In this online prenatal yoga tutorial, Lucy, the founder of Lucy Flo Pregnancy Yoga Studio, guides pregnant (and post‑natal) women through a gentle, mobility‑focused session designed to release tension in the upper body, shoulders, side torso, and spine. The class begins with options for comfortable seated positioning (on the mat, on knees, with cushions) and a brief breathing centering exercise to calm the mind. Lucy then leads a series of shoulder warm‑up movements, side‑body stretches that create extra space for a growing belly, and upper‑back/shoulder‑blade releases that are also useful for breastfeeding or bottle‑feeding posture. The session transitions to an all‑fours position where participants perform circular spinal motions to further mobilize the torso. Throughout, Lucy offers comfort‑focused modifications, cues for alignment (e.g., shoulders over wrists, knee width), and encouragement to move at one’s own pace. The tutorial emphasizes the benefits of prenatal yoga—maintaining mobility, reducing stress, improving sleep, and preparing the body for childbirth—while ensuring safety and comfort for a range of pregnancy stages.
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Hi, I'm Lucy, creator of Lucy Flo online Pregnancy Yoga Studio. I'm a yoga teacher specialising in pregnancy and childbirth preparation. And after years of teaching clients face to face, I've now put all of my class content and birth preparation videos online for women everywhere to access from the comfort of their own homes. The benefits of yoga during pregnancy are endless. From helping you to stay mobile and comfortable, maintaining your strength, improving your sleep, reducing stress and anxiety, and preparing your body for childbirth, I've put together a small tutorial for you today to help you stay mobile and release tension in the upper body, the spine, the shoulder blades, the shoulders and the side body. I hope you enjoy. Hi, everybody. So, let's get started. We're going to begin this tutorial. Either sat on your bottoms on a mat or just some floor space, or you can come and sit on your knees. If you're more comfortable with your knees together, that might be. If you've got any slight pelvic pain, then bring your knees together like this. You might just feel more comfortable here anyway. And if so, you can also use a cushion to sit on underneath your bottoms there, or a cushion underneath your bottoms here. So wherever you want to be is perfect as long as you're comfortable. So before we begin our movement, let's just check in with our breathing. We're going to take a few rounds of inhalations and exhalations. A really great way to centre yourselves and to unwind. So sitting comfortably wherever you've chosen to be, let's inhale through our noses and exhale through the nose. Do that two more times. Inhale, exhale. Last time, breathing in and breathing out. And let's just now start to think about shoulders. We're going to move our shoulders, our upper bodies and our side bodies today. This is a great way of creating more space in your torso. And when we're pregnant, we can often feel like we're running out of space and it can feel a bit uncomfortable. So today is going to work on that and lengthening your whole body. So we start with the shoulders, just to warm them up, squeezing out tension, letting go of anything that's kind of overwhelming us at the moment, making us feel tense. Use this shoulder movement to squeeze that away, keeping the breath smooth as you move. We're going to take both hands up to the ceiling now and we're going to lengthen out the top of the fingertips. Now really feel those arms being drawn upward, but your shoulders are staying down, away from the ears. And we're creating a lovely long Spine here, breathing into the chest, breathing out again. And taking your right hand, or whichever hand you prefer, to the mat or to the floor next to you, onto the fingertips and take your top hand over your side. Body over the body. Sorry. To open up this side, we're just going to enjoy a little stretch here. Try to turn your gaze up to the hand if you can, or at least allow your chest to. To open here rather than curling downwards like this. Keep it open, stretch and breathe. And then we're going to come back to the centre. Take that on the other side. So placing your hand down, the other arm coming up and then over to the side. So when you're pregnant and your bump is getting bigger, towards the end of your pregnancy especially, we can start to feel that we're running out of room and that our babies are getting progressively bigger, but we don't have any more space left in there. So doing side stretches like this can offer you some really lovely relief. Coming back to the centre now and lowering your hands to your knees. We're going to work on your shoulder blades and your upper back. This is great for pregnancy, but also if you are breastfeeding or bottle feeding, you're rounding your back all the time during your postnatal period. This is a great one to remember for helping your. To release in that time at that time as well. So taking both of your hands out to the side, stretch those fingertips and then taking your right arm on top of your left, seeing if you can reach your fingertips to touch and connect, or maybe even bringing your palms to touch like this. From here, you're going to lift the elbows ever so slightly. And then if you can, bring your chin towards the chest, you should be feeling here, a beautiful release in the upper back, offering you some time just to breathe away stress here and really loosen up this part of the body. And again, with bottle feeding or breastfeeding, we spend a lot of time rounding our upper back. So once you've had your baby, this is a great one to remember. Last deep breath here. And then unraveling the arms, taking them out to the side, taking that on the other side. Left arm coming over the right. Wrapping the hands, connecting either the fingers or if you can, finding palms to touch. Taking the elbows up and lowering chin to chest. Close the eyes here as well, just to really tune inward to see how this feels. And then gently unravel the arms, Give the arms a shake. Good. And we're going to move onto all fours, so make your way there in your own time. Carefully use your arms to assist you. There's no rush. And move to this position here. And we're going to make sure our shoulders are in line with your wrists so they're straight. We don't want them too far over the fingers here. And you're going to widen your knees a little bit. Again, if that doesn't feel comfortable for you, keep your knees closer together. Otherwise, widen those knees and then step your hands a little bit further in front, because we're going to begin to move in our beautiful circular motions here. So this is one of my favourite ways to stretch out the torso during pregnancy, mostly because it offers lots of chances to iron out the crease of the body and to find the areas that need a little bit of attention. So we're just going to do this a couple more times, making sure you've gone both directions, really use your hips, your spine, rolling in the body. And then when you're ready to just bring your knees gently underneath you to settle back. And hopefully, with just a few postures like that, you can already feel a little bit more mobility in your upper body, your shoulders, upper back and torso. Thank you for joining me. I hope you enjoyed.
