Divya Deswal explains the kind of exercises to do during pregnancy, what are its benefits and how safe it is to do them
Exercise is good for everybody. You don’t have to be pregnant to know that. But it is also good for pregnant women. Firstly, what is exercise? Any kind of movement that you have been doing up to this point before getting pregnant is normal activity for you, so you can continue the same activity.
However, you might want to reduce the intensity. You know why? Because right from the time that you get pregnant, your hormones start to change in preparation for accommodating the baby in your body. One such hormone relaxing helps make your tissues softer. That ultimately will help your ribcage to open up as the baby’s size will grow.
But that also means that if you jerk and hurt a ligament, it will hurt for a very long time. When we are choosing prenatal exercises, our emphasis is on muscle support, how to develop, or build or support muscles that will support us during labor. In applied positions, in squatting positions, we can also choose an exercise that helps us balance and move our pelvis. Squatting is one of them.
There’s a whole new set of exercises we can do that helps with our spine because as the baby’s weight increases, we begin to adjust our posture to carry that extra weight. And so supporting the spine, supporting the muscles around the spine can be your exercises. And yet a whole set of exercises can be directed at positioning the baby well.
Ultimately we want that baby to move into the pelvis facing one of the sides, preferably the right so that he can find the navigation system coded, both within him and the structure to be born. When we exercise there is a release of endorphin, the feel-good hormone in our body. So exercise is good for us, even when we are pregnant.
