I’ll be up front – I’m not talking from experience. I’ve never been pregnant. However, our numbers at work have been severely depleted recently by people going off on maternity leave. So many, in fact, that jokes have been rife about it being infectious and there being something in the water…
Something that has fascinated me ever since my friends started having children is how much women can continue doing through pregnancy. Advice seems to differ hugely from country to country and different women seem to take different approaches to their pregnancy.
At one extreme of the spectrum, some women seem to approach their pregnancy as an opportunity to sit back, do nothing and eat anything they can get their hands on, especially in the last 4 or 5 months of their pregnancy. These women often seem to complain of permanent exhaustion and blame the pregnancy, but I can’t help noticing that I also suffer from complete exhaustion when I’m not exercising (which seems somehow perverse).
At the other extreme, some women seem to take the view that they want to continue being completely active (as far as working round a bump will allow) and watching the quality of the food they eat. These women seem to have less trouble with exhaustion and often are reported to have easier births.
Most women seem to be somewhere in the middle of this. Mostly eating well and keeping slightly active but perhaps struggling to be as active or eat as cleanly as usual due to the differing advice about what you can and can’t do during pregnancy.
Again, I want to reiterate that I’ve not been there, I’ve not done it, I don’t know how it feels and I am happy to be told I’ve got it all wrong. I’m just putting together what I’ve seen. But common sense seems to suggest that the human body should be well-designed to handle continuing to be active throughout pregnancy.
If you go back to our prehistoric beginnings, sitting about for 5 or 6 months would probably have resulted in no food to eat (unless you had someone else able to gather sufficient food for two, which could be an argument for starting to settle in groups) and would have put you in danger of being attacked by predators. You would probably also need to keep moving about with the seasons to follow migrating animals.
It is with great interest that I have therefore been following Cassandra Forsythe’s blog. Cassandra is a female fitness and nutrition scientist in Conneticut who writes a fascinating blog on diet and fitness. A few months ago, Cassandra announced online that she was pregnant and has since written some really great articles about how her workouts have continued to fit in with her pregnancy (or is the pregnancy fitting in with her workouts?).
If you are pregnant and want to know about handling the pregnancy and continuing working out through your pregnancy I really recommend spending some time reading her blog as this is first-hand experience from someone who is going through these issues at the moment. Having just entered her third trimester she is still working out up to three times a day and seems to be working as hard as she ever was.
If that’s not enough, Cassandra recently posted a video of a friend’s wife doing sledge pushes just before the delivery of her baby. Seriously inspiring stuff!
If you are pregnant, congratulations! I hope this post guides you to some helpful reading on combining pregnancy and an active lifestyle.
Update (11 Jan 2010): As a late addition to this post, I have just found an article on About.com. Usually I am not a big fan of this site, but this article is about the recommendation to continue doing exercise during pregnancy.
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Blog-watch: pregnancy diet and exercise // Mar 18, 2010 at 21:09
[...] discussed before my fascination with the diet and exercise that we can and should pursue throughout pregnancy to ensure the best health for both us and the unborn child. After all, while you are carrying a [...]