PREPARING YOUR BODYfor

PREGNANCY

GIRLSGONESTRONG presents

5 EXERCISES THAT WILL KEEP YOU HEALTHY AND FEELING GREAT, AND CAN HELP MAKE YOUR PREGNANCY, LABOR, AND DELIVERY EASIER

In collaboration withGGS Advisory Board Member Jessie Mundell

DISCLAIMER:

This publication and the information presented herein is provided for informational and educational purposes only and is not to be interpreted as an endorsement of a particular plan, product, or course of action. Girls Gone Strong is not a medical or healthcare provider, and the information presented in this publication is not intended as medical or professional advice, nor as a substitute for or alternative to medical treatment. You should consult with a qualified professional before beginning this or any other exercise or nutrition program. In addition, health and fitness information and research changes rapidly and varies from person to person, and some information presented herein may be out of date or may not apply to your specific circumstances. Use of this publication and the information presented herein prior to consulting a qualified professional is at your sole choice and risk.

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Thinking about getting pregnant? Working on it?

If you’re not pregnant yet, but you’re thinking about it, or actively working on it, now is the time to start preparing to help make your pregnancy—as well as your labor and delivery, eventually—easier.

Preparing your body for pregnancy and developing and practicing healthy habits before you conceive, will be extremely beneficial for not only you, but your baby, as well.

For one thing, you’re much more likely to continue with those healthy habits through pregnancy—and they may even rub off on your partner. You’re also setting up your baby for a healthy start. Your health during conception plays an important role in laying the foundation of good health for your baby. Development starts at conception, and from that initial moment onward, those developing cells are gathering information from your body so your baby can be ready for survival in the world outside your womb.

Another benefit of developing healthy habits prior to becoming pregnant is that you will improve your relationship with the sensations of your body, and you will become more aware of how your feel in your body – imperative for labor, delivery, and recovery.

Lastly, practicing specific movement patterns and exercises can support your body through pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum recovery. In particular, it’s important to make sure that you’re training the core and pelvic floor in your workouts. By this, we don’t mean crunches, leg raises, sit-ups, and holding planks for days. No way. Training your core and pelvic floor includes:

l Breathing properly.

l Generating tension in your pelvic floor muscles and abdominals.

l Allowing the abdominals and pelvic floor muscles release tension (very important for allowing the baby to be able to move and shift).

In terms of exercise specifically, there are a few key elements recommended to help you along in the process. The first thing to understand is what you’re actually preparing for. Think of pregnancy as the “short term” goal (even though it’s a considerable amount of time), and postpartum recovery as the “long term” goal.

For now, let’s focus on preparing the body for pregnancy. Although there can be many factors at play, the goal is to set your body up to experience few aches and pains, carry the baby safely and comfortably to term, allow the baby to get in good pelvic position, and help keep you feeling supported, strong, and energized—as much as possible!

From a fitness standpoint, when it comes to preparing your body for pregnancy your focus should be around these main goals:

l Achieve or maintain healthy level of body fat to optimize your chances of conception and a healthy pregnancy, while reducing your risk of gestational diabetes.

l Improve posture and alignment to help reduce the aches and pains that typically accompany pregnancy as your baby grows and your body changes. This will also help keep your baby in a desirable position, and increase the likelihood of having a smoother labor and delivery.

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l Gain strength, specifically in the glutes, hamstrings, anterior core, and upper back. Having strong muscles and good overall stability helps take some of the load and stress off your tendons, ligaments, and joints, which is especially helpful as your body changes and your belly grows in pregnancy.

l Gain lean muscle mass. Having an adequate amount of muscle mass entering pregnancy encourages a healthy level of body fat, good insulin sensitivity, and gives you a more firm and shapely appearance.

l Prepare the core and pelvic floor to maintain strength, integrity, and a balanced tone throughout pregnancy. A strong core and pelvic floor will ensure that you’re carrying your baby in a good position. You will feel strong and supported during your strength training and daily activities, and you will significantly reduce your risk of pelvic floor dysfunction, incontinence, and pelvic organ prolapse. That said, strength is not the only key factor in a healthy pelvic floor. In fact, many times women have an hypertonic (tight) pelvic floor that needs to be retrained to fully relax, so that they can then fully contract.

l Develop a solid aerobic foundation. Developing a solid aerobic foundation is important for your heart health and for reducing your stress while simultaneously increasing your body’s ability to handle stress. It also improves your quality of sleep, and helps you recover from your workouts and achieve or maintain a healthy level of body fat.

If you’re trying to conceive, focus your attention on balancing your intense exercise with restorative activities, learn how to breathe and properly engage your core and floor, and include squats, pulls, and hinges in your workouts.

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TOP 5 EXERCISESTo Prepare Your Body for Pregnancy

1. RESTORATIVE ACTIVITIES

Balancing intense work with restorative work is key. Restorative work—whether you’re pregnant or not—is incredibly important for managing stress, fostering creativity, allowing your body to heal from more strenuous exercise, etc. While you’re trying to conceive, it is essential. Stress intimately affects hormonal balance, and hormonal balance affects menstrual cycles. If they’re not balanced, wonky things can happen with your schedule.

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Find the right mix of restorative activities that will help to balance stress hormones with more intense exercise pursuits, such as strength training. I typically walk about 45-60 minutes per day. It’s leisurely, it’s relaxed. Sometimes, it’s to run errands, and other times there’s no agenda other than to just stroll and think.

To start, aim for 30 minutes of leisurely walking, three or more days per week. Or, find something else you enjoy like stretching, restorative yoga, massage, foam rolling/soft tissue release work, etc.

It’s worth noting that if your exercise program is currently quite intense and getting pregnant is proving difficult, decreasing the intense exercise and increasing the restorative activities might do the trick.

For example, if you’re currently strength training three days per week, doing two days of high-intensity cardiovascular activity, and another day of moderate steady-state cardio, perhaps your body needs a bit of a break. You might benefit from keeping the strength training and one day of higher intensity cardio, and replacing the other two sessions with 60-minute leisurely walks.

2. KEGELS 2.0

Surely you’ve been told or have heard that kegels are the go-to pelvic floor exercise. Most commonly, you’re taught what I refer to as Kegel 1.0—find the pelvic floor muscles by “stopping your stream of pee.” While this might be fine and well, all you’re doing is learning how to statically contract the pelvic floor in isolation. The pelvic floor needs to respond while you run, jump, deadlift, chin up, and squat, so you don’t pee during these activities.

Enter Kegels 2.0 and its connection to your breath. Breathing can help you learn how to properly engage the abdominals and pelvic floor. The traditional cues like “hug your baby” or “pull your belly to your spine” just aren’t going to cut it in pregnancy when it comes to developing normal tone through the core and floor. It’s crucial to learn how to use the core as a unit.

On the inhale, the diaphragm should descend and the belly and pelvic floor muscles should gently relax and expand. On the exhale breath, the diaphragm should return back up and you should feel gentle tension through the pelvic floor and the abdominals.

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This is what we call the “connection breath” and you can watch this video for the full explanation. Practice two sets of 10 breaths each day, focusing on the quality of the movement, not the quantity of repetitions.

Note: We recommend that you consult with a pelvic floor physical therapist to make sure you should even be practicing a contraction of the pelvic floor muscles.

The next three exercises are focused on developing overall strength in order to support the development of your baby and your changing body throughout the stages of pregnancy. Another major focus is to start practicing good body alignment or having a “neutral spine.” This is really important for the baby’s position in the pelvis. It also decreases the severity of an abdominal separation and reduces back/pelvic pain.

3. SQUATS

Squatting is a fantastic exercise for the core and floor, for developing lower body strength, and for developing that good alignment we just mentioned—especially in daily tasks (squatting down to pick something up off the floor, picking your baby up, going to the bathroom, sitting down and standing up from a chair).

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A squat position can be a really effective laboring and birth position. Whether you’re squatting on a birthing ball or the toilet, or squatting deeply and holding onto something in front of you, the pelvic floor is able to open and relax, and the force of gravity is working in your favor. All of this can help your baby make their way down (and out).

While trying to conceive, practice mastering your squat technique in these variations:

l Bodyweight Squat

l Goblet Squat

l Barbell Back Squat or Front Squat

l Dumbbell or Kettlebell Front Squat

Note: all of these could be free-standing or to a box directly behind you.

4. PULLING

Pulling exercises primarily focus on strengthening the back. This helps to promote better alignment to combat habitual daily postures that often have us rounding forward in our daily life (sitting at a computer, driving a car, etc.). This is especially important through the later stages of pregnancy and when caring for a newborn. It’s best to start focusing on this now.

We recommend these pulling variations:

l Band or cable rows: 1- and 2-arm options (at lower and higher angles)

l DB bent over rows: 1- and 2-arm options

l Inverted rows

l Chin-ups, pull-ups (assisted or unassisted)

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5. HIP HINGE

In hinging exercises the primary movement starts at the hips. Hingeing patterns teach great body awareness and really help with understanding neutral spine, especially at the pelvis.

Useful hinging exercises include:

l Hinge with a dowel

l Tall kneeling hinge

l Glute bridges

l Hip thrusts

l Romanian deadlifts (at 2:20 in the linked video)

l Other deadlift variations

For most women, 3-4 sets of 6-12 reps will work well. The newer you are to strength training, the more you should focus on mastering form, staying in the 10-12 rep range to get as much practice as possible. Once you’ve mastered the movement patterns, add weight and start working your way down to lower rep ranges and heavier weights.