There are a few certainties about pregnancy: You will gain weight. Your body will change during and after. You may never be the same size again.
Both genetics and lifestyle choices help determine the extent to which you’ll experience all of the above, says Julie Wiebe, a Los Angeles-based physical therapist who focuses on postpartum issues.
“Some women just do pregnancy really well,” Wiebe says. “I’ve had women in my office who ask, ‘Why does she have a flat belly, and I have pooch?'” Often, she says, women equate “pregnancy recovery with being back to [their] pre-pregnancy weight.” But, she adds: “That’s a really inaccurate measure of recovery. We have to get a new message out to women: that recovery is not regaining the beach body they had when they were 18, but restoring function.” In particular, that means restoring the function of the abdominal wall, pelvic wall and diaphragm, Wiebe says.
[See: 10 Ways to Make Your Childbirth Easier.]
Listen to Your Body
Exercising during pregnancy can confer many benefits to women (and their babies), and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends healthy pregnant women engage in at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise on most days of the week. ACOG’s recommendations exclude activities that pose the risk of injury, namely those involving falling, such as downhill skiing, horseback riding, bicycling and racket sports. Wiebe adds that women shouldn’t do crunches because they could negatively affect the abdominal wall.
Many women opt for gentler exercises such as swimming, dancing or walking, Wiebe says. “It doesn’t have to look like exercise for you to reap cardiovascular benefits.”
Other benefits include reducing lower back pain, which many pregnant women experience, and maintaining bone and emotional health. Exercising also reduces a mother’s risk of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a serious complication characterized by high blood pressure and seizures.
Instead of focusing on what kind of exercise you do and for how long, listen to your body, Wiebe says. “Women know how to listen to their brain, but not to their body. When you get pregnant, you’re not the only one. You need energy: You can’t spend it all at the gym and not have enough to support the pregnancy.”
Signs that you might be overdoing it or exercising your body inappropriately, she adds, may include incontinence or leaking; heaviness in the vagina (which could indicate a collapsed pelvis); or any sort of unusual pain.
Wiebe encourages women to focus on their form — keeping the correct posture during activities — as well as their breathing. “Learn to breathe well,” she says. It’s especially important to use the breath to train the pelvic wall and abdominal wall for both the stress of delivery and bouncing back afterward, she adds.
[See: The Best and Worst Exercises for Pregnant Women.]
Have Realistic Post-Pregnancy Goals
While chopping vegetables for dinner, Kassie Ambrose, 34, who works in marketing for a biotech company and lives in a Los Angeles suburb, quips, “I will never have the same shape as I did before kids. I don’t think my body has changed significantly except I carry 5 pounds — because I live. I don’t choose to restrict my diet; I don’t work out every day.”
Ambrose, who has two kids, ages 5 and 2, was a light-weight runner before she got pregnant. A little over a year after her first daughter was born, she started running more seriously, but switched to walking when she got pregnant again. “Chasing around a 2-year-old was a pretty good workout,” she says.
Prenatal yoga during both pregnancies also helped keep Ambrose fit. But after her second pregnancy — despite being able to run and feeling fairly fit — she had intense pelvic pain. The diagnosis: symphysis pubis dysfunction, or SPD, a condition in which an overabundance of the hormone relaxin — responsible for loosening your pelvic ligaments during pregnancy so your baby can slide out — causes your pelvic ligaments to remain loose after giving birth, which leads to pelvic joint pain.
Ambrose consulted Wiebe, who helped her re-learn how to breathe properly to help realign her pelvic region. “When you breathe in, your pelvic floor should drop,” Ambrose says. “Mine was doing the opposite.”
Wiebe says Ambrose was like many women who consult her after pregnancy. “Their body changed during the pregnancy. They have to recover/re-learn first,” Wiebe says. “Unfortunately, people think, ‘Oh, I can go back to boot camp.'”
Ambrose says the breathing exercises helped her resolve her SPD. Now she focuses on breathing correctly when she exercises three to four times a week.
[See: 10 Weird Mind and Body Changes That Are Totally Normal During Pregnancy.]
Jumpstart Your Baby’s Health
When you’re pregnant, what’s good for you is usually good for your baby — exercise included. Erin Smith, of Mesa, Arizona, established an educational consultancy called Imprinted Legacy based on that premise. “Exercise doesn’t just enhance our own strength [and] flexibility,” she says. “It also sends hormonal and metabolic messages throughout [a mother’s] entire body. When these messages reach her baby, they are telling the systems in the body how they need to build.”
A baby’s cardiovascular system is one of the primary beneficiaries of a mother’s exercise. “Just as exercise lowers a mother’s resting heart rate, a baby’s heart conditions in same way,” Smith says. “It helps reduce how hard [the baby’s] heart will have to work.” She adds that exercising might even offset a baby’s genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease: “Exercise increases a baby’s brain activity and improves the communication between the central nervous system and brain cells, and the communication throughout the rest of [the] body from the brain.”
There’s even some evidence that the increase in brain activity — due to more brain signaling and brain cell growth — can increase a baby’s IQ, Smith says. The metabolic benefits are significant, too. Just as exercising can lower a woman’s risk of gestational diabetes (or control it if she already has it), it can influence how a baby’s body will use insulin or break down glucose.
Smith says virtually any type of safe exercise can benefit a future mother and her baby, but she cautions women against doing something they don’t enjoy. “If you do something and hate it, that can send a negative hormonal message to your body,” she says. “The best exercise is the one you’re going to do regularly and enjoy.”
And sometimes, exercise just won’t be possible, and that’s OK, too, Smith adds. Like Wiebe, Smith encourages women to listen to their bodies. “I have a few friends who were very active [before pregnancy], and when they were pregnant, their bodies just didn’t allow for it. They worried about how that would affect their baby,” Smith says.
“Your body knows what needs to be done. It knows if it needs to conserve energy,” she adds. “Just because you’re unable to exercise doesn’t mean your body is not going to be healthy later in life. Your baby will still get the benefits, but in a different way.”
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