Taking care of yourself should always be a top priority, especially when pregnant. Besides eating well, taking vitamins and getting enough rest (advice you’re probably hearing from everyone), there are additional ways to boost your prenatal health. Here are the top four wellness services that can enhance your pregnancy.
Top 4 Wellness Services for a Healthy Pregnancy
1. Yoga
Prenatal yoga can help women stay fit and minimize discomfort throughout the entire pregnancy. Even better, it also helps with the actual birth. Yoga works to strengthen the body’s different muscle groups and joints. This is important as your fetus grows and you feel the effects of more weight and strain on your body. Yoga poses strengthen your back, hips, arms and shoulders and relieve any tension or pain you may feel in them. It also enhances flexibility, which will make it easier for your body to adapt to various labor positions. Plus, more elastic ligaments may mean less labor pain.
Yoga also helps focus on and control your breathing. Using its deep-breathing techniques, you’ll be able to fine-tune your emotional and physical balance during pregnancy and relax your body during labor. Through breathwork, you’ll know how to acknowledge the tension and pain of contractions as you inhale and let go of them as you exhale. This may make labor more manageable. Visit wellb.me to find a wide variety of yoga options.
2. Meditation
With the joy of pregnancy comes a lot of physical discomfort and anxiety. This is where meditation comes in. It’s a proven way to help you relax your mind, body and soul – and prepare for labor.
Like yoga, meditation helps focus on your breathing. In turn, this can alleviate muscle tension, reduce stress, help with sleep, and give you more energy. By practicing deep-breathing techniques during pregnancy, your body becomes aware of two separate states, relaxation and tension. By training your mind to think of positive things that make you happy, like a healthy baby, meditation can help your mind stay relaxed. wellb’s meditation experts will also help clear your mind from mental clutter. This will bring you clarity and peace of mind, which you’ll need for the birth of your baby and long afterward.
3. Massage
Who doesn’t want a good massage? During pregnancy, massage therapy can work wonders. It can relieve nerve pain, reduce swelling in the joints, and even help regulate stress hormone levels, leading to improved mood and cardiovascular health. For expectant mothers, Swedish Massage is like magic to ease those pregnancy-related discomforts with the body’s circulatory and skeletal changes caused by hormone shifts.
So how exactly does massage help during pregnancy?
- It helps reduce swelling in the joints that’s caused by your increasingly heavy uterus putting pressure on the blood vessels and reducing circulation.
- It also helps alleviate Sciatic nerve pain. This pain occurs when the uterus rests on muscles of the pelvic floor and lower back and spreads tension to your leg muscles. This causes them to swell and put pressure on nearby nerves. Massage therapy focuses on releasing all of the muscle tension around the inflamed nerves.
wellb has experienced massage therapists who can help alleviate prenatal swelling in the joints and pain caused by inflamed nerves.
4. Fitness
It’s no surprise that exercise during pregnancy is great for you. Some of the benefits include:
- Boosting energy
- Leads to better, deeper sleep
- Can lower the risk of preeclampsia and gestational diabetes
- Strengthens your muscles, which helps your body cope better with the aches and pains of pregnancy
Healthy Means Happy
For a healthier pregnancy, try yoga, meditation, massage therapy and/or fitness. Visit wellb.me to schedule an appointment with a wide variety of wellness professionals who can help make your pregnancy as smooth, healthy and comfortable as possible.