You had a baby. Everyone asks how the baby is doing. Almost no one asks how your back is doing, or why standing up from the couch still feels like it did in your third trimester, or why picking up your car seat sends a twinge through your hip that wasn’t there before you gave birth. Your body did something enormous over the last nine months and in a single day, and it doesn’t just snap back the moment your baby arrives. If you’re a few weeks or a few months out and still not feeling like yourself physically, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone.
What’s Actually Going On
During pregnancy, the hormone relaxin loosens the ligaments around your pelvis and spine to make room for delivery. That process doesn’t reverse itself the moment your baby is born, it happens gradually over weeks and months, and in the meantime your joints are more mobile than they’re used to being while you’re also lifting, bending, and carrying more than you ever have. A peer-reviewed cohort study following postpartum women found that pregnancy-related low back and pelvic girdle pain persists well past delivery for a meaningful number of women, with 65% still reporting recurrent pain and another 15% reporting continuous pain at twelve months postpartum among those who had ongoing symptoms at six months. Chiropractic care was specifically named among the healthcare services this population sought out.
Beyond the ligament and hormonal piece, there’s a straightforward mechanical one. Labor and delivery, whether vaginal or cesarean, place real stress on the pelvis and lower spine. If the pelvis doesn’t return to symmetrical alignment on its own, and it often doesn’t without some help, the muscles around it compensate unevenly, which is a common source of the ongoing back, hip, and SI joint discomfort so many new moms describe.
Who This Affects
This isn’t limited to women with a difficult delivery. Even a straightforward birth places real load on the pelvis, and the postural demands of caring for an infant, nursing in one position for long stretches, carrying a car seat on one hip, bending over a crib dozens of times a day, tend to reinforce whatever asymmetry is already there rather than let it resolve. We see this most often in moms who are three to twelve months postpartum and assumed the discomfort would simply fade, only to find it’s still there once the newborn fog clears enough to notice. Some new moms also notice the demands of a newborn’s schedule affecting their own sleep and recovery well beyond what sleep deprivation alone would explain.
How Zone Technique Applies to Postpartum Recovery
The assessment starts with the muscular zone(5), checking for asymmetry in how the muscles around your hips, low back, and pelvis are firing, a common pattern after the mechanical stress of delivery and the repetitive postural demands of caring for a newborn. The nervous zone(3) is checked for any restriction at the lumbar and sacral levels affecting the nerves that supply the pelvic region. Dr. Korrin’s goal isn’t a generic “get adjusted and feel better” approach, it’s identifying specifically where your body hasn’t returned to its pre-pregnancy alignment and addressing that directly.
We want to be clear about scope here: chiropractic adjustment addresses spinal and pelvic alignment and the nervous system function connected to it. It is not a treatment for diastasis recti or pelvic floor dysfunction on its own, those involve muscle and connective tissue changes that are typically addressed through targeted exercise and, where appropriate, pelvic floor physical therapy. Many of our postpartum patients benefit from chiropractic care and a referral to a pelvic floor specialist working together, not one instead of the other.
What to Expect at Your First Visit
Dr. Korrin will ask about your delivery, how far out you are, where you’re feeling discomfort, and what your daily demands look like with a new baby at home. He’ll do a hands-on assessment of your spine and pelvis, checking for restriction and asymmetry, before any adjustment. Care is gentle and adapted to where you are in recovery, whether that’s a few weeks after a vaginal delivery or further out from a cesarean. If your primary concern is pelvic floor function specifically, urinary leakage, ongoing separation of the abdominal muscles, or pain during intercourse, we’ll talk through whether a referral to a pelvic floor physical therapist alongside chiropractic care makes sense for you.
Moms across Plano, Murphy, and Richardson come in for this exact pattern, months out from delivery, still not feeling like their body has caught up to where they are in motherhood. Our prenatal and postpartum chiropractic care is built specifically around this stage of recovery.
Dr. Korrin has helped Plano moms feel like themselves again after pregnancy. Schedule your first visit today.
