Wellness Wednesday - Exercise and pregnancy - Week 2

Can you exercise while you're pregnant? Of course you can, and you should. Obviously there are a few things you need to take into account, and be aware of. After all, it's not just your health you have to look out for now. You have someone else on board who is pretty vulnerable and totally reliant on you.

Pregnancy is not a disease. It's something women have been doing for centuries, very well obviously, because our population is expanding faster than the earth can keep up with! Over the centuries, things have changed. Death during childbirth was far more common in the 19th century than it is now and a big part of that had to do with something as simple as washing hands. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a hungarian physician who discovered that having clean hands led to more babies surviving. In fact, the infant mortality rate dropped from 35% to below 1%!

These days, I wonder if doctors haven't maybe taken things a bit too far. They have women convinced that the only way to give birth is in a hospital. Hospitals immediately make you think of illness which attaches a very bad connotation to the whole birth thing. Doctors also tell women that they should be taking it easy during their pregnancy. Not only is that theory outdated, but it's dangerous. In last week's post I spoke in more detail about this.

As I said, you SHOULD be exercising, there are just a few things you need to watch out for, and they aren't complicated. As I said last week, heart rate is something to consider, but certainly not the be-all and end-all. Read last week's post to find out why. The most important thing to keep an eye on is actually the body's core temperature. It's the same reason that they tell women not to have hot baths. An increase in the core body temperature of a pregnant woman can affect the fetus, especially during the first trimester. When you're pregnant, your core body temperature rises because you have around 40% more blood pumping around your body to cope with the needs of your unborn baby. Your heart also gets slightly bigger and moves to one side because your uterus expands over the months, so your body has to work harder to keep you cool. It's far more essential to keep an eye on how much you're sweating and whether or not your face is getting red, than it is to watch your heart rate.

This doesn't mean you need to carry a thermometer around with you;) Just take some precautions. You should be exercising in a well ventilated room, even better if it's air conditioned. You should be wearing light, non-restrictive clothing and you should be well hydrated. Keep a bottle of ice cold water on hand. If you have got all of this covered and you are still feeling hot, that means you are exercising too hard and you need to tone it down. That should be your biggest concern when exercising while pregnant, NOT your heart rate.

If you are a regular exerciser then it's absolutely fine to continue exercising and doing what you were doing before. What you do need to do is tone it down slightly and that's mostly because you want to keep your body temperature down. You also want to keep any stretching to a minimum. The reason for this is that pregnant women's bodies release a hormone called Relaxin. The purpose of Relaxin is to loosen your ligaments in preparation for pregnancy. The only thing is, Relaxin makes ALL your ligaments relax and, if you stretch too much, you could cause permanent damage to those ligaments. Doing yoga is still ok but limit your stretches and be sure to tell your instructor that you are pregnant. It's important that you don't stretch past your normal range of motion.

Something else to consider, after the first trimester, is that you should avoid lying flat on your back. The uterus could potentially compress the vena cava, which may result in a reduced blood flow, leaving you dizzy or nauseated. There are other exercises you can do in place of ab crunches or bench pressing. Your trainer should be able to give you alternatives. It's better to avoid sit ups and crunches during pregnancy anyway to avoid developing a condition called diastasus recti. A diastasis recti is a separation of your outer most abdominal muscles and it can be a real problem because the job of those muscles is to support your lower back and organs. A lot of women suffer from this and never recover which means they always have very weak cores. This will lead to back problems among other issues as well as the fact that your second pregnancy will be far more difficult.

As I said earlier, you want to tone down your training if you are pregnant. You don't want to lose weight during pregnancy, you want to maintain a weight that is healthy. A common misconception is that women think they need to literally double the amount of food they are eating. You are NOT, in fact, eating for two. You only need increase the amount of calories you eat per day by 300. That's roughly the equivalent of a large potato with a bit of butter. Keep those extra calories healthy. Remember that, what you eat, your baby will eat. Give them a good headstart for a healthy lifestyle. You WILL gain weight while pregnant. That's a given. But you shouldn't be gaining loads of body fat.

That's it for this week. Next week we will discuss WHY exercising is so vital to yours and your baby's health. Meanwhile, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to comment below!