Effect of physioball selected exercise on low back pain, lumbar lordosis, strength and flexibility in pregnant women

Back pain during pregnancy is a common condition which is often considered as an unavoidable problem. Exercise is one of the methods to reduce it and increase physical strength and flexibility. Physiobal is also one of the exercises; therefore, this study was performed with aim to evaluate the effect of one course of physioball selected exercise on low back pain, lordosis and performance (power and flexible) of lumbar-sacral region in pregnant women.
This quasi-experimental study and applicable in terms of goal was performed on 18 healthy pregnant women (in 5-8 months of pregnancy) with age range of 20-35 years and certain degree of back pain referred to the gynecology clinic of Mashhad Omol-Banin (sa) hospital in 2015. Variables were back pain, lordosis, lumbar muscle strength and flexibility. Physioball exercise lasted for 21 sessions, 3 days a week, 60 minutes each session which included 5 to 10 minutes of warm-up and then one ball was allocated to each participant and physioball exercise was performed. The severity of exercises increased based on the principle of overload and individual abilities of pregnant women. Data were analyzed using SPSS software (version 19) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Levan, repeated measure analysis of variance and covariance analysis test. p
According to the findings of this study, physioball exercises reduced back pain in pregnant women (p=0.020), also strength significantly increased (p=0.000), but had no effect on the amount of lordosis (p=0.072) and lateral flexibility (p=0.11).
The physioball selected exercises during pregnancy can be an effective method to increase the strength of lumbar-sacral muscles and reduce back pain in pregnant women. But it cannot affect the amount of lordosis because as pregnancy progresses, it leads to more weight gain and weight gain seems to be the main cause of lordosis. Also, physioball exercise has no flexible significant effect on lateral flexibility of lumbar-sacral muscles.