I am rather shy to talk about this but I am realizing it is stopping my zeal for yoga which is not a good thing. The last time after I gave birth, I rushed off to yoga at around 8-9 weeks postpartum and found every upside down inverted position became rather stressful as I came down and felt an incredible amount of air rush out of my vagina. It sounded like a fart and I really didn’t know where to put myself.

Here I am again, gearing myself up for hours of yoga practice and I surfed the web a bit to see what people have to say about it. This is what I have found….

The first piece of really useful advice seems to be… wear a tampon. I didn’t think of that, but apparently it works.

A kind woman called Helene wrote some more serious information:
Pulling air in the vagina during inverted poses is not all that uncommon. It happens when the diaphram is pulled up into the rib cage, with a relaxed pelvic floor. This causes air to be sucked into the vagina, which then ”farts” out again when you resume an upright position. It is more common after childbirth, because the pelvic floor is more flexible.

Many of us, when trying to activate the deep postural muscles of the torso, (transverse abdominus, mutifidus) accidentially suck the diaphram up - hollowing out the area right below the ribs, the solar plexus. Instead of ‘’sucking” the belly in, the action you want to develop is compression of the abdominal wall. A kind of lacing of your internal girdling muscles. Contracting the deep abdominals with a co-contraction of the pelvic floor is a very powerful technique to help the body develop core strength - especially after pregnancy and childbirth. Sucking air into the vagina directly after childbirth, when the cervix is still open can cause an air embollism, a serious life threating condition. Many inverted poses–down dog, mountain pose, and even child’s pose are contraindicated in the first few weeks postpartum because of this small but inherant risk.

Another woman wrote… being very conscious of creating a ”lock” in the root chakra, or as I think it’s called in yoga, the mulabanda. Basically this is similar to doing a kegel as you inhale into the inverted position and then maintaining a slight contraction of those muscles as you hold the pose and move out into the upright poses. If you haven’t done some pranayama, this might be foreign to you, but any good yoga instructor can teach you about the bandas, and they make a huge difference in your practice,

I am going to a Mummy and me yoga class tomorrow…. should be fun….

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May 22nd, 2007 | Permalink