What are the real exercise guidelines during pregnancy and post-partum exercise guidelines? How do you safely exercise through your pregnancy? With the varied advice from medical doctors and midwives, it's important to get up to speed with the current pregnancy exercise research.  Enter Catherine Cram, MS.  Catherine is an exercise physiologist and the owner of Comprehensive Fitness Consulting, a company that provides pre- and postnatal fitness certifications and information to hospitals, health and wellness organizations, and the military. Comprehensive Fitness Consulting offers the most current, evidence-based fitness information to pregnant and postpartum women and their healthcare providers.

Catherine Cram is coauthor of Exercising Through Your Pregnancy with Dr. James Clapp.  She is the author of Fit Pregnancy for Dummies and a contributing author of Women’s Health Care in Physical Therapy: Principles and Practices for Rehabilitation Specialists.

We talked about everything you want to know- how hard to go, heart rate guidelines, how exercise benefits the fetus and pregnant mother. We talked about exercise and core temperature during pregnancy, how to know if you're going too hard.  I loved that we went deeper into how your physiology changes and how that affects your cardiac, respiratory, and musculoskeletal systems.   We also talked about return to sport post-partum.  We also talked about breastfeeding and the energy needs associated with it.

Want more on information on being a pregnant athlete?  Here's all of the blog posts and podcasts I've published on the subject. 

 

Topics Discussed in the Podcast 

• biggest myths about exercising while pregnant
• how to safely exercise during pregnancy
• the data about how exercise positively affects the mother and fetus
• heart rate rules for exercising during pregnancy
• how hard can I go and for how long
• warning signs of exercise being too much during pregnancy
• post-partum return to sport
• dispelling fear around diastasis recti
• breastfeeding and exercise

"I don’t want set (pregnancy exercise) guidelines because in doing that, we limit some and we overdo it for others.  I don’t believe in these limitations being put out there for absolutely no reason. We shouldn’t do that. We should empower women, empower them to understand what’s safe and effective. I can tell you in all the years of working with the 1000s of pregnant women I’ve worked with, I’ve actually never had a woman become injured or have a problem with her pregnancy because of the workouts she did, which is pretty amazing."

-Catherine Cram, MS

Resources

• Visit Catherine Cram's Website on Designing Pre-Natal and Post-Natal Exercise Programs
• Some of Catherine's articles for BabyCenter (she is on the medical advisory board)

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co.