Hey everyone Amy here,
Today I’d like to take some time to share my thoughts and feelings with continuing my fitness goals whilst being pregnant.
A bit of a *DISCLAIMER* before I start. Obviously I am not a doctor and this is NOT medical advice, just how I have personally handled my situation. You MUST consult your physician before beginning or continuing any fitness program while pregnant.
As you may have already read I am currently into my second trimester of pregnancy! And I will tell you what, maintaining an acceptable level of ‘normality’ of life throughout pregnancy is harder than it looks. I am sure any mother out there can testify to this! This is the story of my pregnancy so far and the challenges I faced.
I first found out that we were expecting while we were knee deep in our first ever CrossFit Open. For those of you who don’t know what the CrossFit Open is, it is a series of functional fitness challenges released one week at a time, over a 5 week period. The magic of the open is that you do not need to be a member of a CrossFit gym, you can complete the workouts at your own home or anywhere really with nothing but someone to judge you and a camera. Your score after each week gets compared to the hundreds of thousands of others competing around the world, which is a cool way of seeing how you stack up against other people of your ability.
As anyone who has been pregnant before knows, once you get pregnant or leading up to this stage most people do a lot of research! However when you search ‘pregnancy and exercise’ you seem to get a hell of a lot of ‘can’t do’s’ and ‘never do’s’. Along with ‘not allowed’s’ (sadly this doesn’t just stop with exercise, but also with diet, travel, household duties and even pets.).
Whilst this was the second happiest day of my life thus far (the first was marrying my best friend), I was daunted and suddenly a little depressed! According to my superficial and initial research I was meant to be cooped up for the next nine months; this, I could not handle with being a very active person.
We both ended up doing far more extensive research and endless discussion/consultation with my doctor! And found that I can still ‘LIVE’. I could still exercise, run, walk, swim and even lift (with modifications). Yay! We found that the big part of the taboo around exercise and pregnancy is making sure that your body doesn’t overheat or get to the point of exhaustion. The other main thing I had to focus on was that I wasn’t to be in a position where I could lose my balance or over stretch, as your hormones release a chemical called relaxin that means your ligaments become more ‘relaxed’, and over stretching can cause injury more easily.
After all this research I prepared myself for the 16.4 Workout of the CrossFit Open! This was a HUGE workout. As with most pregnant women, the dreaded morning sickness had kicked in. All I could think, was how am I meant to do this when I simply feel sick… all the time! But despite it all, I tried and pushed on through. I had to physically pace myself, take note not to overheat, exhaust myself or let my blood pressure get too high! Some serious scaling and self control had to be put into place. Sounds relatively easy, right?!
I am not going to sugar coat the next couple of months, I struggled at times! But I was determined to not let it get me down, or stop me! I was incredibly tired and Dice would often find me napping in the afternoon before I would go onto workout. I am not going to lie, some afternoons I did not move from the couch at all. When I did get out to the gym I often had to have ‘morning sickness’ breaks or ‘hormone’ breaks where I was too emotional to continue, and the number one challenge was scaling my workouts to suit me. We spent an extra ten minutes before each workout figuring out how we could scale and modify the original workout to suit me. A ten minutes well spent! We found that there is so much information out there if you continue to search long enough and a lot of ways to easily modify workouts for pregnancy.
I was also starting to experiencing some sadness in seeing all my hard earned results go backwards and just not being ‘physically’ where I was a few months ago. But needless to say after every workout I would come out feeling refreshed, re-energised and ready for what the world has to offer. It is amazing how ‘crappy’ you can feel before to how amazing you DO feel afterwards. I also felt an even bigger sense of achievement and that I had accomplished something big.
A lot of our research pointed to the fact that continuing exercise throughout pregnancy can ease labour pains, help with mental strength and improve recovery times after birth.
May this be a lesson to all, to not get disheartened by anything without first doing your homework. Always look into a problem, research or ask questions as there may be a way around or a compromise for the situation.
I hope what I have felt, experienced and learnt can help others through their own pregnancy journey but remember to always consult a physician before continuing an exercise program whilst pregnant.
In other news from the Pride, we are happy to announce that our merchandise store is up and running. To buy any of our products (including male, female and children/baby shirts, hoodies, singlets, and hats) please head to our Shop page on our blog and help share the Active message!
Until next time, keep up the hard work!
Amy
P.S keep an eye out for an exciting announcement on our social media pages in the coming week!!!
Inspired Lion 
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