10 Rules for Prenatal Workouts
Whether you are a Pilates aficionado, or someone who has barely worked out before, it can be tricky to know how to approach exercise once you are pregnant. Seemingly everyone has an opinion about what you should and shouldn’t do, and you will find yourself bombarded by all the most hard core pregnancy stories— people who were hard core exercisers throughout their pregnancies, people who had hard core horror deliveries, etc. Pregnancy and talk surrounding it seem to push anecdotes to the extremes. But having gone through it once myself, and being in the process of going through it once more, I can provide some non-extreme anecdotal tips that worked really well for me. I realize I’m a study of only one person, who has had only one pregnancy and delivery (so far), but I feel like my approach to exercise while pregnant the first time around allowed me to have a healthy pregnancy, a relatively easy delivery, and a reasonably quick recovery. So these are my thoughts and tips.
Listen to your Body.
When you are pregnant, every day and certainly every week can be different. In the first trimester, you may not look pregnant but you might be feeling kind of icky. In the second trimester, you might start to look pregnant and actually feel pretty great, but every week brings new physiological changes you have to adapt to when exercising. In the third trimester, you may be feeling big and not feeling all that great again. Your body is served best during this time by you listening to it and honoring what it needs, and being willing to adapt to the hour, day, week or month without judgment. Just because you may have been able to do something last week doesn’t mean it will feel good to do it this week. Or maybe in your last pregnancy you were able to do a certain exercise or activity but this time around it doesn’t feel right.
In my first pregnancy, all my upright activities started to feel uncomfortable and exhausting— that meant that all my previous summer hobbies, such as hiking, paddle boarding, and bicycling, were off the table. But I needed some sort of physical outlet, and my body was craving extension because I couldn’t lie on my stomach or do anything prone, so I started kicking laps at the pool with a kick board! I kept my head and chest lifted up in extension, out of the water, so my spinal extensors would get a chance to work and my front body would get a chance to lengthen out. And because I had chronic heartburn at that stage in my pregnancy, I had to stand up after each lap, take a drink, and rest for a minute. I felt like an old lady, kicking laps back and forth and resting every few minutes, but being outside, stretched out in the pool, and breathing hard did wonders for my mental health. Not an activity I would have predicted doing, but it was a life saver for me. And I wouldn’t have even tried it had I just forged ahead with my normal activities, pushing myself to do what I used to do before pregnancy.
2. Don’t Stay in Any One Position for Too Long.
You may come across lots of Do’s and Dont’s for prenatal exercises. Don’t lie on your back, but don’t do extension, but don’t work out your abdominal muscles, but do stay in shape and push yourself to be physically fit because giving birth is an athletic feat! To all this, I say you can simplify your life a lot by simply changing positions frequently while exercising. This means, if you are trying to do a Pilates workout, you might change the order of the exercises a bit. For example, the other day I set out to do a reformer workout. But by the time I finished doing Footwork, I was done being on my back for a bit, so I jumped ahead to Stomach Massage. Then I skipped 100 and Coordination because that much forward flexion felt too aggressive. And then I jumped ahead to Chest Expansion and Thigh Stretch because I wanted to open my front body and get upright, but I couldn’t do any of the prone work on the long box. And then I rested for a bit before trying Long Spine. It worked that time, but Short Spine would have been too compressive. See what I mean? The point is to get moving, but to listen to your body, vary your positions, and rest when necessary.
3. Try to Move Your Spine in all 7 Directions.
If you are someone who can reduce all of Pilates down to spinal health (I am not that person, but some are), a good rule of thumb is that in every session you need to move your spine in all 7 directions. That’s right, 7. Bending forward and backward (spinal flexion and extension) are the first two. Then bending from side to side (lateral flexion) and twisting from right to left (spinal rotation) are the next four. The seventh one is a surprise. It’s spinal decompression. That means feeling a sense of length from the crown reaching up and out of the spine to the tail bone pulling down and away from it. You can’t really stretch your spine apart like a spring, unless you are hanging upside down by your ankles or on some sort of tractioning device, but you can create an upward energetic lift of your musculature while your skeleton releases and relaxes down into gravity. Sort of like all your muscles are holding your bones in a kind of soft tissue sling. Any good Pilates workout, no matter how restorative or how intense, should incorporate some way of moving the spine in all directions (or planes.) You can do it upright, lying on your back or side, kneeling, or whatever. It can incorporate springs or other devices like balls, rollers or straps, or it can be just you on your mat. But move your spine all around and in every which way. Pregnancy and your shifting shape and weight can put undue stressors on your vertebrae, and simply mobilizing yourself in all directions can help reset the balance, or at least offset the excess loads.
4. Keep Your Lower Body Joints Mobile (i.e. Squat!)
I once heard someone say that if you squat 200 times a day, you’ll have an easy delivery. Well, I don’t have the time or energy, or frankly, the interest, to squat 200 times a day. But I am a huge proponent of being able to squat, at any age and in any physical condition, pregnant or otherwise. Squatting improves strength and mobility in all the joints, from the ankles on up through the knees and hips and spine. It pumps your fluids through your body, helping to flush out toxins, massage your organs, and aid digestion. It lets your spine hang freely. It makes your tissues more supple and toned, especially in the pelvic floor. So squat! Use whatever modifications you need, be it holding on to a doorknob or chair back, placing a lift under your heels or a rolled up mat behind your knees. But don’t worry about doing it 200 times. Especially if you weren’t doing 200 squats a day before you got pregnant, which leads us to tip #5.
5. Don’t be a Bro.
I can’t tell you how many athletic people have told me they had very difficult deliveries because their pelvic floors were TOO strong and so they wouldn’t release when it was time to give birth. Well, a pelvic floor that stays perpetually contracted isn’t a strong one. It’s an unhealthy one. Healthy tissues can contract with the appropriate force (which is not the same at all as holding a Kegel all day every day as hard as you can for no reason), and also release and soften when not needed. Healthy tissue is spongy and responsive. And healthy pelvic floors are able to release when it is time to give birth.
People also tend to wear as a badge of honor the most athletic thing they were able to do right before their due date. Now, if you feel great running a marathon at 39.8 weeks pregnant, go for it! But don’t force yourself to do something like that just because you want to show you can, even though it may not serve your body and your delivery when the time comes. This all points back to Tip #1. Listen to your body.
6. Breathe Deeply.
This is great advice for everyone, every day, all the time. Breathing deeply tones the muscles, especially the muscles of the abdomen, which include all four layers of belly muscles, your diaphragm, and residually your psoas and pelvic floor (because of the expansion and contraction of the surrounding tissues.). So breathing deeply will help oxygenate your cells, flush out your system, and tone your birthing muscles. Not to mention it will fill you with calming hormones, reduce your fight or flight impulses, and generally prepare you better for the world, and with it the delivery of your baby. And then remember to breathe deeply after you have your baby, too. The world is stressful. Breathe through it.
7. Experiment with Movement in Different Planes.
Be willing to modify and adapt your movements. If there is an exercise you want or need to do, but you can’t anymore because your physiology will no longer permit it, try it in another way. Say you love doing Swan, a Pilates exercise that starts prone on the floor and moves into upward spinal extension, but you can’t lie on your belly any more. What about putting pads under your hips and chest? Too big for that one? Try draping yourself over a fit ball, or kneeling while extending your spine, or even standing against a wall and doing Swan with a roller under your forearms, pushing it up the wall as your spine extends? Find a way to move your body in the direction it wants. The Pilates method is rich with repertoire, but is also ripe for modifications and adaptations while maintaining the integrity of the work.
8. Accept your Changing Sensations.
This goes back to #1 Listen to your Body, and #5 Don’t be a Bro. Your body is changing. Rapidly. Faster than you can adapt to it. Accept that today you might feel great and tomorrow you might feel listless. Today you might need to do more twisting and tomorrow you may need to meditate. Accept that your body is going to be different every week for 40 weeks (and we won’t even get into the postpartum weeks), and be amazed by that! Your body is incredible. And it’s smart. And it generally knows better than you do. So tune in, pay attention, and honor it without opinion or judgment.
9. Get Creative.
There are no pregnancy workout police watching over you. There is no Pilates overlord making sure you are staying true to the method. Tap into what your body needs, and be willing to be creative to help it get that.
10. Repeat: Listen to your Body!!
Pregnancy or no pregnancy, we’d all be better off if we just paid better attention to our bodies. Our bodies will tell us when something isn’t right, when something is being neglected, when something is compromised. It will tell us what it needs to feel better. It will tell us how much and how fast. How hard and how often. It will tell us. We just need to listen.
