#316 | The Body Ready Method for Optimizing Labor With Co-Founder Lindsay McCoy

Did you know that how you breathe on a daily basis can influence how your birth goes? Yes, your rib cage impacts your pelvic tension! On today's episode, we have Lindsay McCoy, a birth doula, exercise physiologist, and co-founder of the Body Ready Method. She explains how breath, mobility, and pelvic balance all come together to support a smoother, more efficient labor—and how a few simple daily practices in pregnancy can reduce the need for interventions in birth. She reminds us that our job is not to get stuck in our heads trying to “do it all right," and that "There's only room for one head in the pelvis, and that is your baby's!" 

You’ll learn how to identify common imbalances, what to do when labor stalls, and how to avoid unnecessary interventions by proactively supporting your body in pregnancy. This conversation is for the woman who wants to feel confident, aligned, and body-aware—not obsessive. It’s also essential listening for birth professionals who want to support laboring women with more precision and less guesswork. The "Flow, Balance, Space" framework is all about optimizing your labor for your best birth. 

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Transcript

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

Well, hello, everyone. My name is Lindsay McCoy. I am the creator and co founder of the body ready method. I am an exercise physiologist and a birth doula of 15 years. And I have trained, you know, now, 2000 professionals in the body ready method, and you know, 10s of 1000s of families through our work virtually. And then, of course, in person, I am the daughter of labor and delivery nurse, the granddaughter of an OB GYN. And funny enough, my husband's father was an OB GYN. So I was like, No thank you. Like dinner talk was episiotomies and hemorrhages, and I was going into exercise science. Thank you very much. And then going through college, I got really interested in special populations, thought about doing cardiac rehab. Worked in that for a while. Then when I was starting to think about having my own babies, got really into the research and what was going on with prenatal exercise. Realized there wasn't a lot of great you know, like the law of specificity. I'm training my marathoners for a marathon differently than my swimmers, differently than my gymnasts. And then when you get pregnant, people just say, just listen to your body, or just do yoga or do what you've already been doing, and we haven't ever been taught to listen to our bodies. And so it's really not the best approach. And then I was also starting, you know, when my first birth in 2007 was not the way Anna May Gaskins guide to childbirth told me it could be right, I needed to know why. I'm a science nerd, I'm a researcher. And so my second birth in 2009 was like the portal to who I am. I mean, they're all the portal to who I am now. But it was like, I remember, I had him at 1:54am and I was like, people need to know I couldn't fall asleep. I was like, on this high my husband just wanted to sleep. And, you know, within month, months, I was attending births as a doula. The first birth I ever attended was 40 hours long, ended surgically and again, like I was starting to see this disconnect from what I knew biomechanically and bio, you know, physiologically, and what I was seeing supported in practice, you know, even just like the positions people were put in. And so I just became obsessed. And that's kind of what I do today is I teach doctors, midwives, nurses, doula, chirals, pretty much anyone in the perinatal space. And then, you know, I've spoke at ACOG and acnm, and then I also teach families how to support their own bodies.

Let's start off by having you tell us what it is that you found out about your first birth, yeah, what did you dig into? What did you find first? Just tell us a little bit about, tell us how it went, and then tell us, yeah, I would love to. So, my first birth, you know, I was 2020 21 I was 21 and I was a, I guess a people pleaser, like you think, you know, I was like, Oh, I hired a midwife. So I got midwife, so I'm good, right? So whatever they say is probably right. And so, you know, I kind of just went into that birth. I also thought, oh, 40 weeks, I'm gonna have my baby at 40 weeks, right? You know, as or actually, as a first time mom, I assumed I'd have my baby at 38 weeks, of course, because I was so done being pregnant. And then when my baby wasn't born at 40 weeks, and I felt some contractions. Essentially, I brought I put myself in the hospital too soon, and they said, oh, we'll just give you a shot of something. They didn't even tell me what it was. You'll wake up in labor. It'll all be good. Well, it was morphine. I woke up my baby, his heart rate didn't look great. So then they induced me.

I was, I didn't have a cesarean, but I'm surprised by based on kind of the way things went that I didn't, and it just, you know, I was stuck in a bed with a cord coming out of me on every I felt like I was just there with cords, just passively listening to what people told me to do. And it just wasn't the It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't what I thought it could be. So then my second birth in 2009 you know, despite, you know, I actually covered this all on my podcast, that's no longer happening. But despite my family being very against it, I had a home birth, you know, hired a midwife. It was just a beautiful experience that I kind of had to hide from my allopathic medicine family, who they now get it, but that was 2009 there wasn't free standing birth centers yet where I lived, and so I was kind of bucking up against a lot of preconceived notions about what that was. So yeah, so I really shifted, and I saw what it could be versus what it was, and then their journey just continued from there, because then after that second birth, I had diastasis, recti and pelvic floor, you know, issues, and then I was like, Wait, this is also something that's really not addressed. And even the research back then was saying, Well, if you have twins or a history, there wasn't really a lot of specific understanding of things like pressure management and ways we could actually support the pregnant body to not, you know, it's like people are telling, oh, that's just part of being a mom. You're like, well, not necessarily. Maybe it doesn't have to be, right? We just accept it. But there are things that can be done. So, so talk to us about what can be done. What do mothers need to know? Yeah, there's a lot that can be done. So I think the way that I like to approach is it, I like to approach it from a individualized approach. So that means, if I, you know, I was an alpine ski racer, so I use my and, you know, I have an injury from that. And you know, we have sudden stops in gravity. We have car accidents, you know, someone's a volleyball spiker. You know, we all use our bodies in different ways throughout our lives, and so as a result, we all have different patterns in our bodies, and those patterns impact our bodies experience through our lives. And so for me, you know, I had this kind of shifted pelvis that creates tension on one side of my pelvic floor more than the other. And so, you know, that created SI joint pain on one side, which a lot of people with that, then they say, well, that's just because you're pregnant. Well, yes, Pregnancy is a big load, and it's adding to this already, you know, inherently a little bit imbalanced structure, and then it's showing up as a symptom. And so rather than focus on the symptom, I want to go back to the root right, and I want to say, like, what is that communicating with me, and how might that also impact the birth experience? So if one side of the pelvic floor is tighter than the other, you know, babies just accommodating the space they're given, maybe they tip their head to the side, go ace and clitic to get through, you know, maybe they turn to the other side. You know, there's a lot of different things that could occur. So for that, you know, it's like addressing that. And the same thing with diastasis, recti, the pelvic floor, like, if we can get that system working, well, it's not just about spot treating, let's say the pelvic floor, right? If the pelvic floor is the symptom, that doesn't mean that's the root of the symptom. It might be your diaphragm, right? Is too tight and it's pushing too much pressure downward. It might be that your body is too shifted forward and you can't access your glutes, right? So there's a lot of different The cool thing about it is the same stuff that makes your core and your pelvic floor more functional for life and for you know, through this process, is the same stuff that can optimize your body for birth. And so it's not like, here's your pelvic floor stuff, here's your core stuff, here's your birth prep, like it's all the same stuff. You know what that reminds me of? Yeah, we interviewed Gail Tully. I don't know if this is right. I think it might have been episode 54 it was way back in like October of 2020, and I remember how surprised I was to learn she was talking. I think about her niece, who was a softball player and had that repeated motion of using the bat to hit the ball over and over and over, I guess, being a righty, she was always swinging left, and after enough hundreds or 1000s of times of doing that, they actually found that her cervix itself, what the uterus was, twisted and torqued. Cervix moved off to the side. So theoretically, if one were to reach inside and look for the cervix, it would not have been there. It was twisted to the side. And when you just said, we can feel a symptom like that woman's walking around unaware that that's happened inside her body, but she may get a symptom of one hip being tight or something, right? You're saying, Well, let's look at what's causing that, because that very thing can be impacting the birth. So unwind, whatever it is that's really Yeah, and I will say a lot of people, then the solution often is, and I love the solution. You know, things like the forward leaning inversion will acutely release that, right? So we can acutely bring.

That uterus into balance, but that's temporary. That's about like two ish hours, and then what are you going to do? You're going to go back to moving through life the way you've been moving through life, right? And so we need those, those reactive responses, is what I call them. Like we love techniques like the Ford leaning version and things like that. And also, if we can teach, let's say, the glutes to support themselves in a more balanced way. If we can support teach her to shift her pelvis, she's probably shifted one way. Let's learn how to shift the other way. Let's teach those tissues to be strong in a more lengthened position, right? And so there's kind of two pieces, there's proactive preparation, and then there's reactive response. And so birth professionals need to understand how to respond like at a birth, let's say a softball player or volleyball Spiker, they get really tight sacrotuberous ligaments, right? If, if, if, if I'm at the birth, I should know how to release the sacrotuberous ligament for that individual. But if I'm meeting them at three months pregnant, let's give them stuff so that I don't need to release their sacrotuberous ligament at birth, right? Because I want the birth like, we want it to be boring, right? I say, like the boring birth is the goal. I don't want to have to use all my fancy tools and techniques, and I will if I have to, but, like, my goal is just to be like, you're amazing. Here's a sip of water, and then in pregnancy, or even sooner, let's give them some support so that they can, like, proactively find more balance in their body.

How many midwives or OBS, in your experience are asking mothers in their prenatal, initial prenatal visit if they were an athlete, if they were a skier, if they were soccer or player, if they were a ballerina? I mean, well, who's doing more and more? Hopefully, I just spoke at a Minnesota ACOG, and they were really interested and fascinated. So I'm really thinking, like, I want to believe that the things are shifting, but yeah, I mean, even, do you sit at a desk all day? Right? Do you cross your legs always to the left? And it's not in a shame way, because I think people can take what I'm saying to the extreme. And then I see posts on Instagram that are like, never lean back. Never tuck your like, Mike, pelvis is tucked right now, and it's okay, like, right? Like, people take it to the extreme and expect people to, like, lean I had a V back, V back. Moms get really I get it right. You can be really anxious about baby's position, especially with all the stuff about, like, scary stuff about baby's position, and I had a client once who was literally watching to be, like, leaning forward, and she was so terrified of even, like, leaning back, and it just made me feel sad for her that I don't want this to be taken in a way that I'm saying, like, okay, only be aligned and never move out of that, right? That's not the goal. The goal is to allow your body to get access to all of its ranges of motion, right? And, like, have more variety, release some restrictions, not to hyper focus on, like, how you're sitting all the time. Yeah, I'd love to comment on that, because that's exactly what can happen when I start working with my clients on day one in hour one, I have them question whether they are perfectionists, because it sounds like one of those, like, humble brag qualities, you know, the old interview like, Oh, I'm a perfectionist, and it's actually a really destructive quality. I identify with it. I think many, many, if not the majority of us do. And what perfectionism really means is you you exhaust your resources going toward one particular goal, like strive for excellence, not perfection, but it's really counterproductive in the example that you're giving, because if you tell a woman forward leaning is optimal, which it is, that's in part because we spend so many of our so much of our lives reclining. And when we're telling women to forward lean, we're really just saying, like, sit well, have a natural forward leaning tilt. But if they say, okay, like, if that's good, I'm going to do it 10 hours a day. Now that's unnatural. Like our ancestors did not do that. They didn't sit in a forward lean. They walked more. They moved right. And that's what we want. We want movement in the pelvis and movement in the knees. So yeah, it's we have to be so careful of how women hear the advice given, because the perfectionist is going to go running with it. And not only is she going to do that, she's going to have anxiety around it, because she's going to keep thinking she's enough of it. Yeah, I always say with great knowledge comes great responsibility, like when I teach my professionals to, like, assess a body. You know, things from things like their rib cage angle, their infrasturnal angle, will tell us so much about what's going on in their pelvis. There's a lot of things that we can assess, but we're not going to say, even if we're thinking, okay, they're oriented to their inlet, so they're narrow in their outlet, and so I want to help them create more availability in their outlet, or vice versa. I'm not going to tell that client, oh, you're pushing is going to be long, right? Like, that's not helpful. And we don't know that. There's so many different things. It's just one data point. But as a professional, in the back of my brain, I'm going to say, Okay.

Yeah, they spiked a lot of volleyballs, and they're clenching their glutes. I'm, you know, I'm gonna just keep that in my brain. I'm gonna give them tools for pregnancy, and then I'm just gonna be like, Hey, I might wanna do this at their birth, maybe, maybe not, right? And when you say that, you mean a particular exercise might be required Exactly, yeah, yeah. But who knows, right? And so it's just about, you know, it's about, I think a lot of times as birth professionals, we have this metaphorical bag of tricks, and we kind of like, it's like a double hip squeeze, forward leaning version. We kind of just pull them out at random, and I'm trying to get people more to the point where they can really be what I call a birth detective, and really hone in on that body, mind, spirit, you know, it starts with the nervous system. You know, when I was even when I was teaching a cog, it's kind of funny. You know, they hired me to teach the biomechanics, right? Like the very clinical, how does the pelvis open with these different movements of the leg and spine and arms? And I was like, I can't even tell you guys, we can't even talk about that until we talk about the nervous system. My whole approach is, I say F, the BS. I don't know if you swear on the show, but it's F. That's how you remember F, the BS versus flow, then balance, then space. So we have to address the nervous system. If someone is scared and they're running from an imaginary Tiger, what's going to what's opening their pelvis? More going to do right? And so we have to address it kind of in that order. First, we help them with the flow and the safety and that ability to go into what I call the labor flow state, then we can help support balance, if needed, right with different techniques and tools. From there, then we get to the biomechanics of like, where are the knees, where are the arms to help create space, but ideally, we teach people to be intuitive. If you gain access to these movements in pregnancy. Then, and you're in your flow state, you will intuitively find the movements and the positions that create space where the baby is. So my job is not to, like, be the physiological manager, right? It's, that's what the allopathic people do, right? Is they just, like, manage the birth. We're not managing the physiology. We only can you know, we only jump in with that if it's needed, otherwise, I trust that intuition. That's a way better assessment anyway, exactly. That's a real skill and best skill. So let's, let's get, let's get into the nitty gritty. Let's talk about like, how about let's start with the woman who was not a professional athlete doesn't really have a lot of aches and pains.

Has no idea if she's tight on her right side or left side or backside or front side. She's just going through pregnancy, you know, ready to have her baby, and she's having a long Well, let's even before we get into labor, let's talk about what she should do in pregnancy to help have her smoothest, fastest, best labor. And then maybe you can get into, like, the first things that a woman should do if her labor seems to be taking too long, or, you know, going slow or stalling, even starting with the flow, and then getting into the balance and how to make space, sure. So in pregnancy body ready method, we have five pillars, pelvic floor, pelvis movement patterns, core and upper body. So those are like our five pillars. And addressing all of them will help create, like a readiness in the body. Of course, we also need to talk about readiness in the nervous system and the mind. So that's a whole thing. I love the power of the mind and that stuff, and a lot of people do a lot of great work with that. So you definitely have to pay your mind. You have to get a good team, right? It's like mind body team, right? If you're going if you want sushi, don't go to the Italian restaurant, right? So get a good team, prepare your mind, nervous system. And then the third piece that I really kind of try to focus on is helping to prepare the body. And so some really key things, the one of the ones that the more I work with the body, the more I become obsessed with mobility of the rib cage and the breath, and using breath to create space. So if you have compression in your rib cage, and I'm not, I don't think this is you won't be able to see me. But like, if your rib cage is compressed. Yeah, people are going to see you. It's on YouTube, so show us, give us all the details. Cynthia and I are both right when you said that. We're both sitting up a little bit, taking a deeper breath, stretching our ribs. So I love it. I love it. So, so if you think about it, we wear a lot of tight bras, right? We don't breathe into our ribs. We thrust our rib cage. So now the back of my rib cage is compressed. And so when we have tension here, it pushes down into the pelvis, right? And so the more we can create space in the rib cage, the more we have space in the pelvic floor. They literally mirror each other. So I will assess people's breath a lot and say, okay, there may be breathing side to side, but they're not breathing front to back, or they're not breathing. And so it corresponds with a space that's not moving in the pelvic floor, because it's literally the two sides of kind of a system. And so that's one of the biggest things I say, is to learn how to breathe into your rib cage three dimensionally get out of the tight bras. It's not always about movements. It's also about things like how tights your bra. And that's a simple one. Is we can get, you know, the rib cage is going to.

Anyway, and so we need to allow for that space. So upper body mobility on our on my Instagram, I have a lot of different movement tips and things. So there's a lot of upper body stuff there. With the pelvis. It's about helping that pelvis find a state of neutral. So a lot of people are either in a state where they're in what's called a posterior pelvic tilt with a lot of tension in their glutes, in their hamstrings, or they're in a more anterior pelvic tilt where there's a lot of tension in kind of the front side, there's psoas. And so we can teach people how to assess their own pelvis and how to do movements to help with that. You can also hire a body ready method, professional. We have over 2000 all over the world, and many do virtual but it really it's about learning how to work with your body. And the cool thing about this work is that the same stuff that makes birth tends to help with the efficiency of the birth. Like I said, it helps your core and pelvic floor, but it also helps. You know, people are when people have these injuries at birth, a lot of times, it's, it perpetuates through their life. You know, I want to be jumping on the trampoline with my grandkids, right? I want to go use my body to hike that mountain. I want people to not be limited based on their experience through their childbearing years. And so I really do think it's, helpful to be proactive. And I know you know, someone who hasn't given birth yet and they don't know what to expect doesn't always have the same buy in as someone who's had a previously difficult experience, but there are simple things you can do, like learning to breathe, learning how to hinge at your hips, right, and things like that. So it's a long story, but being proactive in pregnancy is absolutely the way to go with that. And then I think your second question was, what to do, like early labor, right? So early labor, you know, when baby's trying to get into the pelvis, we want to do things that are creating space there. You know, first of course, we want to not freak out, right? Like, stay calm and even that positive. Like, ooh, this is it. I'm gonna get up. I'm gonna move. Well, is it the middle of the night? Let's just sleep, right? Like, let's conserve our energy. The goal isn't to be in, like, the most inlet, open position forever. The goal is to move and to breathe and to sleep and to nourish yourself. But if I'm meeting someone in early labor, or I'm meeting someone who's about to be induced for whatever reason, there are some simple movements and tools that I'm going to do with almost all of them to just kind of optimize that that process. I mean, it could be as simple as heat on the lower back, right if somebody's QL muscle, which is the muscle connecting the back of the pelvis to the back of the ribs. If that's very tight, which is tight when we have what's called an anterior pelvic tilt, it can create a less it can make it more difficult for the back of the pelvis, the sacrum, to do what's called counterutation. And so if we can release those tissues, we could do what I call the glute scoot. We could do heat on the low back. We could get in a tub when we release those tissue we you know, you could have your partner massage your lower back that allows those tissues to release. And now that sacrum can counter mutate, and now baby can get into the pelvis. So it can sometimes just be a few little things that are needed. You know, I'll sometimes, if I have a client in prodromal labor, I will often go to their house kind of assess what's going on. One client I remember is where I created the glute scoot at her birth because she was in an anterior pelvic tilt, and then she had a lateral shift, so one hip was higher, they were both more forward, so baby's not getting into that pelvis as easily, right as a pelvis that's that is able to counter Newt and kind of balance out so babies waiting for a more balanced space. And so we were able to release that grippy one sided QL, we were able to get her lower back to release. And then, you know, I went down the street to work at a coffee shop, and she called me. Within two hours, she was in labor. You know, she had a baby that evening. So, yeah, simple things can really help when there's just a little extra need. What about the woman who doesn't have a body ready method? Person helping them through their birth? Maybe has watched your Instagram a little bit, but obviously, as you said, we don't want women getting too much in their head about this. We could definitely see mother starting to feel like, Am I doing the pelvic tilt right? What the heck is the glute scoot? When do I need to do the glued scoot? Like there's there could be potentially a lot of overthinking. So what about just the idea of a mother and baby sort of having that intuitive flow communication, and Mother moving her hips naturally in the way that her baby and body need.

How much of that is happening in your experience? And then, like, Are there a few little things that you can just nudge women in the right direction, like a few little things that they don't have to overthink, that can help them in this.

Process, absolutely. I mean the things like the glute scoot and the reactive response you don't need to know, and you don't even necessarily need to do. That's for the professionals I like when I'm I don't know who, if you have more professionals or lay people that listen to this podcast, but how I speak to professionals is a little different than how I speak to families, because families, your job is to really, like, hone into your intuition, hone into, you know, peace and flow and breath and to not overthink it. You know you you're not going into labor. Okay. Like, that's okay. Let's keep nourishing our body. Let's keep, like, that calm spirit about us versus, like, what is wrong? Something must be wrong. You know, sometimes early labor can just take a little bit of time as baby is is journeying through and your job is not to overthink it. I always joke, there's only room for one head in your pelvis, so get yours out of there, right? Like, as a pro, I'll be all up in there with my head, but like, your job is to not overthink it. And a lot, most of the time it works like birth works, you know, and your job is to not overthink it and to just go into that flow, especially if in pregnancy, you've practiced the different movements of birth, you can just show up and just flow and just believe, and that's why I just I see people who have never given birth just intuitively move into the positions that their baby needs. You know, I remember one client jumped up on the bed and did this crazy movement, and I was just like trying to spot her so she didn't fall off the bed. And after the birth, she goes, Why did you pull me up into that position? And I was like, I didn't do anything. I was just making sure you didn't fall off the bed. And so that's all just to say that your body knows what to do, and your job is to just go there. And we're in an altered state of perception in birth, right? We go from our prefrontal cortex, which is that thinking, judging, planning, brain that we don't want to be in birth. We want to go into this like, deeper, more limbic place. And so that's why, when I see someone, you know, overthinking, and you know, they're fully clothed, and they're like, What should I do now? And then they go in the bathroom and they come up completely naked, and they're just like, I'm like, yes, they're in the flow. This is what we want. And then you just see you just see it work. You mentioned that there you you mentioned that there were some specific thing birth movements that people could practice prenatally so that they intuitively come during the birth. Can you talk about those? Sure. I mean, so learning how to tuck and untuck your pelvis, not in a cat cow type way, but truly like mutating. Being able to mutate and counter mutate is one movement having access to both internal and external rotation of the femur. So a lot of people at rest are either in a position where they're more internally rotated, or they're more externally rotated. So see like the duck feet, or the people who kind of walk in the outside edges of their feet, and then you also see the people who are more pronated or more internally rotated. And so just learning, kind of where you are limited, and finding access to both of those movements, you know, I like to say, the first time you ride a bike, you shouldn't be in a bike race, right? So the first time you're moving your pelvis in all these ways, you obviously, ideally aren't in birth and so internal, external, tucking and untucking, flexion and extension. So a lot of people are very good at hip flexion, because that's what we're all doing right now. We're sitting right. So we're all in some degree of hip flexion, and a lot of people lose access to hip extension. And actually hip extension widens the anterior, posterior, front to back diameter in the pelvic inlet, right? That's why flying cowgirl, if anyone knows that position, that's why that works. And I've seen that one taught wrong, because people say, Oh, you need a big curve in the lower back. You don't want a big curve in the lower back. That's back extension. And so learning, you know a lot, a lot of this is like a game of telephone sometimes with with birth pros. And I've noticed when we bring it back to the biomechanics and say, Okay, let's invite that person to tuck their pelvis under, find true hip extension. Now we're actually widening the inlet. But if somebody hasn't practiced hip extension, and they don't really have a lot of it, which is very common in our society. It can be tricky to just kind of force it at birth. And so finding access to hip extension is also going to help you strengthen your glutes, which is going to help them stop gripping and tensing the back of the pelvic floor, which is going to allow that pelvis again, that ability to move. New take counter new Tate. So, yeah, those are the big ones. Internal, external, flexion, extension, and even, you know, another one that I like to add in is when we reach the arms up. You know, you see people a lot of times at, you know, as they're pushing, they'll reach the arms up, or they're like, pull them in. Well, why are they doing that? Well, there is a the inserts from the arm to the sacrum via what's called the thoracolumbar fascia. And if we have a lot of tension there, right? If we're like in this more extended position, it can be difficult for that, you know, pelvis to create space, and so opening up the lats with some upper body mobility movements can be really powerful as well. Are you saying when women have that inclination to reach up and pull they're relieving the tension, and they don't realize they're doing it, or they're adding to the problem. When they reach up, they are encouraging mutation of the sacrum, which is an outlet opener. So isn't that super cool? So I actually started thinking about that because I love looking at old depictions of birth, and we have one of Cleopatra, and there's one of a pioneer birth that I found in like medical research. And the Cleopatra birth, her attendants are reaching her arms up as the baby is being born. And in that pioneer birth, they're pulling the arms forward and pushing the knees back. And they might not have realized, like the the word that we have today would be like, the thoracolumbar fascia is mutating the sacrum, blah, blah, blah, right? They just knew we do this, and the bottom opens, and now we have, like, the scientific stuff to back that up, and that's why I'm like, a cog ACM. Look at this, and they're gonna say, that's so cool. Tell us more, and then it's going to take them 20 years to get around to making any changes, right? I know. I know. Yeah, I've seen it done in the hospital with sheets hung from the ceiling, and in both of my water births, I hung a maya rap from the ceiling specifically to for pushing, because when I got that urge to bear down. All I could think about was lifting my hands up, like it just had to be done, and then to have something to pull tension on, and then on the knees in the tub the length. I had no idea why, really, why it was to know why, right? Absolutely no, yeah. It just was like, that's what my body needed to do, and it's yes, in all birth rooms, there should be something hanging from the ceiling that women can grip onto, because it helps so much with the pushing. What would you say to a woman like me who strongly preferred birthing on hands and knees and I didn't have that inclination to pull? Does that mean that that worked against me because I didn't pull, or does it mean maybe I'm not naturally tight in that area, like, Why did I not have that inclination? I think everyone needs a little bit different things, right? We don't know. We don't have the information that baby has to and we don't know what's going on inside. And so I really trust the birthers. One of the things that I have seen, you know, the whole internal hip rotation. People call it now, knees in, ankles out. But actually, knees together is not internal hip rotation. That is a deduction, and that will narrow the space and so. So when you people, you know, you see people say, like, knees together. I'm like, No, keep the knees under the hips and ankles wide. But does everybody need internal hip rotation for their babies to be born? No, if that was the case, then we'd have a lot less babies being born, because a lot of people aren't just finding internal hip rotation to push, and it's the same with the reach up. Like your body might not have needed more space. It might. You know, I didn't push in, knees and ankles out. I was on my knees. I didn't reach up. But if, let's say I was pushing and pushing and pushing, and the baby's not coming, and I'm, you know, on my hands and knees, maybe my Doula or my midwife or someone could say, Hey, you want to try holding and reaching and pulling this thing, you know, maybe we need it. We can sometimes support adding more space, or, Hey, you know, let's see if, what happens if we widen these ankles a little bit, or we do this or that. And so sometimes, if the intuition isn't there or something's in a delay, you know, we as professionals should understand how to create more space or how to create more balance for those people. But most of the time, you're gonna find when, if you feel safe and you're in your flow, you're going to find the positions that work best for you. And sometimes, you know, you see some people rounding around their babies, and some people actually intuitively more arch. So we don't all have the same bodies, the same patterns, so we don't always need the exact same things to help our baby journey through the pelvis. This is why it's so important that birthing rooms are set up in a way that allow women to move around. Obviously, they should be out of the bed in the home. It's happening intuitively, but very few women are giving birth at home. But hospital rooms need bars. They need things hanging from the ceiling. They need squat stools. They need the bed to be in the background, not the foreground, because then mothers don't have to think about all this stuff. They can just see something that their body, in their mind, is called to, and then they can go and use it. And they don't have to necessarily be put into the flying cowgirl unless, you know, unless there's a prolonged period of time where.

And really feel stuck by the way that position looks extremely uncomfortable for a woman. Do people actually like that? I mean, I don't use it all the time very often, because I'm so because my clients get a lot of prenatal prep, and they don't need to, like, be in this extreme hip extension. I mean, same with Walters. You guys know the Walters position, right? Where you're like, that's the same thing. If you take flying cowgirl and you flip it into a different plane, it's the same thing. All of those are just hip extension. Why don't you describe flying cowgirl for the listeners? Because we have so many women who are going to be wondering what you're talking about. Just do your best to describe, yeah. You want me to, like, show it up, right? Show it so that the YouTube viewers can see it. So it's like, yeah. It's like, you, you're you're in an extended position. You're tucking your pelvis under your knees, your legs are behind you, and then you put a peanut ball between the legs. So it's like, it's basically hip extension. And if you think, Walters, Walters, we put someone on their back, and we extend their legs down. I'm not showing it very good, because I wasn't prepared me on video with it. But, yeah, it's just an extreme hip extension movement, which is going to, I can show it on a pelvis, but it's gonna take those sits bones and pull them so that we are widening the inlet. So I really like Walters. I say, is my big guns, and I have done it at maybe five births, honestly, Walters, I say if you're doing Walters at every birth, you're not you're doing something wrong, because that's extreme. It's not fun. And the times I've done it are the times where it's like, okay, are we going to do a cesarean, or should we try this first? Right? Like, if you're trying to get everyone's baby to engage by putting everyone in Walters like you're missing something, there's more, there's more stuff you could do. So is that for the babies who haven't dropped, like when? What's your indication for doing that? So for Walters, or for the hip extension, there's a few different options. If you're trying to get a baby into the inlet again, that's going to widen the AP or the front to back diameter in the inlet if, though, I've also used it, and I've taught this to a lot of labor and delivery nurses, specifically, if the baby's hasn't yet being born, and they're just like, pushing, pushing really, really hard, and there's just like, No, there's no progress. Sometimes it's actually the show. You know, it's not just the head, right? We have a whole baby. So sometimes the shoulder can be held up at the inlet. And so sometimes putting someone like taking a break the time I'm thinking about the first time I tried this, the my client had an epidural. She was pushing for, I think she was on hour four, and the midwives were really great. And I said, Hey, can we try something? We put her in Walters for three contractions. She didn't really push, you know, she had an epidural, and then we flipped her back onto hands and knees, and her baby was born two contractions later. So it was like that shoulder just needed to slip under the pubic bone. So there's a couple different reasons. And again, this is not something that I think families need to know, right? That's not your job to know these What if situations Your job is to flow with what is and and be intuitive. And then the birth professionals do need to, in my opinion, understand all of this stuff. You know, especially doctors, they're only taught how to add force. I often show this with a toilet paper tube and I say, okay, squish it, you know, less space, and now the baby's not coming. So what does, what does the model, medical model, do? Okay, let's add force. But if we had, like, create space and balance first, oftentimes we eliminate the need for any extra force. Yeah, Pitocin is often not the solution, but it is always the solution, right, right? And forceps and episiotomies and everything else, or even nipple simulation, right? I mean, it has a time and a place, but it's it's trying to add power behind the contractions, which is sometimes needed, but very often, we need to address flow, balance and space first. Just out of curiosity, how often are you finding yourself having to use these more complex, more detailed types of positions or protocols in physiologic versus non physiologic birth? Yeah. So, I mean, if somebody is in a more physiological birth supported environment, right, like a home birth, they tend to be able to be a lot more intuitive with their movement, right? And they tend to feel safer, to flow through their process. But still, sometimes, definitely, I've had to do various different techniques at home births, you know, because there's all kinds of things that can show up. You know, if somebody has a really, really tight pelvic floor, relax. You can't just, like, flow and relax enough to release that tension, right? Like a pelvic floor that is really, really tight is still a pelvic floor that's really, really tight during birth. So, so definitely home birth, there still is sometimes a need for some of this extra support, but it's definitely less common in home birth than when somebody is really fearful and out of their flow and constantly interrupted, and has a team that's not as patient or willing, right? And so sometimes I will say, as a doula, you know, I'm not making the medical decisions right. Of course, I'm just supporting my client. For, you know, variety of situations, they may be choosing to be induced at 39 weeks, right? Or they might be choosing whatever they're choosing. And so my job is to kind of support through that. So sometimes I will need to do more of my kind of reactive tools. I mean, it can be as simple as, where do you squeeze the hips? Like when I'm doing a comfort measure? You know, a lot of people like press really directly in at the sacrum, which I'm like, that can relieve back pain, but it's not addressing why we're having back labor. So why not? If someone's already having back labor and they already want they're already hired me to support their comfort, why not address why they're having back labor, or create some balance, release some tension, rather than just pressing in that actually might be preventing the birth from happening as efficiently. So Lindsay, just for any woman listening right now, who's pregnant, what are just the first basic things she could immediately start doing right off the bat without knowing her body specifically or her history? What are some like, no brainer, definitely, if nothing else, be sure you're doing this. Yeah. So my very favorite thing to suggest people to do is to walk. Our ancestors walked. We need to walk. We sit a lot, right? We sit in chairs, we work at the computer, we round forward, we wear tight bras. And so walking is, you know, allows the psoas to free swing. It allows a lot of suppleness in the tissues. And so going for daily walks is also so good for our mental health. And so just getting and running is not a replacement, right? So it's like, get walking, get moving, is the first one. Get out of the tight bra and start breathing into your rib cage. Is the second one. Super simple, right? You don't need anything to do that. Learn how to hinge at your hips right when you're when you're leaning forward to spit out your toothpaste. Do you round your spine? Or can you hinge at your hips, right? It's very simple.

And I would say then the the last one would just be to start learning how to manage your stress, regulate your nervous system. You know, this is great preparation to being a parent, which is very stressful, right? And so if you're really stressed now and everything is chaos now, you know, like, we're also developing that baby's nervous system. And so just allowing yourself to, you know, after you've heard all of these things, you're like, Oh, that's a lot, okay, but that's not for you, right? Your job is to just breathe and eat good foods and go for walks and dance with your partner and laugh with your friends and just enjoy this journey. And I would say it's about like flowing with what is right. And that's the whole journey of life is just flowing. You know, I just got back from some travel, and the travel home was really chaotic. And I was like, Okay, this is just the rapids part of the flow, right? And so my job, I can't stress about what I can't control. I couldn't control, you know, delays and storms and really not great airlines. I can choose to not go with them again. But you know, like your job is not to control this whole process. Your job is to take control of the controllables of this experience and let go of the rest. And I think that is honestly the journey of life.

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