Day 1: Pillars for Preggos an Addendum to What You Should Expect While Expecting

Approximately one year ago my father and I attended the 2009 functional training symposium for the NSCA. What followed was nothing short of inspiration for the work done at GCMC. It is no secret that the tide of health care is shifting towards prevention. Gone are the days of sick care, the kind of circular passive care that keeps on going, and going, and going, until your benefits are exhausted for the calendar year. GCMC is about supporting active lifestyles. It's the kind of health care facility that wont tell you to stop living. Juan Carols Santana, the representative for the NSCA at the symposium, provided us all with the vernacular to translate our heavy medical jargon into real words and concepts that everyone could understand. Thus was the birth of "pillar training" at GCMC and specialty classes like Pillars for Preggos.

It is all well and good that we should know proper lifting techniques; however, recent studies indicate that teaching proper lifting techniques does not simply translate into a world free of back pain. While the study did not answer why teaching proper lifting techniques did not prevent low back pain I have a theory of why and how that answer can lead to a better method of preventing low back pain in pregnant women and women with small children.

The answer is one of efficacy versus effectiveness. What I mean is that in theory and in ideal conditions, proper lifting techniques should help to prevent low back pain. However, we live in a less than ideal world and in less than ideal conditions. So while there may be some efficacy in lifting techniques, the advice has little to no effectiveness in the real world. And this is not a new concept; athletes do not train solely in ideal conditions. The distance runner does not adhere to only short sprints, on sunny days, with zero humidity, at zero elevation, and then go run a full marathon in Denver, Colorado in November.

This principle means a few things to the expecting mother. You can expect changes in the core musculature supporting your low back. Patterns of weak and tight muscles that will predispose you to certain aches and pains. You can also expect balance changes to come as your pregnancy progresses. Core strengthening exercises like the pelvic tilt, dead-bug, quadraped, and plank can help to recondition your core, while balance training can help prevent falls. However, you can also expect that your baby, once delivered, will put you in all kinds of precarious lifting situations, ones that making proper lifting techniques impossible.

As Juan Carlos Santana said at the Functional Training Symposium, "try to explain to a mother how to use proper squatting and reaching techniques while bending over across the back seat of a car to place a small child into a car seat or to take one out of it." It just is not possible. This is why Pillars for Preggos has the potential to be a success and help many new mothers. Life is movement, and bodies that move well, live well. It is important that you train for life. Being a mother is a full time job, 25 years later my own mother reminds me of this fact every day. So why not train your core in the positions it will be exposed to? We are all athletes of sorts. Some by vocation, some by recreation and some of us are industrial athletes. Consider yourself a domestic athlete, possibly one with the most physical demands.

Pillar Training for Preggos will be held every Saturday at 1:00pm. We had our first class today and it was a success. The group was small but there was a lot of learning and training, even for me. Of all the things I had accounted for, after all the training in classes and on my own, the one thing I did not anticipate was nausea. Needless to say we now have that under control. Today, some expecting mothers took their first steps to putting their pregnancy on a strong foundation and GCMC took their first steps towards fine tuning their first specialty group program. For more information about pillar training click here and to schedule online for the next Pillars for Preggos class click here.