4 Summer Moves to Benefit Your Pelvis and Prepare for Fall and Winter
If you have been reading some of the other posts, we are currently on the theme of summer and as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are nearing the end of it, now is a perfect time to start looking to fall and winter. As the sunny evenings slowly turn to chilly nights and the smoothies and ice cream we may have been consuming in the warmer months soon become heavier and sweeter foods as we look towards the holidays, bringing attention to how we are treating our bodies now can have a great impact on the health of our bodies in winter. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), it is understood that as we ease into late summer we maintain our health now to allow for a seamless transition into fall and winter where cold/flu and illness can run rampant. While you are doing the work to build up your immunity, I would like you to consider how you can also work towards preparing your pelvis for the cooler months.
You might not think that your pelvis really has anything to do with your health and immunity, but it actually really does! Follow along as I go through the top 4 ways you can prepare your womb and pelvis for winter.
4 Summer Practices For Your Pelvis
Move Your Pelvis
Summer is all about moving our bodies in the literal and metaphorical sense. We may be spending more time outdoors swimming, running or just playing. We can also be moving our pelvis and body but not in the best ways. It may be spent going from a car to a plane to a train as we travel much more during the warmer months. As the travel and playtime start to wind down as we get back to our routines of work, school or just the desire to slow down, I would encourage you to keep moving even if it means that it will be slower or shorter periods of time.
The pelvis is a hotbed of systems, from the muscular system that wraps around our pelvic bones, the circulatory system that runs from the heart down through the abdomen, to our groin area and our legs, the lymphatic system that ensures that bacteria, waste, and other undesirables are not hanging out waiting to congest our body and our nervous system, the queen of all systems and regulator of our endocrine system that has organs that take up residence in our pelvis. They are all dependent on movement. During fall and winter as it gets colder, it may feel easier to settle into the recliner but incorporating small movements, especially when you are sitting for most of the day, that focus on moving your pelvis will limit that stagnation that could fester.
It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can watch my YouTube video here and here where I offer some suggestions.
Bring Warmth to Your Pelvis
Generally, I am not a fan of eating or drinking a lot of very cold liquids even when it is hot outside, however, I do make exceptions. Traveling this summer to Puerto Rico where the temperature was at least 92 degrees with a humidity of 80% + definitely made me want to consume more cooler liquids and foods to allow my body to cool down because sweating wasn’t cutting it. When we are in climates where it is much cooler than Puerto Rico and we are not bringing a lot of heat into our system, so consuming foods or liquids that are frozen or cold can not only dampen our inner digestive fire but even bring on more digestive discomfort.
While we will opt for more warming foods and liquids as the temperature turns, we can help support our bodies by doing a simple practice of abdominal massage to bring warmth into our belly and encourage peristalsis, or the flow of digestion. Beginning to integrate this practice into either your night-time or early morning routine is a great way of supporting your womb because when your colon is happy so is your uterus.
Here is a simple abdominal massage practice that you can implement today to your daily routine:
Abdominal Massage
Begin by doing an abdominal spiral with broad hands. Go in a clockwise direction (right to left) using an oil or body butter of your choice 10-15 times.
Next, move your hands so they are along the sides of your body and move them towards the belly button 10-15 times.
Lastly, bring fingers above your pubic bone and pelvic bone and move towards the belly button so you are getting the diagonal sides of your abdomen. You can do the same underneath your rib cage.
This should take anywhere from 5-10 minutes to complete.
This will help to soften any tension present in your belly.
Allow Your Pelvis to Breathe In and Out
You might be wondering how does your pelvis breathe in and out, well, it does so essentially through your diaphragms. You have a respiratory diaphragm and a pelvic diaphragm and every time you breathe in or inspire your respiratory diaphragm drops down and is caught by your pelvic diaphragm. The same thing occurs when exhaling where the pelvic diaphragm will retract or go back towards baseline when exhaling and the respiratory diaphragm will catch that breath as it draws into the rib cage. When we have this balance between relaxation and engagement, that is where we build resiliency in the tissues, they have the ability to respond quickly and effectively when there is, say a cough or a sneeze.
In case you have lived under a rock, we lived through a pandemic recently, and the combination of colds, flus, and COVID all make for some very unhappy pelvises. The coughing, sneezing, vomiting, and sitting/lying down from fatigue are enough to create issues in our pelvis such as incontinence. If we don’t have the resiliency needed to meet the demand of multiple coughs and sneezes, we end up with a lot of leakage.
Now, this is different than doing a Kegel. We are not just squeezing the pelvic floor muscles, we are actually looking to bring connection from the movement of the respiratory diaphragm to the core muscles to the pelvic diaphragm, they all need to work in concert with each other to ensure a strong and resilient pelvic bowl. You can watch in the gif below and here how to integrate this into your workout routine before you start to lift heavy or maybe just as you are doing tasks such as lifting and carrying your kid, laundry, groceries or picking up the garbage.
giphy.com image of respiratory and pelvic diaphragms
4. Find Joyful Movement For Your Pelvis
The only movement that is really worth doing is one that you enjoy doing and brings you joy.
As summer slowly fades into fall and winter, some of our movement quality tends to take a nosedive especially as work and school responsibilities take priority again. However, it is during this time that we want to ensure we are still getting some movement in, to not only benefit our mental health as the days get shorter but for our overall immunity as well.
Taking all of the supplements are great but we also want to make sure that we are moving and sweating in some form daily to help ensure we are moving our lymph, getting our blood pumping, and providing good engagement in our muscles and mobility in our joints. All of these same structures and systems are also located in our pelvis, so we benefit our pelvis when we are moving, a win-win!