Carrying a baby for nine months is a beautiful journey. But, you may experience many physical discomforts such as tailbone pain pregnancy. This can range from mild to extreme tailbone pain during pregnancy and may interfere with your daily routing.
Understanding causes, management and preventive strategies of tailbone pain pregnancy may enhance your quality of life during pregnancy.
Causes of Tailbone Pain during Pregnancy
During pregnancy, you experience several physiological and structural changes in your body that contribute to the hip and tailbone pain.
Hormonal Changes:
During the third trimester of your pregnancy, relaxin hormone releases to make pelvic ligaments looser and flexible to facilitate a comfortable area to growing baby.
Pelvic floor muscles tighten due to the relaxation of pelvic ligament resulting tailbone pain during pregnancy.
Weight Gain and Posture:
Your poster is altered during pregnancy because your abdomen expands resulting altered center of balance of your body. Therefore, your pelvis tilts forward and additional weight of growing baby causes hip and tailbone pain during pregnancy.
Prolonged Sitting:
Sitting for a long time during pregnancy can cause excruciating tailbone pain during pregnancy because, growing baby’s weight, excessive fluid and placenta put additional pressure on pelvis.
Constipation:
You may suffer from constipation during pregnancy and tailbone pain can lead you to increased discomfort because straining to have a bowel movement and effort to pass a hard stool put extra pressure on the pelvic floor muscles which are attached to the tailbone.
Previous Injuries:
A previous fall or injury onto the tailbone causes tailbone pain during pregnancy. You may experience extreme tailbone pain during pregnancy due to additional weight and other causes along with previous injuries.
How to Manage Tailbone Pain during Pregnancy
Suffering from tailbone pain during pregnancy affects your quality of life. Therefore, managing tailbone pain is important to reduce the discomfort in your body to experience a beautiful journey of pregnancy.
Maintain a Good Posture:
You can relieve hip and tailbone pain during pregnancy by maintaining good posture during sitting, standing and sleeping. Sitting straight up on an appropriate cushion along with your shoulders back, keeping your lower back supported with a specific coccyx “U” shaped or gel cushion, and your feet on the ground help you to manage the tailbone pain during pregnancy.
Avoid prolonged sitting and always try to tuck your tailbone in with relaxed shoulders and do not let your tailbone arch backwards when standing.When you sleep, try to sleep with a pillow under your bump and between your legs. You can try sleeping on your side with a pillow to improve spine alignment and leads to reduce tailbone pain during pregnancy.
When getting up from the bed, try to roll onto your side and push yourself and avoid sitting up directly on to your tailbone. This significantly reduce the pressure on your tailbone and helps to minimize the pain in the tailbone and consider as a safer and gentle method to stand up after lying down.
Apply Heat or Cold Packs:
A heat pack can reduce tightness of your tailbone area by relaxing tensed pelvic muscles and this improves the blood circulation to tailbone area.
An ice pack wrapped in a tea towel can help you to reduce inflammation around your tailbone and it relieve the pain after prolonged sitting.
Physical Therapy and Exercises:
Physical therapy can include gentle stretching exercises to relieve hip and tailbone pain during pregnancy. Physiotherapist. determine the root cause and intensity of your tailbone pain and design a pelvic floor PT treatment plan tailored for you.
This plan includes mobilization, dry needle, cupping and instrument assisted treatments and stabilization exercises such as single-leg knee hug, kneeling hip flexor stretch, pigeon pose and child pose. Other than these management strategies, you can visit your doctor in case of constipation, bladder pain, weakness in either one of your legs and sudden extreme tailbone pain during pregnancy.
Pain in Tailbone after Pregnancy
Most women experience pain in tailbone after pregnancy due to several reasons. Loosed pelvic ligaments during pregnancy cause the instability of the tailbone after the pregnancy also. The trauma of delivery and the dysfunction of pelvic floor after delivery can increase the ongoing tailbone pain during pregnancy into excruciating pain in tailbone after pregnancy.
Management of tailbone pain after pregnancy is also important to avoid further damage to your tailbone. You can continue with prescribed pain reliefs, taking help with a caregiver, increasing activities gradually and taking advice from your doctor.
Preventive Measures for Tailbone Pain during Pregnancy
Maintaining good posture, regular stretching and gentle exercises, avoiding sitting for long period and using a supportive cushion can prevent you from tailbone pain during pregnancy as well as after the labor.