Nobody Warns New Moms About the Back Pain That Comes After the Baby

I wrote previously about chiropractic care during pregnancy and the Webster Technique, but there’s a whole chapter after delivery that almost nobody talks about, and it drives me a little crazy how little attention it gets. The pregnancy ends. The appointments taper off. And the body that spent nine months adapting to carry a baby is now expected to just… bounce back, while also doing an entirely new set of physically demanding tasks it’s never done before.

Nursing or bottle-feeding for twenty minutes at a time, several times a day, hunched forward and looking down. Carrying a car seat that, with the baby in it, can weigh twenty-five or thirty pounds, usually on one hip, usually while also managing a diaper bag. Bending over a crib with the rail at an awkward height. Lifting a baby in and out of the back seat of a car dozens of times a week. None of these individually seem like much. Added up over months, they are a lot.

On top of that, the ligaments that loosened during pregnancy to allow for delivery — thanks to a hormone called relaxin — don’t just snap back to their pre-pregnancy tightness the day after birth. That process takes months, sometimes longer, especially if you’re breastfeeding. Which means the pelvis and lower back are more vulnerable during exactly the period when new parents are doing the most repetitive lifting and carrying of their lives.

I’ve had patients come in three, six, even nine months postpartum convinced that their back pain must be unrelated to the pregnancy because “it’s been so long already.” It’s almost always related. The joints never got properly reassessed and realigned after everything shifted to make room for delivery, and then daily life as a new parent just kept loading those same misaligned areas.

My honest take, having worked with a lot of moms in this stage: the six-week postpartum checkup with your OB is important, but it’s not really designed to catch musculoskeletal issues — it’s checking on healing, not on whether your pelvis and spine have actually returned to good alignment and are moving the way they should. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of unresolved pain lives.

What I look for with postpartum patients is pelvic alignment, SI joint function, and how the whole spine is compensating for months of forward-hunched feeding positions and one-sided carrying. The adjustments themselves are gentle — nothing aggressive, and I take into account whether you’re still nursing and what your energy and sleep actually look like right now, because I’m not going to pretend you’re operating under normal conditions. Sometimes I’ll bring in craniosacral work too, especially for moms who are also dealing with the tension headaches and jaw clenching that seem to show up out of nowhere in that first year. You can read more about that approach on my Craniosacral Therapy page.

If you’re a Pleasanton parent somewhere in that first year postpartum and you’ve just been living with back or hip pain because it seems like a normal cost of having a baby — it’s common, but it’s not something you have to just accept. It’s worth getting checked.