Pregnancy shifts your centre of gravity, changes how you breathe and asks your rib cage and pelvis to adapt to support a growing baby. Those changes are completely normal but they can affect how load and pressure travel through your body well after you’ve given birth.

If rib mobility is still limited, or you lack pelvic control, the low back often ends up doing the stabilising work that the hips, trunk and core should be sharing. Often that looks like weak glutes leaving the low back to cover hip extension, or a deep core system that isn’t managing pressure well, leaving the low back bracing to pick up the difference.

Add in the daily demands of bending, lifting, carrying and baby wearing, and it’s no wonder the low back can end up tight, fatigued or just uncomfortable.

Why stretching alone won’t fix it

It’s tempting to treat a tight low back like a flexibility problem; stretch it out, foam roll it, move on. But that tension is protective, not a tissue-length issue.

That means the tight feeling and the weak feeling aren’t separate issues. They’re the same issue. A muscle that’s bracing all day isn’t the same as a muscle that’s strong, it’s stuck “on,” holding things together, but it hasn’t built the capacity to actually produce force when you need it to.

Building resilience means giving your body better movement options and more strength, so the glutes, hips and core can share the load again  and the low back can finally stop compensating.

Why you need mobility

Mobility work isn’t about loosening the low back, instead the goal is restoring range in the joints that are actually supposed to move: the ribs, thoracic spine, hips and pelvis. When those areas can access their full range, the low back doesn’t have to borrow movement it wasn’t built to provide.

But range on its own isn’t useful. The goal isn’t just to touch a new position, it’s to be able to move into and out of it under normal daily load. That’s why the mobility work in this post is active rather than passive — a hip shift, a rotation, a reach — so your nervous system learns the new range is safe to use, not just possible to reach.

Why you need core strength

Once you have range, you need a system that can control it, otherwise the compensation just shows up somewhere else. Core strength here means the deep system — diaphragm, transverse abdominis, pelvic floor, multifidus — managing pressure and holding position while the rest of the body moves.

This is what lets the ribs and pelvis move freely without collapsing into a compensatory pattern, and it’s what stops the low back from needing to brace as a backup stabiliser. Training anti-extension, anti-rotation and anti-lateral flexion builds control in every plane the low back gets asked to resist day to day.

Why you need strength

Mobility and core control set the stage, but resilience comes from strength, training the hips, glutes and posterior chain to actually produce force through the ranges you’ve built. Skip this step, and you’ve built range and control that only ever gets used at low intensity; the moment you bend, lift or carry under real load, the body defaults back to the old compensation pattern, because that’s what it’s strong at.

Loaded hip hinges and hip extension work teach the body to send force through the hips instead of the spine, so the new pattern holds up under the demands that caused the problem in the first place like bending, lifting, carrying, baby wearing.

Mobility gives you the range. Core strength gives you control within it. Strength makes it durable under real load. All three together build a low back that doesn’t need to compensate.

The approach: mobility → strength

The exercises below are grouped in the order you’d actually use them in a session: a breathing reset to access better rib and pelvic positioning, mobility work to restore range through the hips and spine, core drills to control that new range under load, and strength work to put it all together.

You don’t need to do all nine every session, choosing 2–3 to sprinkle into your regular training is enough to build the pattern over time.

Breathing

Deep squat rib smash (rack supported) Hold onto a rack and sink into a deep squat, reach and lengthening through the back body. This opens the back of the rib cage and low back while your lower body stays integrated, and gives you a breathing reset before the rest of the session. The ball helps block on your inhale coming to the front, which is a key piece to encouraging posterior expansion and better access to breath through the low back.

Mobility

Scorpion Lying face down, rotate one hip and reach the opposite foot across your body. This combines rotation and extension through the spine and hips together, restoring range you don’t get from static stretching.

90/90 hip shift In a supine 90/90 position, place a block or foam roller between your knees and lift your tailbone off the ground. Shift your hips side to side while maintaining a slight hip lift. This helps open up the back side of the hips, improves internal rotation as well as pelvic positioning and decompression of the low back.

Quadruped banded thoracic rotation In quadruped with a band anchored, rotate through your upper back while keeping your hips still. Better rotation through the upper back avoids any low back compensation.

Core

Deadbug cross connect Push your arm into the opposite leg while keeping your ribs down stacked over your hips, low back gently in the ground. As you hold this position, extend the free leg. This builds anti-extension core control, so your spine isn’t the first thing to give when you’re under load.

Dynamic side plank Add a hip dip or reach to your side plank. This lengthens and strengthens the lateral line and obliques for side-to-side .

90/90 trunk rotation with arm bar From tabletop, drop your knees side to side while holding an arm bar overhead. This challenges rotational control through the hips and pelvis while keeping the rib cage stable.

Strength

RDL (barbell) Although this is primarily a glutes and hamstring focused exercise, it strengthens the low back and entire posterior chain. Because you’re holding a braced, hinged position under load, your low back develops isometric strength. Heavy compound lifts like this require solid abdominal bracing and pressure management to manage the lift, too.

Reverse hyper Let your legs hang and swing from the hips. This strengthens hip extension and the posterior chain while gently decompressing the spine, rather than loading it further and ideal if something like a back extension triggers discomfort.

Putting it together

Pick one from breathing, one or two from mobility, one or two from core, and one from strength to build and add to your session or week.

If you only have time for one category, prioritise strength. Mobility and core work create the conditions for change, but it’s strength — training the glutes and posterior chain to actually produce force — that gets a low back out of guarding mode for good. A tight, tense low back needs to feel supported before it can let go, and that support comes from capacity, not flexibility. Consistency with a small dose of each category, weighted toward strength, will do more for a tight, fatigued low back than any amount of stretching alone.

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