EUROPE 1 ACCOMPANES YOU
Yoga can help to live well in pregnancy: this is what yoga teacher Émilie Yana, who was the guest of the program Europe 1 on "Every day", was defending. The professor, who also writes a book on this subject - My little notebook, prenatal yoga (Solar Editions) - is first of all reassuring. According to her, prenatal yoga "adapts to pregnancy and to bodily, physiological and hormonal changes throughout pregnancy".
The goal is, according to Émilie Yana, to "prepare her body to accommodate this baby who will grow and make room in the stomach". The right method is to channel, breathe, release tension and manage stress.
To participate in classes, you do not have to be an informed yogi. Émilie Yana believes that this is a "good introduction" for beginners since the "postures are simple and always adapted". "The idea is not to put your foot in the back of your head," she adds, advocating "do not force yourself" and not to place yourself in a logic of performance. "We just try to assume a belly that grows more and more for nine months without doing too much damage," says Emily Yana.
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The teacher invites you to practice prenatal yoga in the first trimester of pregnancy. However, the exercises will be different from those performed before delivery. "Even if you do not have a lot of stomach initially, there is still a hormonal upheaval that can cause nausea, for example," said Emily Yana. Whatever the period, prenatal yoga helps relieve the discomfort experienced during pregnancy, she says.
Relieve nausea
During the first trimester, Émilie Yana favors "opening exercises of the ribs" which will "stretch the upper back and the diaphragm" and thus "revive the transit, relieve heartburn and nausea".
Reduce back pain
"As the belly is going to get bigger, we tend to be slightly arched, so the lumbar muscles get heavier," says the yogi. Against back pain, prenatal yoga helps to "restore your posture". This includes gentle weight training exercises. "The big rights, the abs that we see when we have chocolate bars, we do not touch," warns Emily Yana. "On the side we have the obliques and below the transverse, these abdominals are stabilizing muscles that act on the back muscles, they are the ones that will help avoid being slouched or arched."
Émilie Yana then advises "the posture of the child, quite effective and very easy to do throughout the pregnancy". "We are on her knees, we have buttocks on her heels and we stretch our arms to the ground as far as possible," she illustrates.
Prepare your perineum for childbirth
Prenatal yoga also helps to prevent incontinence, which occurs because of the relaxation of the perineum, a muscle that is highly stressed during pregnancy. "It's like a hammock carrying the weight of the uterus all the way through the pregnancy," says Yana, who says the goal is, through yoga, "to have a perineum more elastic ".
Have the right position during childbirth
Finding the right position to facilitate the baby's passage is also one of the benefits of yoga. For this, we engage in particular the breathing. "The more you breathe deeply, the more the diaphragm can go down and up, and the more the body is aligned so that the baby can engage," says Émilie Yana.
"On inspiration, you take your breath by the nose, you inflate the belly and on the expiration, you contract the perineum.It empties his belly as if we wanted to stick his belly button to the spine", advocates she. "It allows the diaphragm to go up completely and the lungs to empty while working the perineum."