We can use our breath in supine (lying down) or in four point kneeling and focus on breathing into the back space to encourage the pressure of our breath to move back as well as down. We can also do hip shifts in a variety of positions to lengthen the posterior side of the bottom and the back! We can also look at internal rotation, that means getting those feet to turn in toward the body. I have some video examples for glute lengthening AND internal rotation in my pregnancy online course. I have also included some edits from specific work shops in this article. 

These movements are safe in pregnancy and are a superb place to start after giving birth to re align your body. 

The above is all written based on the general population bias BUT you may well be different. If you feel that these movements do not work for you then you may need some further work in person / online with a trained pre and postnatal movement expert. 

Squeezed bottom!

Pelvic floor muscles tight at the back longer at the front.

Shifting weight to one leg

Pelvic floor muscles if shifting on right leg - tight back right long front right.

Long back left and tight front left