Fitness While Pregnant

There are some good resources about pregnancy and exercise that should be examined before planning your fitness while pregnant. Also, consult your doctor on what are acceptable exercises for you. I will provide some guidelines here that will be helpful.

If you are farther along in the pregnancy, then you will need to be extra careful not to start up anything too strenuous. You should be doing some type of physical activity so keep a log  of everything that you are doing. You will also need to demonstrate that you understand the recommended exercise guidelines. In order to do this, you might need to keep a hypothetical log that demonstrates the minimum requirements of the 3 different exercise components. You can do this by including hypothetical entries in your log where you fall short of the requirements (indicate as such on your log). Or, you can turn in a separate hypothetical log that includes everything that you would have done if you weren't pregnant.

Regarding your cardiovascular exercise, since you are pregnant you want to be very careful about the intensity of exercise, especially as you get farther along. If you are early in your pregnancy, you can get started on a good routine that you can carry out right up to the delivery. You will need to be careful about the mode of exercise because some exercises (e.g. running, horseback riding, biking) are not usually recommended. I have heard some different opinions from doctors about what should and shouldn't be done. If you haven't already, you will probably want to read information from a variety of sources about recommended exercise programs during pregnancy.

You should be able to successfully work all of the muscle groups for your strength requirements, you will just need to be careful about how you do them. For example, crunches may not be that good but single leg lifts will work your abdominals to a certain degree. If you are going to use weights, use lighter weights and do more repetitions. Make sure to breath through all exercises. There are lots of opinions about what should or shouldn't be done during pregnancy but everyone seems to agree (including me), that women benefit for physical activity during pregnancy.

Fitness testing is more problematic if you are pregnant. Because these are efforts to near fatigue, they are not recommended unless you are very fit going into them. There are some are cetain fitness tests that will be less severe on your body, and some are sub-maximal. Choose one of these, like the 1.0 mile walk test. Also realize that you may not see improvement s pregnancy progresses and after birth. However, the data can be useful biofeedback for you, to understand the fitness changes in your body between tests. Your goal could be to maintain fitness; in this case, similar results on the tests would confirm this.

Try to design a program that meets all the minimum requirements for this exercises, and then also make a notation on your exercise log to indicate you are pregnant.