NOTEWORTHY WEDNESDAY!

“Now, new research suggests that the bond may be stronger than had been suspected. When you exercise during pregnancy, your baby is not, as most of us would have thought, a passive, floating passenger and ballast on the bladder. Instead, he or she may be actively joining in the workout, with the fetal cardiac system growing stronger and healthier as a result of the workouts.”

This is such important information…when a pregnant woman exercises it is beneficial to her fetus. Although this seems to be something that we should just assume to be true when it comes to health it needs to be proven. Now it is!

“Unborn children, as it turned out, did exhibit a training response, even though their mothers were seemingly doing all of the work. When Dr. May examined the fetal cardiac readings, in an earlier report published last year, she found that fetuses whose mothers had exercised showed lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability than those whose mothers had not worked out.”

So there should be no excuses for us not to exercise when we are pregnant. If we want to be healthy and we want our fetus to be healthy then exercise should be included in prenatal care just like healthy eating and going to prenatal check-ups.

The exercise that we do during pregnancy seems to have healthy effects that last and are detectable in the newborn.

“The babies born to exercising mothers continued to have lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability four weeks after delivery than the babies born to the other women. The effect was especially robust in the children whose mothers had exercised the most, Dr. May said; they had the slowest heart rates and presumably the strongest hearts.”

There is no excuse…we must find time to exercise when pregnant for the health of the fetus and the newborn.

The jury is still out as to whether these healthy findings will continue into toddlerhood and thereafter.

via Phys Ed: Pregnancy, Exercise and Heart Health – NYTimes.com.