Exercising While Pregnant: Good For Mama And Baby
Baby Taylor arrived on July 28th, 2017, lighting up my world with her spunky personality! Now six months old, she loves to babble, to roll, and to squeal in her daddy’s arms as she watches me fly through the air, working on Ninja moves. She’s a very healthy and active baby who LOVES to be outside, so Tim and I lucked out bigtime. Throughout my pregnancy, I exercised consistently, even racing a 200 meter race the week I was due. Whenever I would post about doing pullups pregnant or doing a half marathon pregnant, most people saw the posts as what they were intended to be: inspiring and educational. Every once in awhile, though, I would get a comment saying I was hurting my baby or even killing my baby by exercising. Now that my baby has been doing fantastically well for six months, I feel confident enough to tell those people…They were wrong.
It’s not so much that I want to tell them for personal gratification. I’ve come to a beautiful, freeing place in my life, now that I’m a parent, where I simply don’t have the time or energy to care anymore about what people think. My main motivation for writing this post is to let other pregnant women know that what I was doing was fine and healthy for my baby, in case they needed reassurance, as they search for the right balance for them. That’s right – everyone is different, so because I did x or y exercise doesn’t mean someone should follow me exactly, but hopefully sharing my experience training while pregnant will encourage others to do the research needed to figure out what they can do to exercise and stay healthy and fit while pregnant, too – not just for themselves, but for their baby, too, (rather than stay away from all exercise for fear of overdoing it). How does one go about this? Well, it’s not easy. As a professional athlete with many good years of competition left, I wanted to find the balance of staying as fit as I could while erring on the side of safety. I looked for books on high-performance pregnancy, but found practically nothing. A few pro runners have blogs about their experience but I couldn’t find a ton of detail there, so I stared interviewing all of my athletic mama friends. I chatted with everyone from my friends who like to jog for recreation to Olympian Carrie Tollefson, and everyone in between.
What I ended up finding out was right for me was getting rid of my tempo runs, fartlek workouts, and interval workouts, but maintaining my speed drills (e.g. high knees, butt kicks, skips), along with solid-effort sprints that lasted under a minute or so. I continued to strength train, even lifting a significant amount of weight, just not as much as before and I did it all very slowly and carefully, with full and proper form and engagement. That’s what felt right for me. I know some women with healthy babies who still did tempo runs. I have a friend who went skiing well into her second trimester (something I wouldn’t have done) because she is an excellent skier, (far better than I am). The universal truth, besides being careful not to get overheated, is to LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. Now, people throw that term out all the time. And I thought I listened to my body pretty well as an athlete. I had two stress fractures in my first decade of running – just enough to now know and respect the signs of onset before they lead to another such injury.
If you feel judged as a pregnant person or as a parent, you may not know exactly what you’re doing (nobody does!), but just remember, you care more about your baby than anyone else does, especially some random stranger on social media. Whether others are well-meaning or just feeling judge-y, please try to brush off what they say, (at least that’s what I tell myself to do). The next time someone criticizes what I’m doing with my baby, I’m going to ask them for their phone number to come babysit if they think they can do it better. And if they really care that much, they can spend the night and take some night feeding shifts, too.Listen to me, getting all sassy as a mama.
At the end of the day, with a few rare exceptions, we parents are all trying to do the best we can with the knowledge and experience we may or may not have, feeling scared shitless half the time but going for it anyway.