He explains why a calorie is not just a calorie, while explaining the science and politics that have led to the explosion of chronic disease prevalence over the past 30 years, followed by strategies to beneficially adjust your hormones and improve your health.
I haven’t made it alllll the way through pregnancy yet. I’m 37 weeks along today, so it could be any time in the next few weeks. But I’ve learned and re-learned quite a few things along the way, including several that apply to everyone, not just pregnant women.
Take Advantage of Proper Breathing & Abdominal Pressurization to Increase Your Strength & Safety
Pressurizing the abdomen by inhaling before the effort part of an exercise and then keeping it pressurized to support and protect your spine and back by exhaling with something like a tsss or kuh sound is something that I knew was important but took for granted pre-pregnancy. As you progress in pregnancy, you’re not supposed to use (and indeed it becomes very difficult as the abs distend) intense pressurization. Not being able to do it as effectively made me realize how truly valuable it is.
Here is a wide-stance squat to accommodate my belly – squatting well over 120+lbs used to be no problem – now my abs feel like they’re working plenty hard with a 26.4lb bell:
While I still stabilize my spine and use some abdominal tension and pressurization while lifting (less abdominal bracing and a softer tsss exhale – you can hear me do it in the videos on this postfrom last week), I can’t lift nearly as heavy as when I was able to give myself all that abdominal and spinal support. My muscles simply can’t support the efforts, and I’ve had to lift progressively lighter.
So all you non-pregnant people, learn and take advantage of proper breathing and pressurization! It not only keeps your back safe, it allows you to lift heavier and strengthens your abdominals (including the pelvic floor). Think of it like a plastic beverage bottle. If you loosen the cap and squeeze it, it’s easy to crush, but when the cap is on tight, it’s very difficult to crush it. It’s internally pressurized, like you should be when lifting!
Strength Training Improves Your Pelvic Floor Muscles
Sometimes during pregnancy, a woman’s body will retain water – swelling is especially common in the feet, lower legs, and hands. But you can combat this by doing what everyone should be doing, pregnant or not – stay hydrated and stay active. It helps reduce the likelihood and severity of swelling.
Train Barefoot
This is something I would like to see research/studies on, but I haven’t found any yet. Many women find that their feet grow during pregnancy and don’t always return to their previous size postpartum. Swelling can play a role in temporary changes, but the relaxin hormone that relaxes ligaments throughout the body combined with the weight gain of pregnancy can cause both temporary and permanent foot size changes and even flattening arches.
I haven’t had any change in foot size at all, and I speculate that it may be because I’ve been training barefoot and in barefoot shoes for several years, strengthening my arches and all the muscles of my feet. Even if the two are unrelated, barefoot training strengthens your feet, which is good for everyone and can lead to reduced pain/better stability throughout the body.
Hydration
I cannot believe how much water I have to drink throughout the day to avoid feeling and having symptoms of dehydration. Early in the second trimester, 128 ounces (1 gallon!) became pretty much a necessity. Now I’m drinking between 128 and 150 ounces a day (and I only wake up 2 to 4 times a night, which isn’t that much for someone over 8 months pregnant!). This is with a moderate activity level in a moderate climate. I’m lifting or doing body weight moves about 3 or 4 days a week for about 30 minutes, plus walking my dog every day and yoga once a week, and that’s about it right now.
When I have more than a day of slacking on my water intake, I’ve started to get minor swelling in my hands, slow digestion (which is slow anyway due to all the pressure on it from baby stuff), and other unpleasant side effects. But these symptoms don’t just happen to pregnant women – anyone with chronic dehydration majorly ups their risk of poor digestion, mental fog, swelling, and a slew of other issues. So, pregnant or not, I’ve re-learned the importance of hydration.
Balance
I had been led to believe that I would have terrible balance while pregnant, which usually happens partly due to those relaxing ligaments causing more wobbliness, plus a drastically changing center of balance.
Fortunately for me, I have noticed very little change in my balance. I feel ever so slightly more wobbly doing some asymmetric or single-leg movements, but I have developed my body awareness, strength, and balance over many years of many kinds of exercise, and I felt myself naturally adjust as I got bigger and with changing levels of relaxin in my body. I haven’t stopped doing any movements because of feeling unstable.
Asymmetric moves are challenging for my core, but my balance feels just fine:
Looser Joints/Ligaments
This has been minor. I only feel it slightly, and mostly in my pelvis. My SI joints have acted up here and there, partly because of less abdominal and thus spinal and pelvic support, and partly because relaxin is preparing my body for labor and making all the ligaments in that area looser. I stopped sprinting around the second trimester because it became uncomfortable on my pelvic floor, but I was also noticing that my ankles were a bit more wobbly – I stopped sprinting on the beach and moved to more packed dirt.
Fatigue & Recovery
Woo has this part been rough! My body is just doing so much new stuff, my lungs are getting more and more squished, my muscles are working much harder to lift not only my increasing and not-evenly-distributed body weight but also the weights I pick up, I have increased blood volume to pump around, pregnancy hormones are way different than non-pregnant hormones and levels, and so on.
I get tired and winded more easily, take longer rests between sets and exercises, but yeah, everything is more work, and I get more fatigued. I’m taking more time for recovery and self-care because I need to. With every training session, I remind myself that right now I’m exercising to stay healthy and grow the healthiest baby I can, not to set new personal bests or get stronger.
Swings are even more cardiovascular-ly taxing than before!
For comparison purposes, here’s a video of me swinging a kettlebell (and teaching) back in 2012 (skip to 0:30 in for the swing), followed by a video of me swinging a bell last week at 36 weeks pregnant – not too big of a difference!
Most of the U.S. is experiencing an unseasonably severe cold snap this week, with temperatures in much of the midwest well below zero. Here in Monterey, there’s been frost in the morning and it’s been dropping into the 30s at night, which is a far cry from -20 and feels just fine to me, but it’s still unseasonably cold for here.
I don’t need to use them here anymore (though I keep them around for traveling to snowy places), but while living in the frozen north, I found an amazing pair of gloves that I highly recommend.
Specifically, I have the Seirus Gore-Tex Xtreme Gloves:
The thing that makes these gloves so awesome is that they are super warm while being form-fitting and allowing dexterity I haven’t found in any other glove this warm. I can zip up my coat with these on, start my car, use my keys to unlock my door, and find things in my pocket or purse (which are often hard to do in other warm gloves).
These are still available on Zappos, but Seirus has a newer, even better version this season – the Gore-Tex Xtreme All-Weather Glove.These have the same look but are now completely waterproof – check out the functionality in this short video:
I promised back when I first wrote about being pregnant many months ago that I wouldn’t bombard the blog with posts about pregnancy, but I have basically not mentioned it much at all, and I thought those of you with kids or kid(s) on the way or planning on them might want to see how my kettlebell work has been going. I’ll write more about it, too, but here are a couple videos my husband took today. I wanted to see how my form is looking, and I’m pretty happy with what I see!
Kettlebell Swings at 36 weeks pregnant – 24kg/52.9lbs kettlebell
Kettlebell Snatches at 36 weeks pregnant – 12kg/26.4lbs kettlebell
When I was in high school, I worked at a children’s resale shop, and the most popular item was the jogging stroller. We had a request list several dozen people long to call when we got one in, and as a distance runner at the time, I always thought that when I had kids, of course I would get one, too, and go for runs with it when the baby was big enough to be in the jogger.
But I will not be running with a jogging stroller. If I do get a stroller, I’ll probably get a jogger because they are maneuverable, durable, and good on many surfaces, but I won’t run with it, and if I can get by without one and just babywearing, that’s my preference.
There’s really just one reason why that cascades into a couple others:
1. It Ruins Your Running Form
Running seems so simple, but what’s going on in your body is really quite complex. Your feet, ankles, hips, core, and shoulders must coordinate and work together to have good form and stay safe.
When you run with proper form, all of these things work together to propel you forward, with both sides of the body and brain working evenly. In fact, walking, running, and sprinting are Original Strength resets that help the halves of your brain work together and build strength, stability, and coordination throughout your hips, core, and shoulders. This translates into better movement and coordination in the rest of your exercises and daily life.
When you run with one or both hands on a jogging stroller, you’re not running the way your body is meant to.
If one hand is on the stroller, your body is twisting unevenly with every step. Even if you switch hands, you’re creating poor movement patterns, and you’ll probably favor one side over the other.
If both hands are on the stroller, you’re not allowing your shoulders to work with your core and hips, making some muscles, joints, and connective tissue do more work than they’re supposed to.
It would feel terribly awkward to start running while keeping your arms held out in front of you, and there’s a reason it feels wrong – it is – yet that’s exactly what people do when running with a jogging stroller.
2. This Poor Form Can Lead To Movement Compensations That Transfer Into Many Other Areas of Your Life
You can start to overdevelop certain muscle groups while neglecting others, depending on how you run with your jogger. For example, it doesn’t allow your core to support you as much as if you had your arms free, and the one-sided twisting of the one-arm-on-the-stroller runner can lead to tightness and/or over-development on one side of the body and weakness and/or laxity on the other side.
This doesn’t go away when you stop running. It is a pattern of unevenness that can show up in your lifting, walking, and all the movements you make in your daily life. You may notice that your hips tend to shift to one side or that your torso tends to twist during lower body exercises, or that you develop shoulder tightness on one side if you favor a particular side to hold the stroller or both sides if you hold on with both hands.
3. Movement Compensations Often Lead to Pain
Finally, the big problem is that these movement compensations often lead to pain, which decreases your quality of life and can derail your exercise and general movement abilities.
The effects of the twisting that happens during the one-handed stroller hold can lead to back and hip pain from the uneven development of muscles that should work evenly. The effects of the two-handed stroller hold can lead to lack of core involvement that can also lead to back and hip pain due to increasing weakness of the core combined with continued running or doing other movements that require the core to be strong.
Back and hip pain can then lead to further compensations and pain in other areas of the body and result in poor communication from the brain to those areas, which cascades into more issues.
Finally:
Form is important. I’m not saying that an occasional run with a jogging stroller will wreck your body, and like anything, there are people who can run like this for years with no pain, but most people who run with a jogger do so regularly, and it can create poor movement patterns that lead to weakness, unevenness, discomfort, and pain. I’d like to avoid that.
Now I need to start working on some sort of pull-behind sled jogging stroller with a harness…
Eclectic Kettlebell 