Chapter 1

Recognizing the Benefits of a Fit Pregnancy

IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing what a fit pregnancy is all about

Handling physical changes throughout the next nine months

Making labor a lot easier

Giving your baby a great start

Looking forward to life after pregnancy

Congratulations on your pregnancy! With a healthy lifestyle and good advice from your healthcare provider, you’re going to deliver a healthy, happy baby in a few months.

One of the most significant benefits of a fit pregnancy is that you gain less fat than nonexercisers do during their pregnancies. And for the weight you do gain (keeping in mind that weight gain during pregnancy is healthy and absolutely necessary), if you’re a fit woman, you’ll have an easier time shedding your weight after you deliver.

If you’re tempted to think of these 40 weeks as a time to throw caution to the wind and eat whatever you want, you’ll probably gain far more weight than you need to and will have a difficult time getting back to your pre-pregnancy size. To stay fit during your pregnancy, you have to approach your pregnancy with a different mindset: not throwing caution to the wind but using common sense in every decision. You do so by incorporating healthy eating habits and burning additional calories as you work out. (Book 3, Chapters 1 and 2 cover how many extra calories you need during your pregnancy, how many more calories you can eat without gaining more weight than your doctor recommends, and your nutritional needs to support you and your baby during your pregnancy.)

Besides helping you manage your weight, a fit pregnancy brings other incredible benefits, from making your pregnancy more comfortable to improving your mood to helping your body get back to normal after you deliver. Even your baby benefits from your workouts. This chapter is chock-full of the benefits of a fit pregnancy that you and your baby can enjoy.

Much of the current research on the benefits of fitness during pregnancy comes from fitness pregnancy guru James F. Clapp III, MD, who has been researching the effects of exercise on women and their babies since the 1970s. His research and writing has shown the world how beneficial fitness during pregnancy is to moms and babies alike. His groundbreaking book, Exercising Through Your Pregnancy (Addicus Books), coauthored by Catherine Cram, MS, was updated in 2012.

What Does “Fit Pregnancy” Mean?

In a nutshell, a fit pregnancy means that during the nine months between the time you conceive and the time you go into labor, you’re doing the following:

• You’re setting yourself up for an easier labor and delivery. This is what you’ve been waiting to hear, isn’t it? Women who exercise during pregnancy deliver their babies about five days earlier, spend less time in labor, experience fewer complications during labor and delivery, have fewer inductions and cesarean deliveries, and need fewer drugs to relieve pain than women who don’t exercise.
• You’re establishing cardiovascular fitness. Getting fit while you’re pregnant means that your heart and lungs (your cardiovascular system) get stronger, healthier, and more efficient. This means that not only will you be a mother, but you’ll also likely live to be a great-great-grandmother!
• You’re developing strength. You tone your arms, chest, abdomen, butt, hips, and legs. You may never look like a bodybuilder (and probably don’t want to), but you can make yourself strong. This strength comes in handy with all the bending and lifting you’ll be doing in a few months.
• You’re improving your flexibility. By stretching after your workout and on your days off, you’ll become far more flexible, which means you’ll experience fewer injuries and be far less limited in what your body can do throughout the rest of your life.
• You’re balancing exercise with proper nutrition. Exercise and nutrition go hand in hand; the food you eat fuels your body (doing so either efficiently or inefficiently), and the exercise you do changes the amount of food you need to eat to maintain your weight. This is why you see articles about food in workout magazines and articles about workouts in health-food magazines. The two are inseparably linked. Book 3 tells you what you need to know about nutrition during pregnancy.

Being fit during pregnancy doesn’t mean training for a triathlon or getting certified as a fitness instructor (although if those ideas become future goals of yours, that’s terrific). And you don’t have to start eating macrobiotic food or anything like that. Instead, a fit pregnancy is about normal people taking seriously the advice of physicians and researchers to get in shape and stay that way.

Coping with the Changes Your Body Is Experiencing

Your body undergoes dramatic changes during pregnancy, and these physical changes can make women downright uncomfortable for much of the 40-week duration. These changes range from how your heart and lungs operate to how you process the food you eat to how your muscles and joints change (Book 1, Chapter 4 covers these changes). One of the best ways to alleviate the discomfort of many of the changes your body is experiencing is to exercise. That’s right: If you exercise during pregnancy, you’ll spend nine months being far more comfortable than you’d be if you didn’t exercise.

Easing back pain and soreness

As your abdomen increases in size and you gain the weight required to have a healthy baby, you’ll likely see a shift in your posture (either a greater curve in the low back or a hunched-over appearance in the shoulders). You may also experience some low-back pain as the curvature of your lower spine changes with the added weight of your baby and body fluids.

During pregnancy, your growing baby changes your center of gravity, and muscles in your legs, hips, butt, back, and shoulders either lengthen or shorten because of this shift. Without exercise, these muscle changes can lead to poor posture, which in turn leads to back pain, stiffness, and soreness.

Exercising during pregnancy, however, helps get those muscles back into balance and improves your posture. And many types of exercise specifically strengthen your back and abdominal muscles, helping you get rid of low-back pain.

WEATHERING GESTATIONAL DIABETES

Gestational diabetes, a form of diabetes that appears during pregnancy and may increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes later in life, often leads to delivering a very large baby and increasing the risk of complications during labor and delivery. But here’s the good news: Research shows that pregnant women experiencing gestational diabetes who exercise just three times per week lower their blood sugar.

Fine-tuning your circulatory system

Exercising during pregnancy increases the volume of blood your heart pumps with each beat, increasing the amount of oxygen and nutrients delivered to your baby. This increase in cardiovascular fitness also provides a safety margin for you and your baby by enabling your cardiovascular system to pump out adequate blood flow during times of physical stress.

The increased cardiovascular functioning helps you weather the physical challenges of pregnancy better and with less fatigue.

Helping you sleep better and giving you more energy

During pregnancy, many women tend not to sleep well at night and experience extreme fatigue during the day. Exercise, however, can lick these problems, making you sleep more soundly at night and feel refreshed throughout the day. It’s true! If you lie awake at night or sleep fitfully, set up a regular fitness routine; you’ll find yourself dozing faster and more soundly as your body recovers from the paces you’re putting it through.

Essentially, exercise creates a system in which you’re very alert throughout most of the day and then you crash at night, sleeping like a log. As long as you exercise in the morning, afternoon, or early evening, you should feel sleepy at your bedtime. However, because exercise makes you alert, if you work out three or fewer hours before your bedtime, you’ll throw off your body clock and be alert at night and dead tired throughout the next day.

Developing muscle tone and flexibility

Exercise at any point in your life builds muscle tone, and if you stretch regularly, you’ll also improve your flexibility.

If you currently watch your flabby arms wiggle when you brush your teeth, tend to hide your legs under sweat pants, and could barely touch your toes even when you weren’t pregnant, exercise can change your life. Imagine being able to lift heavy objects without help and without hurting your back, wear sleeveless shirts and short shorts with pride, and snake yourself under couches and dressers to retrieve lost toys. A whole new world is waiting for you if you just add exercise to your daily routine.

The best news, though, is that you’re not only improving your appearance but also getting your body ready for some difficult tasks ahead: labor, delivery, and motherhood.

Controlling weight gain

During pregnancy, you need to gain weight regularly so that your baby grows properly and is well-nourished. (Book 3, Chapter 1 tells you how much weight most women gain and in which areas of the body.) Exercising while pregnant helps you gain a healthy amount of weight that tends to come off fairly easily after you deliver.

A study by Dr. Clapp showed that women who regularly exercised to the end of their pregnancies gained nearly 8 pounds less than nonexercising pregnant women, yet they were still well within the normal weight gain limits for a healthy pregnancy.

GETTING INTO A GREAT MOOD

Have you heard of distance runners getting high on endorphins? That’s not an illegal substance they’re taking; rather, endorphins are natural, pain-relieving chemicals that the brain releases during physical activity, not just during distance runs. Get on the exercise bandwagon, and you, too, can experience a daily dose of free, safe, mood-enhancing drugs sent throughout your body by your brain. You’ll feel relaxed and calm instead of tense and stressed.

Exercise also helps you work through whatever’s bothering you. Many women find that by using their 20- to 60-minute workouts to sort out the problems of the day, they tend to be less upset over minor frustrations.

Preparing Your Body for Labor and Delivery

Anyone who tells you that childbirth is a breeze isn’t being very honest with you. Childbirth is hard, and you don’t want to approach it without being physically ready. One of the best ways to get yourself ready is by exercising during your pregnancy.

Having a less complicated delivery

Several research studies have shown that women who exercise have fewer complications during delivery, including instances of fetal intervention because of abnormal fetal heart rates, forceps deliveries (in which a large tong-like tool helps the baby come out), and cesarean deliveries (in which the baby is surgically removed from the uterus). Women who exercise during pregnancy also tend to need fewer drugs for pain relief.

Spending less time in labor

According to a study by Dr. Clapp, labor is significantly shorter (by about one-third) for women who exercise regularly during pregnancy than for a control group made up of physically active women who didn’t continue exercising during pregnancy.

Also, babies of women who exercise regularly throughout pregnancy are born about five days earlier than those of women who don’t exercise, making pregnancy that much shorter (and five days is a really big deal when you’re in your third trimester).

Passing the Benefits to Your Baby

You’re not the only one who benefits from your fit pregnancy — your baby gets in on the action, too! Women who exercise during pregnancy see the following benefits in their babies.

A better-functioning placenta

Okay, so your baby may not thank you for producing a better-functioning placenta the way he would thank you for, say, a car when he turns 16, but a better-functioning placenta is actually better for your baby than any hot rod will ever be!

The placenta is an organ that develops inside your uterus during your pregnancy. Throughout your pregnancy, the placenta transports nutrients, oxygen, and waste products between your baby’s and your blood supply via his umbilical cord. The better the blood flow to and from the placenta, the healthier the baby. A study by Dr. Clapp showed that regular exercise during pregnancy leads to a placenta that grows about 30 percent faster in mid-pregnancy and has about 15 percent more blood vessels and surface area at the end of pregnancy. This effect on the placenta may have an added benefit of providing a safety margin for the fetus in times of stress-caused decreases in uterine blood flow.

A leaner child

Dr. Clapp discovered that when women exercise regularly (three to five times per week) during pregnancy, their babies are born with less fat. And though babies of exercisers are leaner, they’re not born with low birth weight; in fact, they’re well within normal limits — the same size range as babies born to mothers who didn’t exercise, in terms of weight, limb lengths, and head and chest circumferences. They’re just leaner.

And this leanness continues. Dr. Clapp’s studies showed that by age 5, children of women who exercised while pregnant are generally still leaner than children born to women who didn’t exercise during pregnancy. What a great way to help your baby start life as a healthy person!

Bouncing Back after Your Baby Is Born

Studies show that women who exercise during pregnancy have a much easier time returning to their pre-pregnancy weight and size than women who don’t exercise while pregnant. In addition, having a fit pregnancy also gets you up and around faster after you deliver and helps you not crumple while carrying your ever-growing baby in your arms.

Recovering quickly

Babies don’t give you much time to recover from your pregnancy. They have needs, and they want those needs met now! In order to do a bang-up job as a new mother, you need to be up and out of bed as quickly as possible, and exercising through your pregnancy is just the way to do that. Not only do women who exercise throughout pregnancy have shorter labors and deliveries, but they also get back to their lives faster than women who haven’t exercised.

Getting back to your pre-pregnancy weight

Exercising during pregnancy helps you keep the amount of weight you gain at a healthy level. Research also shows that women who become or stay fit during pregnancy have less weight to lose after they deliver, and those women find that the weight they do gain comes off more easily and quickly than it does for their nonexercising counterparts. And given that an inability to lose weight is one of the top two complaints of new mothers (the other is lack of sleep), this is welcome news.

Carrying your baby

Have you ever lifted a 10-pound sack of potatoes off the display at the supermarket and barely been able to carry it over to your cart? Your baby’s going to weigh almost as much as that sack of potatoes at birth and will quickly exceed that weight as he grows. Exercising now gives you time to strengthen your arms, back, hips, and legs so you can lug Junior around with ease.