Training for Labor: Using the Law of Specificity Throughout the Nine Months

Part 1 of 3: Building Balance and Alternation

Most prenatal Pilates programs focus on strengthening the core and pelvic floor. But what if we’ve been missing the most important question: Are we training pregnant clients for the specific demands of labor itself?

Labor is a full-body, asymmetrical, rotational event. Yet most clients arrive at delivery day with exaggerated postural imbalances and a pelvis that can’t move fluidly between positions. The law of specificity tells us that if we want the body to perform well under a specific demand, we need to train for that demand. So let’s talk about what that actually looks like over nine months.

The Problem: Pregnancy Amplifies What’s Already There

Whatever postural habits existed before pregnancy get exaggerated—often dramatically—unless we’re diligent about creating balance and teaching the body to alternate between positions.

Why Alternation Matters

There’s no one “bad” posture. Our best position is always our next one. We want to train clients’ bodies and brains to find all possible movements and alternate seamlessly between them. But because we’re human and living in 2026, many of us are stuck in habitual twists we’re not even conscious of.

Here’s a common one: Picture the left half of the pelvis tipped forward, and the right half tipped back. The left pelvic floor is narrower; the right is more open. In pregnancy, this asymmetry becomes exaggerated. When labor starts, the baby has to navigate through an unbalanced birth canal—not ideal.

The good news? We have nine months to balance things out, and the tools we can give our pregnant clients will stack the cards in their favor for an easier delivery.

The Starting Point: Expand What Is Compressed, Compress What Is Expanded

Let’s consider how a typical untrained pregnant posture presents. (By “untrained,” I simply mean they haven’t yet had our guidance.) What we usually see is some version of a swayback posture—ribs back, hips forward, lumbar compressed, back body locked up.

The simplest, most effective next step? Create ways to expand the back and side body. By opening these compressed, rigid, non-moving areas, we:

• Widen the brain’s map of the body

• Find more symmetry side to side
• Help clients discover what neutral feels like

Neutral isn’t somewhere we want to stay, but it’s an essential pass-through. It’s the place we move from, back to, and through on the way to our next best position. In pregnancy, this center shifts day to day. Without awareness and daily practice, proprioception—the body’s ability to sense its own position and movement—diminishes. No other time in life is more important for full body awareness than pregnancy.

I always prioritize breath combined with positional techniques when a client first comes to see me. I teach several of these and give them as homework to practice many times a day. Here are three essentials.

Three Essential Techniques for Daily Balance

1.  Send the Hips Back

This shift also brings weight into the heels and starts to activate the posterior chain—the hamstrings, glutes, and back line that pregnant clients desperately need and often can’t access when locked in a forward-hip, toe-gripping stance.

As pregnancy progresses, the tendency to push the hips forward only increases. Cultivating this awareness early may prevent a cascade of issues down the line.

This cue is so simple that clients easily remember it and catch themselves during the day—at the grocery store checkout, waiting to cross the street, or standing at the kitchen counter.

2.  Pelvic/Rib Rotation in Split Stance

You can do this on both sides, but every human is neurologically wired to be on their right side (even when standing on the left leg). Practicing this sequence as outlined below is the secret sauce in pregnancy for daily balancing of the pelvis and ribcage.

Setup:

• Hands on a counter, footbar of a high clinical Reformer, or sitting box on the Cadillac
  • Small split stance: left foot forward, right leg back (just the distance of a regular step)
  • Optional: Hold a Mikasa-sized ball (or smaller, like an orange Franklin ball) between the knees to maintain midline awareness
  • Back right heel can lift
  • Continue to feel weight in the left heel and a sense of the left big toe (this gives better hamstring and posterior chain connection). Try to maintain seventy percent of your weight throughout on the left leg and foot
  • Slight flat-back hip hinge with a decompressed lumbar spine, pressing into the counter with both hands

Breath Sequence (3–4 cycles):

• Inhale: Send breath into the left back body and right front chest wall
  • Exhale: Connect the left front ribs down and back (guided by the long exhale, not by shoving). Sense your transverse and internal obliques.

Add-On 1: Pelvic Rotation

• Rotate the pelvis slightly to the left
  • Hug the left inner thigh toward midline
  • The legs piston slightly with the rotation (left leg draws up, right leg lengthens down; both knees stay slightly bent)
  • Same breath sequence, 3–4 cycles

Add-On 2: Arm Swing with Counter-Rotation

• Keep the left hand on the counter, and pelvis rotated left
  • Push the left hand into the counter and swing the right arm behind you (this doesn’t have to be a big range of motion)
  • Sense your pelvis rotating left and your upper ribcage rotating right
  • Same breath sequence: Inhale into left back body and right front chest. Exhale and internally rotate left front ribs in and back; sense left upper inner thigh and weight into left heel.
  • At least 3–4 breath cycles

This creates internal rotation of the left leg, left abdominal wall integration, and eccentric length in the left glute—opening the back, bottom side of the pelvic floor on the left. All of this is essential as we go into labor.

To do the other side, reverse the cues.

3.  Wall Breathing

Most pregnant clients favor extension or outright live in it (even if they cover it up by shoving the hips forward and ribs back). The extension position looks like an alligator opening its mouth wide: the bottom of the ribcage in front swings up, and the top of the pelvis in front swings down.

We don’t want to shove parts back into what we deem neutral. Instead, we want to find avenues of awareness that help clients move from extension, through neutral, into flexion, and then into their next position. If we can help someone find seamless transitions between spinal, ribcage, and pelvic positions throughout the day, we’re doing life-changing work.

Why this matters:

The habitual constant extension position locks us up. We become less responsive and spontaneous in movement—something we definitely don’t want to encourage in pregnancy. It also causes issues that may linger long after delivery:

• Stretching and pain in the upper abdominals
• Compression of the lower back
• Heaviness in the pelvic floor
• SI joint pain
• Bladder issues
• Closing off the back of the pelvis and pelvic floor
• Constipation and hemorrhoids

We need tools to help clients release and spread the back body while creating the right amount of activation to internally rotate the front ribcage and tilt the pelvis under. A rounded position with a decompressed lumbar spine is one of the most difficult but most important shapes our pregnant clients can create.

How pelvic movement impacts the whole system:

Pelvic movement impacts how well the spine and ribs move, and vice versa. If we get the ribs and spine moving well in all directions, we improve pelvic mobility and tension patterns in the pelvic floor tissue. We create more comfort during pregnancy and more space in the pelvis for birth.

Using surfaces like a wall directs the client’s breath into the compressed back and side body, opening what’s been locked down.

What’s Next in This Series

In Part 2, we’ll dive into the cardinal movements of labor and how to prepare the pelvis for each stage of descent. We’ll explore specific positional work that mirrors what happens in the birth canal—so when labor starts, the body already knows what to do.

In Part 3, we’ll bring it all together: programming strategies, trimester-specific progressions, and how to integrate this work seamlessly into your prenatal sessions.

The Bigger Picture

Training pregnant clients for labor isn’t just about avoiding pain—it’s about giving them agency, preparedness, and the best possible shot at the birth they want. The work we do in the studio over nine months directly translates to how their body and brain respond in the delivery room.

If you want to go deeper into the biomechanics, breath strategies, cardinal movements of labor, and positional work that make this possible, my book A Movement Educator’s Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth and the new Training for Labor workshop on FusionPilatesEDU.com walk you through every stage in detail.

References

Postural Restoration Institute® (PRI) foundational concepts: Left AIC, Right BC, and PEC patterns. Drawn from PRI literature, course materials, and clinical texts.

Forte, R., De Vito, G., & Boreham, C. A. G. (2021). The role of asymmetry in the function and health of the musculoskeletal system: A review. Journal of Bodywork & Movement Therapies, 28, 136–151.

Gianni, J. (2023). A Movement Educator’s Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth. Singing Dragon. Ricci, S. S. (2020). Essentials of Maternity, Newborn, and Women’s Health Nursing. Wolters Kluwer.