Postnatal Recovery
You have made it through the last nine months, given birth to your amazing baby and now where do you go from here? There is lots of information about your baby, how to do this and how to do that, but what about you. How do you best take care of yourself?
In this article, I will explain the science about Postnatal Recovery but also give you some practical tips to make you feel more like yourself again.
Firstly, we must ask ourselves, what is your understanding about postnatal recovery?
Is it just being able to get out of bed and survive the day before you fall back into bed again, exhausted? No I didn’t think so.
How about feeling good about your body again, feeling more energised and dealing with the roller coaster that a new born baby brings. Then going to bed at night without being totally exhausted.
In order to look at the big picture of postnatal recovery we must firstly look at the body as a whole which ismade up of various systems. One of these systems is called the Autonomous Nervous System. This the body’s automatic nervous system and it controls a lot of the bodily functions including organs, breathing, heart rate etc.
The Autonomous Nervous System is broken down into two side:
Quite simply the body is more likely to recover when it is in a parasympathetic state. When you are constantly in a sympathetic state (stressed) your body, from a cellular level, will find it hard to recover and be in an optimum state for energy production.
Constant increase of cortisol (the stress hormone), suppresses the immune system, turns the body into a catabolic state and breaks down the body at a cellular level, upsetting hormonal balance and suppressing recovery hormones
We have the ability to control the autonomous nervous system to place it in a more parasympathetic state by using external forces such as breathing, the thoughts we use, the words we use and many other calming strategies. We will cover these as we go further through this
Hopefully this article has given you some useful and practical tips for decreasing the overall stress loading on your body to help you to recover during this postnatal period. Just remember there are 365 days in the year, and you won’t get things perfect every single day. However, by placing your body in the best possible environment to recover you will be better placed to not just survive the postnatal period but feel great and enjoy the amazing time with your baby.
If you need any help during this time with your postnatal recovery, just email me at lyndon@yummytummies.co.uk
Good luck,
Lyndon
Lyndon is a postnatal exercise and recovery specialist at Yummy Tummies.
M: +44(0)7957152245
