Hi, I'm Michelle Kenway and welcome to pelvic exercises. Today I'm going to teach you some
exercise that after hysterectomy. These exercises and techniques will improve your recovery
from hysterectomy surgery, and they're really worth practicing before you have your surgery.
There's three main exercises we're going to look at today. The first one is deep
breathing exercises. The second one is circulation exercises, and the final one will be a technique
to help you move in bed. So let's start with the first one deep breathing exercises. It's really
important that you breathe deeply after your surgery. Many women tend to breathe shallowly
following a hysterectomy surgery. So this is a technique to actually get the breath right
into the base of your lungs. First tip is to sit tall, so sit tall with me. Put your hands
around the base of your ribcage, feel that base area there. Now when you breathe deeply,
you breathing through your mouth for three nights. Whatever feels comfortable. I want
you to make your ribcage go wide as you breathe in. Let's have a nice deep breath in and make that
ribcage go wide. Breathe it in and let the air out slowly. Can you feel that you're not using
your neck and shoulders we want the breath to come down here. This is the type of exercise that will
help to prevent chest problems after having gone any surgery. So let's go again with that deep
breath. Big breath into the ribcage, breathe it in the ribcage go wide and relax and go.
Finally, I want you to try that exercise one more time. As you feel the ribcage go wide,
you might notice that your abdomen moves forward just slightly. And this is also correct part
of the exercise I showed you the doing the exercise correctly. So one final time, nice
deep breath into ribcage sitting nice and tall. For starters, let's breathe it in. Big breath in,
let the air out slowly and relax. How did you go? It's worth practicing that before your surgery.
The next exercise we're going to do is to help you improve the circulation in your lower limbs.
You might have been on a plane flight and had been told to do circulation exercises during
that flight. The reason for that is that when you sit still and particularly after guided surgery,
you can increase your risk of clots forming in the deep veins and your calves. So these are
great exercises to do particularly when you're not moving much when you get home from surgery.
So if you can position yourself in bed, and maybe the way you're going to be able to Operation line
down and I want you to think about moving your feet up towards your head and feet back down
again. So this is called a calf pump exercise and if I actually moved my pants up, you can see my
calf muscles contracting. So lifting my feet up, you can see the calf muscles contracting strongly
and down. If you push the back of your knees into the bed, as you do that, you'll also tense
your thigh muscles and this is a really useful technique for propelling that blood that's in
those areas back through to your heart. So up and down nice and steady as you're resting in bed in
hospital than when you return from hospital. And I try and get patients to do those 10 times with
often up and down being one every 15 or 20 minutes while you're awake. Good Regular exercise to do.
Okay, so we've done the first two exercises, we've done our breathing exercise and our
circulation exercise, let's move to a bridging exercise to help you move more comfortably in
bed. So let's say it's following your surgery and you want to move in bed. This is the safe
way to move in bed without putting downward pressure on your wound and also help you to
move without pain in that area. The first step is to slide one foot towards the bottom side,
one heel up towards the bottom, and then move the other heel up to bottom. In that position,
you can quite readily lift your bottom off the bed, this doesn't use your tummy muscles,
it might put pressure down for your wound, and it might also relieve some pressure off
your back. So that's the exercise it's called a bridge. So in that position,
you can see then you can actually move yourself up the bed and you could move yourself from side to
side. This is a much safer technique than using an overhead bar to pull yourself which will use
your abdominal muscles and push down through your word. So that's that simple bridge up and down.
And it's also very nice in it'll take pressure off your back because sometimes your back can feel
sore after hysterectomy as well. So a couple of those up and down, and up and down. Okay, great.
So what have we done today? We've done some deep breathing exercises,
big breath into ribcage and down to help prevent lung problems. We've also done some circulation
exercises bare feet moving up and down to help prevent circulation issues. And I've
taught you a really great technique for moving in are moving in bed following your surgery. So
remember that practice makes perfect. It's really well worth practicing those before your surgery
and here's to having a healthy hysterectomy and a healthy pelvic floor. Bye for now.