Exercising for Two

When you exercise during pregnancy, your baby is not, as most of us would have thought, a passive, floating passenger (and ballast on the bladder). Instead, he or she may be actively joining in the workout, with the fetal cardiac system growing stronger and healthier as a result of the workouts.

Gretchen Reynolds, in this NYT article, refers to a study that came out last April. "For the study, which was presented on Sunday at the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting in Washington, researchers from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences revisited a group of 61 healthy women, ages 20 to 35, who’d been part of a pilot study of exercise, pregnancy and fetal heart health. About half of the women had exercised regularly during their pregnancies, jogging, power-walking or otherwise working out at a moderate pace at least three times a week. Some also had lifted light weights or practiced yoga. But their primary activity had been aerobic. The other half of the mothers-to-be “were normally active but did not engage in formal exercise,” said Linda E. May, an exercise physiologist who led the study. "

The study found that unborn children had a response to their mom's workouts! Dr. May examined the fetal cardiac readings and found that "fetuses whose mothers had exercised showed lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability than those whose mothers had not worked out."

Dr. May told Reynolds "Dr. May reported at the Experimental Biology meeting. The babies born to exercising mothers continued to have lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability four weeks after delivery than the babies born to the other women. The effect was especially robust in the children whose mothers had exercised the most, Dr. May said; they had the slowest heart rates and presumably the strongest hearts."

Bottom line: stay healthy and work out, for you and your baby's healthy future

Read the entire article here:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/exercising-for-two/