For beginners: Finding a fitness activity you enjoy and getting into a fitness routine
For experienced athletes: Seeing how pregnancy changes your workouts
Searching for exercises that complement your existing regimen
Getting back to your current workouts after you deliver
Never exercised before? No problem! Just because you may have hated gym class and didn’t play sports when you were in school doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be fitness-challenged during your pregnancy. This chapter helps you find a fitness routine that fits your interests, lifestyle, and goals.
If you’ve been an athlete — competitive or not — you probably find yourself in a quandary: Can you maintain your current level of fitness and activity while simultaneously doing everything in your power to protect your growing baby? The good news for you is that although your workouts need to change somewhat during your pregnancy (information you’ll find in this chapter), you can continue to be active and maintain much of your fitness. And after you deliver a healthy baby, you can gradually ease back into your old routine and regain any lost fitness in just a few months — head to Book 4, Chapter 5 for that info.
For the Novice Exerciser
Your options for working out are nearly endless, which means that you can find fun ways to work out. The key is to choose an activity — or activities (who says you have to choose only one?) — that suits your personality and gives you a great workout.
Homing in on your favorite activities
Liking the activity you’re doing helps you stick to a workout routine. The problem is, if you’ve never exercised, you may not know what activities you do and don’t enjoy. Here are some questions and advice that can help you narrow down your list of potential workout activities:
Do you like being outdoors? If so, walking is your best bet, and fitness walking is a great workout. If you aren’t ready to walk briskly for 15 minutes, try a combination fitness walk/leisurely walk, in which you walk powerfully until you feel fatigued and then begin walking slowly until you’re ready to speed up again. Just be sure to avoid exercising outdoors when heat and humidity increase the possibility of heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
Do you dislike being outside in extreme weather? Swimming, Zumba, yoga, indoor cycling, and any number of indoor exercises (stair-stepping, elliptical training, or rowing on indoor fitness machines) keep you out of the cold. If you opt for stair-stepping, be sure you’re using a step machine (such as a StairMaster) rather than participating in a high-intensity step-aerobics or CrossFit class, which may be too intense during pregnancy if you’ve never exercised before.
Did you like riding a bike as a kid? Chances are you’ll still like cycling now. Choose low-traffic areas that don’t make you breathe exhaust, which can be bad for you and your baby. Remember, though, that pregnancy plays with your balance. If you’re not an adept cyclist, stick to indoor cycling on a stationary or recumbent bike.
Did you like swimming as a child? People who love water tend to always love it, so take up swimming or water aerobics. Swimming, considered one of the safest activities in which you can participate, is also a whole-body workout that tones your arms and legs.
Do you want to work out with others or alone? If you want to be around people, consider joining a gym or enrolling in a prenatal yoga class, low-impact aerobics class, or water-aerobics class. If you prefer to work out alone, you can do nearly any activity; just be sure to keep your phone with you at all times.
Are you looking for an activity that will calm you? Yoga, swimming, and walking are activities that give you quiet time to meditate. Yoga and Pilates are excellent ways to move and breathe slowly and gently while still strengthening muscles, so they’re recommended during pregnancy. Some yoga and Pilates routines, however, don’t elevate your heart rate enough to strengthen the heart muscle, improve your breathing, and burn calories. Consider alternating yoga or Pilates one day with another activity the next.
Remember that pregnant women should avoid hot exercise environments, so hot yoga (Bikram) or any classroom that isn’t cool and well-ventilated is not recommended.
To get the benefit of exercise, you want to keep moving at a brisk pace for a minimum of 15 minutes, which means that activities that don’t elevate your heart rate, that allow for plenty of rest, and that offer options to ride or sit instead of walk aren’t going to get you very fit. A workout during pregnancy is any activity that takes your Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) to 12 to 14, which is considered “moderate” to “somewhat hard.” (See Book 4, Chapter 2 for the lowdown.)
You’ve heard it before: Check with your healthcare provider before beginning any exercise activity. Also check out Book 4, Chapter 2 for more safety precautions.
Exercise basics: Warming up, cooling down, stretching, and hydrating
Every workout routine — no matter what activity you decide to pursue — must include four important elements: warming up, cooling down, stretching, and hydrating yourself (drinking fluids). This section gives you a brief overview of these exercise basics.
Warming up: Every time you exercise, you want to ease into your workout, starting off gradually and giving your body time to warm up. This means that you ease into your workout, starting out more slowly than you intend to go during the bulk of your workout. The amount of time you take to warm up depends on how fast your body adjusts to physical activity, but for most people, five or ten minutes is plenty.
Many people like to stretch before exercising, but this introduces the possibility of getting injured. Stretching can be as challenging to your body as the rest of your workout routine, so if you stretch cold muscles (muscles that have been resting), you’re essentially working out without a warm-up. Instead of trying to warm up with a stretch, do your stretches after you finish your workout.
Cooling down as you finish: As you near the end of your workout routine, gradually downshift to your warm-up pace again. This helps ease your body from the intensity of your workout and avoids stopping suddenly, which can cause muscles to tear.
Never end your workout with a big, ferocious finish and then stop — your muscles just can’t downshift quickly enough, and a quick stop can also make you feel lightheaded or dizzy.
If you work out for 15 minutes, the majority of your workout is spent warming up and cooling down. As you increase the length of each workout, keep your warm-up and cool-down periods the same, thus increasing the amount of time that you maintain your workout pace.
Stretching afterward: Right after you finish your workout — and before you sit down, take a shower, or relax in any other way — you need to stretch. Stretching today keeps you from getting sore tomorrow.
Drinking plenty of fluids: After you stretch, take time to hydrate your body. Drink at least 16 ounces (2 cups) and up to 32 ounces (4 cups) of fluids within 30 minutes of completing your workout, and drink a total of 64 ounces (8 cups) throughout the day.
Avoiding injuries
In general, injuries are caused by the following situations, so avoid them in your own training:
Doing too much, too soon: Getting fit takes time, and you need to build up the length and intensity of your workouts very, very gradually. From week to week, never increase the average duration of your workouts more than 5 minutes: The first week, your average may be 15 minutes per workout; the second week, the average should be no more than 20 minutes; the third week, 25 minutes; and so on. And increasing even less than that is perfectly acceptable.
Not stretching after a workout: Without stretching, your muscles, ligaments, and tendons tighten up, becoming more prone to tears and sprains.
Wearing worn-out shoes: Replace your athletic shoes about every six months, even if they don’t look worn out. If you don’t replace your shoes twice per year (or more often), you risk joint pain in your knees, ankles, and hips; shin pain; foot pain and/or bruises; and so on.
Working out on hard surfaces: Concrete is the hardest surface on which you can exercise, and all that pounding can add up to the wear and tear on your back, joints, and muscles and lead to an injury. Instead, work out on asphalt (blacktop) roads or bike trails (asphalt is softer than concrete), dirt roads or trails (as long as the footing is even enough not to throw you off balance), an exercise mat or pad placed over a hard surface, or even a rug or carpet in your living room.
Not getting enough sleep: Your body needs eight hours of sleep to recover from the stress of being pregnant each day, plus a little more to account for exercise.
Setting up your first fitness routine
To set up an effective fitness routine, you need to establish a convenient time to work out, set up a workout plan that includes some variation (so you don’t get bored), keep track of your workouts, and stay motivated. The following sections get you started.
Developing a fitness routine isn’t easy, mainly because you’ve never had to include exercise in your day-to-day routine before. You can pick up a new habit, though, by doing an activity for just 21 days. This means that if you exercise today and stick to it for the next 21 days, in only three weeks, exercise will be a daily part of your life.
Carving time out of your day
To allow time to work out and stretch, allot 30 to 60 minutes each day that you exercise. Most women work out at one of three times throughout the day: morning (before work or other commitments), midday (lunchtime), and late afternoon or early evening (after work but more than three hours before bedtime).
Any of these times can work, depending on your schedule and your preferences. A fourth option — exercising a few hours after dinner — isn’t a good idea, because you increase your heart rate too close to your bedtime. Exercising less than two or three hours before your bedtime can interrupt your sleep and lead to increased fatigue the next day. You can also get your 30 to 60 minutes in multiple, shorter sessions throughout the day. Research shows that this provides benefits equivalent to one session of the same cumulative length.
Creating a workout plan
Although a one-size-fits-all workout plan doesn’t exist, Tables 4-1 through 4-3 give you an idea of what a beginner’s exercise routine may look like. Modify these tables to match your own goals and the number of weeks you’re into your pregnancy, and always determine whether and how much you’ll work out by how you feel and what your baby is telling you.
These tables list the number of minutes to work out. If your form of exercise involves stopping and starting (such as with weightlifting or with exercise balls and resistance bands), don’t count the minutes in between each type of exercise in your total minutes. And keep in mind that the minutes in these tables include time to warm up and cool down. Also, the term CT in these tables means “cross-train” — that is, switching from your normal activity to a very different one.
Wondering why each week increases? Because even though 15 to 20 minutes of activity is enough to raise your heart rate and expend calories, more is better, up to a point. Research varies, but for nonpregnant women, working out between 30 and 60 minutes per day, four to seven days per week, is generally considered the ticket to excellent overall health and fitness. During your pregnancy, however, especially if you’ve never exercised before, 20 to 30 minutes per day, four to six days per week, is terrific; as you become more fit, try to continue to increase your duration and frequency to six to seven days for 40 minutes or more of exercise.
Keeping track of your workouts
To track your workouts, download an app or use a paper calendar (remember those?) that has spaces for each day. Make note of what workout you did and for how long. You may also want to note how you felt (“tired,” “sore,” “full of energy,” and so on) and what may have contributed to that feeling (“got a great night of sleep,” “bad morning sickness,” and so on). This information can help you monitor your progress. And whenever you feel a workout slump coming on, you can look back at your fitness progress for a strong dose of motivation.
For Fitness Buffs and Competitive Athletes
If you love to exercise or are a fierce competitor, you may think that nothing will change during the next 40 weeks: You’ll just keep exercising the way you have been, deliver your baby, and not skip a beat.
It’s a fine dream, but a dream nonetheless. A lot is going to change over the next nine months:
Morning sickness (or any-time-of-day sickness) may interrupt your usual workout schedule.
You’ll be far more fatigued than you’ve ever been, so a seven-days-per-week workout schedule may no longer be possible.
Your balance will be off, making you susceptible to falls and injuries and putting some forms of outdoor exercise off-limits.
Your weight gain (which is absolutely necessary to deliver a healthy baby) makes getting around more difficult than usual.
The increasing size of your breasts and abdomen and the tenderness of your breasts may keep you from being physically capable of doing your pre-pregnancy exercises.
You may experience a host of minor illnesses or other complaints that make you less able to start or finish a workout. These problems run the gamut, including (in alphabetical order) backaches, breathlessness, gassiness, headaches, heartburn, hemorrhoids, rashes, swelling and fluid retention, and urinary incontinence and increased urination. And that’s just in the first trimester!
Your body isn’t going to recover nearly as fast as it has been able to, so you’ll be able to do fewer hard workouts and will need more easy or rest days between harder efforts.
None of this means, however, that you can’t continue to be highly active. It just means you need to make a few modifications.
If you’re an elite athlete and hope to continue training at a high level during your pregnancy, consider being monitored by a physician or taking part in a supervised prenatal training program to minimize the risk of danger to you and your baby.
Modifying your workouts to accommodate your pregnancy
Whether you need to modify your workouts depends on how you and your baby are faring during your pregnancy:
Is the baby growing normally?
Are you gaining weight normally?
Do you feel good?
If you can answer “yes” to the preceding questions and your healthcare provider doesn’t have any objections to your continuing your pre-pregnancy workouts, you don’t need to modify your routine. If any of your answers change, however, that’s when you need to modify.
If all the physical stresses placed on your body during pregnancy sound terribly unfair, given how fit your body was before you became pregnant, remember that, in just nine short months, you’ll have a healthy baby as your reward. Until then, give yourself time to come to terms with the fact that your workouts will indeed change.
The following tells you how you may decide to modify your current routine:
Intensity: In order to keep yourself healthy, you’ll likely need to decrease the intensity of your workouts. If you can measure your workout intensity, expect your pace to slow down as you progress through your pregnancy. If you participate in a sport in which you can’t measure intensity directly, pay careful attention to how your body feels during and after each workout. If you find yourself increasingly fatigued, are sore in muscles that have been long developed, or can’t seem to work out as long as you used to, reduce the intensity of your workouts.
Duration: If you want to continue the duration of each workout and you feel great, do so. If you aren’t feeling as good as you and your healthcare provider would like, consider reducing the duration. If, for example, you want to continue running 7-minute miles, you may find that you’re comfortable running for 30 or 40 minutes per workout instead of 60.
If you don’t want to reduce the duration, you can reduce the intensity. For example, you may be able to run 60 minutes at 9-minute miles (reducing the intensity) and keep up the same duration (the 60 minutes of exercise). You can also alternate higher-intensity, lower-duration days with lower-intensity, higher-duration days.
Frequency: Even elite athletes tend to have trouble working out seven days per week while pregnant.
If staying in good shape isn’t enough for you — that is, if you’re planning to stay in the finely tuned, ready-for-competition shape that you were in before you became pregnant — you may need to rethink your ambitions. Trying to stay in top shape during the 40 weeks of pregnancy may mean making your workout routine a higher priority than your baby’s health, a concept that may have tragic consequences. Your goal during pregnancy should be to avoid losing so much ground that you can’t quickly get yourself back into shape after you deliver your healthy baby. But you’re not going to run a marathon or play in a tournament a week after labor — you may, however, be able to perform at a high level four to six months after childbirth.
Competition: The most notable change in exercise for a pregnant athlete is that your healthcare provider will likely advise you to stop competing by the second trimester (weeks 15 to 27). Although your doctor or midwife may recommend that you stop competing earlier or later than that, the fact remains that pregnancy will very likely set limits on your competition for at least a few months. Use common sense about this, thinking about what — if any — competitive gains you’ll make by continuing your racing schedule; listen carefully to your healthcare provider’s advice.
Many athletes have made successful returns to competition after delivering healthy babies, and some even find that time off from competition renews their interest in it and makes them more successful.
Finding alternate activities
If, after you reduce the intensity, duration, and/or frequency of your workouts, your body still isn’t managing your exercise routine well and you’re feeling fatigued or you and your baby aren’t as healthy as you should be, talk to your healthcare provider about whether you can try a less-intense activity than the primary activity you’ve been doing. Table 4-4 gives you some ideas, but your healthcare provider may have others.
Reducing the intensity of your workouts, using lighter weights, and substituting out some of your higher-impact movements
Weight train with heavy weights, including doing squats, bench presses, and incline bench presses
Lifting lighter weights with more reps; avoid deep-knee bends and pushing weights over your head when lying on your back or in an inclined position
Mountain bike
Indoor cycling on a stationary bike
Perform gymnastics moves
Walking, doing low-impact aerobics, using resistance bands, and/or weightlifting
Play soccer, basketball, or hockey
Weightlifting and the following: walking, using a stair-stepping machine, or using an elliptical trainer
Row
Weightlifting, swimming, and walking
Run or hike
Walking or doing low-impact aerobics
Ski (downhill or outdoor cross-country) or skate
Indoor cycling or using a cross-country ski machine
To quickly resume your training regimen after you deliver your baby, you want to work similar muscles with your alternate activity as you do with your primary activity. For example, cycling, speed-skating, and cross-country skiing all use similar muscle groups, but they use very different muscles from running, which is similar to walking and aerobics. So if you’re a speed-skater looking for an alternate activity, you want to choose cycling over walking.
Even if you seem to be physically handling your workouts and don’t want to reduce their intensity, duration, or frequency or change activities altogether, your healthcare provider may still ask you to change sports until after you deliver. This is especially true if you participate in very demanding activities like rowing and running, ball sports or contact sports that can result in blunt trauma to your baby (but may be considered okay), or activities that can result in a hard, serious fall that can hurt your baby. See Book 4, Chapter 2 for additional information on sports that you may be asked to give up as your pregnancy progresses.
Easing back into your routine after delivery
As a fitness buff or competitive athlete, you may long for the day when you feel fit again, attack your workouts with vigor, and maybe even compete in your sport. Returning to your old routine will happen, but it takes time and patience. This section gives you a few tips.
Take as much time as you need to get back to your old routine. Because you’ve likely reduced the intensity, duration, or frequency of your workouts, you’ll need some time to build back up again. Most women need to take a minimum of two weeks off from exercise after the birth of a baby. This time allows you to recover from the stress of labor and delivery and allows your body to heal. In order to determine whether you’re ready to get back into your exercise routine, ask yourself the following questions:
Have you recovered from labor and delivery, and do you feel ready to start exercising again?
Is your baby feeding well, and is she on a feeding schedule that allows for a long enough break for you to exercise?
Has your healthcare provider given you the go-ahead to start exercising?
If you had a cesarean section or episiotomy, is your incision healed, and are you able to move around comfortably and without pain?
If you feel ready to get started, start back slowly — and reduce or discontinue exercise if you experience any increase in vaginal bleeding or have pain or discomfort.
Although every woman and every pregnancy is unique, consider the following tips for a safe return to your old fitness routine:
Start your first post-delivery workouts as though you’ve never worked out before. See the earlier section “For the Novice Exerciser” for some beginner’s guides to working out, and follow whichever one allows you to work out without feeling any pain or significant discomfort. You may experience some muscle soreness and fatigue, but you shouldn’t feel any sharp pains.
Increase your weekly minutes no more than 10 percent per week for the first couple of months, no matter how antsy you feel about getting back into great shape. This may mean that your return to your pre-pregnancy fitness level takes from four to six months. As you become stronger, you can start to increase your duration and intensity beyond 10 percent, but always use your body’s response as a guide.
If you end up having a cesarean delivery, returning to your old exercise routine may take a couple of months longer than it would if you’d delivered vaginally. This timeline doesn’t hold for all women, given that people heal at different rates, but it’s a general timeline to consider if you’re trying to set goals for the year after you deliver.
Be cautious when stretching or doing any quick, stop-and-start movements for three to five months after delivery. The hormone relaxin has made your ligaments and joints much less stable than they were before you were pregnant, so use care and avoid quick and jerky movements.
Start with one moderately high-intensity workout every one or two weeks and gradually increase to a maximum of two high-intensity days per week. The demands of breastfeeding and new motherhood are hard enough on your body to consider doing more than two hard workouts per week at this stage.
Take one or two easy days (of lower intensity) after each hard workout. Follow a hard–easy–medium–easy–hard–easy or hard–easy–easy–hard–easy–easy workout schedule.
If you’re nursing, keep up your caloric intake so you produce enough milk. You may need as many as 500 more calories per day than you did before you became pregnant and started nursing. Make sure you’re eating enough calories for the amount of exercise you’re doing and hydrate well.
Don’t try to lose weight too quickly, especially if you’re breastfeeding. By eating right and gradually increasing the intensity, duration, and frequency of your workouts, you’ll naturally lose the weight in a relatively short time frame without dieting.
Continue to monitor your urine color, body weight, temperature, and overall physical well-being as your body returns to its pre-pregnancy state. Exercise only after you’re released to do so by your healthcare provider, and call him or her if your body isn’t adjusting well to working out.
Remember that pregnant women should avoid hot exercise environments, so hot yoga (Bikram) or any classroom that isn’t cool and well-ventilated is not recommended.
To get the benefit of exercise, you want to keep moving at a brisk pace for a minimum of 15 minutes, which means that activities that don’t elevate your heart rate, that allow for plenty of rest, and that offer options to ride or sit instead of walk aren’t going to get you very fit. A workout during pregnancy is any activity that takes your Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) to 12 to 14, which is considered “moderate” to “somewhat hard.” (See Book 4, Chapter 2 for the lowdown.)
Developing a fitness routine isn’t easy, mainly because you’ve never had to include exercise in your day-to-day routine before. You can pick up a new habit, though, by doing an activity for just 21 days. This means that if you exercise today and stick to it for the next 21 days, in only three weeks, exercise will be a daily part of your life.