Maybe it hurts to roll over in bed. Or to stand on one leg while you pull on your jeans. Or to climb the stairs with the baby on your hip. If that sounds familiar, you might have pelvic girdle pain. That's pain around your pelvis, the ring of bones between your spine and your legs. It often starts in pregnancy, and for some mothers it carries on after birth.
A new trial from Japan looked at what helps. The answer wasn't a gadget. It was a few short sessions with someone watching how each mother moved.
How common is postpartum pelvic girdle pain?
More common than most people are told. A large review put many studies together. It found that about 45 out of every 100 pregnant women have pain in the pelvis, the low back, or both.2 After birth, it's about 25 out of every 100. Around half of them have pain mainly in the pelvis. Serious problems after pregnancy showed up in about 7 out of every 100 women.
So if this is happening to you, you're far from alone. And it doesn't mean your body has failed at anything.
What the 2026 trial tested
The trial followed 127 women across several hospitals and clinics in Japan. All of them had pelvic or low back pain from 28 weeks of pregnancy onward. Everyone got an exercise leaflet. Some also got three 30-minute sessions, face to face, with exercises picked for them and checked as they moved. The sessions came late in pregnancy, 5 days after birth, and 1 month after birth. One more group got the same sessions plus a pelvic belt.
At one month after birth, mothers who had the sessions said pain got in the way of daily life less than the leaflet-only group did.1 Their scores on the study's questionnaire were about 5 points better. And the belt? It didn't add anything clear on top of the sessions.
What the trial didn't show
By three months, the difference between groups was no longer clear. The numbers still leaned toward the sessions, but they were too spread out to be sure. Mothers also weren't placed in groups by chance. Their group depended on which clinic they went to, and that can skew results. And 107 of the 127 women finished. So this is a hopeful early sign, not a final answer.
There's something else worth saying plainly. Nobody fully knows why this pain happens. Researchers who compared how women with and without it move found some differences. But few of those differences showed up the same way from one study to the next.3
What this means for you
The word that stands out to us is individual. The leaflet gave everyone the same exercises. The sessions were fitted to each woman and watched as she moved. That matches what we see. Pain around the pelvis after birth is rarely about one muscle. It's about how the whole system works together, and that starts with the breath. How you breathe shapes how your ribs and pelvis sit. That shapes which muscles switch on when you lift the car seat.
We're coaches, not doctors or physiotherapists. Sharp pain, pain that keeps getting worse, or pain that stops you walking needs a clinical check first. We've written about why the six-week clearance was never the real timeline, and the same idea applies here. Recovery runs on your body's clock. If you'd like someone to watch how you move, our postpartum support coaching starts with how you breathe and move today.
- Oishi K et al., "Supervised, Individualised Exercise Across Pregnancy and Postpartum for Pregnancy-Related Lumbopelvic Pain: A Multicentre Pragmatic, Site-Allocated Cluster Trial," BJOG (2026). Read the study ↩
- Wu WH et al., "Pregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain (PPP), I: Terminology, clinical presentation, and prevalence," European Spine Journal (2004). Read the study ↩
- Desgagnés A et al., "Motor control of the spine in pregnancy-related lumbopelvic pain: A systematic review," Clinical Biomechanics (2022). Read the study ↩
