exercise | Parenting In the Loop

Exercises during Pregnancy

During pregnancy exercise remains important. Although your labor progression cannot be predicted it is known that a few exercises can help you prepare your body.

There are four specific exercises during pregnancy that exceptionally good.

Kegels
Pelvic Tilt
Squat
Tailor or Cobbler Pose

Remember to start slowly and work at your own level for each exercise.

Kegels

These simple exercises are small internal contractions of the pelvic floor muscles. The muscles in the pelvic are support the urethra, bladder, uterus and rectum. These exercises can also help to keep hemorrhoids from inflammation. It may even speed healing after a vaginal delivery. It may even shorten the pushing stage of your labor.

Tighten the muscles around your vagina as if trying to interrupt the flow of urine when going to the bathroom.

Hold for a count of four, then release. Repeat ten times. Try to work up to three or four sets about three times a day.

Pelvic tilt or angry cat

This is a one of the great exercises during pregnancy to strengthen your abdominal muscles and can ease back pain during pregnancy and labor.

Get down on your hands and knees, arms shoulder-width apart and knees hip-width apart, keeping your arms straight but not locking the elbows.
As you breathe in, tighten your abdominal muscles and tuck your buttocks under and round your back.
Relax your back into a neutral position as you breathe out.
Repeat at your own pace, following the rhythm of your breath.

Squat

Squatting is an exercise long known for helping to prepare for labor and delivery. It helps to strengthen you thighs and open your pelvis.

Stand facing the back of a chair with your feet slightly more than hip-width apart, toes pointed outward. Hold the back of the chair for support.
Contract your abdominal muscles, lift your chest, and relax your shoulders. Then lower your tailbone toward the floor as though you were sitting down on a chair. Find your balance — most of your weight should be toward your heels.
Take a deep breath in and then exhale, pushing into your legs to rise to a standing position.

Tailor or Cobbler Pose

This exercise can also help to open you pelvis and loosen your hip joints in preparation for childbirth. It helps with posture and easing lower back pain.

Sit up straight against a wall with the soles of your feet touching each other (sit on a folded towel if that’s more comfortable for you).

Gently press your knees down and away from each other, but don’t force them.
Stay in this position for as long as you’re comfortable.

Exercises during pregnancy can help you feel better not only during your pregnancy, but during labor and delivery and postpartum.

If it okay with your doctor or caregiver do exercise you should give these a try.

Source: Four exercises to ease aches and help with labor | BabyCenter

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.