Top 5 Prenatal Fitness Exercises
02/06/2010

PRENATAL FITNESS PART 1

Prenatal exercise is receiving an increasing amount of attention in the media lately, yet the services available for women fall massively short of the demand. This article aims to address a question we commonly get asked - “what is the best exercise to do when I am pregnant?”

It's important for a woman to maintain her overall prenatal fitness, not just focusing on maintaining the strength of her core and the management of weight gain, as in the case of most yoga, aqua-natal and buggy classes. We are not for any moment saying that these are bad classes they just offer very specific things, for example yoga primarily focuses on your core so fails to incorporate cardio, whilst aqua-natal and buggy classes tend to provide a safe environment in which you can work up a sweat but perform a limited range of strength exercises using minimal resistance.

It is important for mum's and mum's to be to have a well rounded exercise programme that adequately meets the changing needs of their body, helping to not only manage weight gain and help keep them toned, but also to alleviate many of muscular and postural imbalances that occur and commonly result in back pain, hip pain and pregnancy prone “waddling”.

We have put together a list of the top 5 exercises that we commonly recommend and use, from the feedback we get from the women we come into contact with they really help to meet the needs of their body and are easy to perform. Here they are...

1. Squats – as your pregnancy progresses your pelvis becomes increasingly unstable, it therefore becomes important to maintain the strength and tone of your glutes and quads to help avoid hip pain and the “waddling” that so many people experience during pregnancy. Performing squats, side-laying leg lifts or clams are great ways of doing this. I have attached a link to one of our videos on youtube showing how to perform the clams, side-laying leg lifts and squats.

2. External Rotation – over the course of your pregnancy your bump will increase in size and weight and depending on the degree to which this occurs it commonly results in rounded shoulders and, or hunching of your upper back. External rotation, a bent over row or reverse flyes are all great exercises to help strengthen and tone the muscles of your back and arms helping to improve your posture and manage back pain. Postnatally if you breastfeed then this becomes an even more common occurrence so performing exercises like this becomes doubly important. Stretches of your chest will also help to alleviate this.

3. Abdominal Hollowing / Pelvis Bridge – during pregnancy it remains important for you to maintain the strength and tone of your abdominals however as the size and weight of your bump increases your rectus abdominals will lengthen accordingly possibly causing the wall to separate slightly (known as distasis recti). This means that you shouldn't perform any crunches or rotatory movements, rather to maintain the tone and strength of your ab's you should perform static exercises such as abdominal hollowing or a pelvis bridge, both can be done either on all 4's or on a fitball. Performing either prenatally will help improve your recovery postnatally, help reduce your chance of back and also help knead your rectus abdominals back together if they have separated.

4. Deadlift – this exercise is a great one to help strengthen and tone your lower back, helping to manage back pain and also put you in a good position for all the lifting you will be doing postnatally. As you will have weaker abdominal than usual it's important not to lift a heavy weight, if you have any difficulty performing this exercise then you could always perfrom what's called a superman. We have attached a link to both exercises to this article.

5. Bicep Curl / Tricep Extension – Basic bicep and tricep exercises are great to perform, not only do they help maintain the tone of your arms but they also help maintain the strength of the particular muscles, putting you in a much stronger position postnatally for all the lifting and carrying you will be doing. Simple exercises like a bicep curl and tricep extension are more than adequate to do this.

Guidelines state that when performing strength exercises if you are in your 1^st trimester then you should only perform 2 sets of 15-20 reps with 60s rest between sets, if you are in your 2^nd trimester then perform only 2 sets of 10-15 reps with 60s rest and in your third the number drops further to 2 sets of 8-10 reps with 60s rest.

Based on the feedback we get from the women we come into contact with these are very restrictive guidelines, therefore rather than prescribing rep ranges so much we tend to place more of an emphasis on monitoring exercise intensity, although we do limit reps to 3 sets of 15 reps. We advise women never to exceed between 5-7 on a scale of 1-10 of physical exertion, however this doesn't mean you should stay at a 7 for the duration of your exercise, also if you don't feel confident enough to gauge your own level then it would be better to stick to the guidelines.

Although the above list is tailored more towards strength we have put together a separate article outlining cardiovascular exercise during pregnancy titled Prenatal Fitness Part 2, so take a look at that to get some good ideas of the type of cardio you could perform and the intensities you want to be working at.

Video Links:

Squats on a stability ball

Clams

External Rotation

Bent Over Row

Deadlift

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