Tips on fitness for women after pregnancy. A post partum body is at risk of injury if a workout is resumed too soon or at too high of intensity. I think that is one area that we are not educating people on....
I think that is one area that we are not educating people on. There is quite a bit of information now about prenatal fitness and what is best but not much on post-partum. Most people think that after the doctors say that it's okay to go back to exercise that one could just be ready to resume whatever intensities and whatever type of workout they have been doing prior to pregnancy. That actually isn't the case. There are things to be worried about and careful about after pregnancy as well because its takes the body quite sometime to return to a pre-pregnancy state.
It's important to remember that there were hormones that were loosening the connective tissue during pregnancy. Those connective tissues don't return to a normal state sometimes for six months or more after pregnancy. After birth, women are still very prone to injuries because of that. Also, the whole abdominal area, which had been stretched out completely, now it doesn't have a baby in there holding it in place, so there is a full core area that's extremely weak. If you combine that with those connective tissues are also loose, women are very prone to injury in all the joints as well as lower back pain and that sort of things.
So after pregnancy some of the same things that we talked about before actually still holds true. Women don't want to be doing very quick directional turns and things that could really put strain and torque on joints. As far as the abdominal area, it's important to develop that strength in a careful slow manner. There are a lot of exercises that, if we go straight through them, like standard crunches, can, in some cases, actually cause problems for women.
There is also a condition in post partum women where the abdominal muscles separate and it's actually more common than people realize. It can happen during pregnancy and, if it happens, it will, in a lot of cases, just naturally come back together. There are some women, however, that this doesn't come back naturally and, if they are unaware of the problem, some of the exercises that they do can actually exacerbate the problem. I think that after pregnancy, when women are trying to get back into shape, is when it becomes also very important to make sure who they work with is knowledgeable. It's important that a women or her trainer be able to check to see if they have the abdominal separation. Women have to do specific exercises to regain their strength before they move on to more intense workouts.
I think the most important thing is that women need to be aware that their body isn't back to normal and just to start slow. They should also have reasonable expectations. I have come across so many women who feel like they are supposed to somehow shed all the weight and be back to some physical shape really quickly and, the truth is, that you carried the baby for nine months. During those nine months your body was stretching and changing and I think that the reasonable expectation after birth is that it's going to take you nine months, at least, if not longer to get back to feeling physically like who you were before.
