Did you know that exercising in the first half of your pregnancy can positively impact your baby’s placenta function? But, how can you feel confident about exercising during pregnancy with all the myths about the safety of exercise?
The good news is that exercise is generally very safe throughout pregnancy, to include in the first trimester. Outside of specific complications that your provider states that exercise is unsafe, you can safely exercise!
Exercising Throughout Pregnancy
There are numerous benefits to exercising throughout pregnancy! For you:
- Improved comfort throughout pregnancy,
- Decreased risk of developing a prenatal complication,
- Faster labors,
- Improved birth outcomes, and
- Faster recovery postpartum.
For your baby, benefits could include:
- Improved stress response,
- Better transition from womb to world,
- Better body composition at birth,
- Improved cognitive skills,
- Enhanced nervous system development,
- Improved motor skills, and
- Increase language skills.
Even though there is a lot of research to support exercising throughout pregnancy is safe and beneficial, there can still be worry of doing something wrong or harmful! We get these concerned messages all the time from our followers: “I don’t know what to do to keep my baby safe, but I love working out!”
Good news: there is really not much you can do exercise-wise to hurt your baby (outside of a complication that makes exercise contraindicated). You can’t run too hard, or lift too heavy, or exercise too intensely. Outside of throwing your body off elevated surfaces, or contact sports, you will likely not do anything that could hurt your baby with a normal workout. So, breathe easy there!
But, let’s discuss some of the benefits for your placenta, aka the connection between you and your baby, if you exercise throughout your pregnancy!
Benefits of Prenatal Exercise for Your Baby's Placental Development
The placenta is your baby’s lifeline during utero! The placenta acts as your baby’s lungs, kidneys, and liver by transporting oxygen and nutrients to your baby and removing metabolic wastes. Plus, the placenta helps with hormone production and provides immunity to your baby. So, a high-functioning placenta helps your baby in utero!
Exercise throughout pregnancy has been linked to increase blood vessel formation in the placenta, which could mean an increase functional capacity. This means that the placenta has a better capability to transport oxygen and nutrients to baby, and then also transparent metabolic waste away from baby. Having more blood vessels, or roads to baby, will increase the efficiency of the system.
But increased blood vessels could also be linked to increased endoplasmic reticulum stress, or stress on the system that helps with protein synthesis and other cellular functions. If this system is stressed, it may not be able to function as well. So, the concern is if there is rapid blood vessel development in the placenta does it increase the stress on the endoplasmic reticulum system?
Fortunately, the answer is no! The increased blood pressure formation does not increase stress on the endoplasmic reticulum system, so protein synthesis and other cellular functions are not affected, and maybe even improved with exercise throughout pregnancy.
Feel strong and move comfortably throughout your entire pregnancy. Our program syncs to your current week of pregnancy, so you can start at any time!
- 5 Workouts Per Week
- Labor Prep Workouts
- Teambuildr App Access
So, what type of prenatal exercise should you do to reap these benefits??
Now, does it matter if you exercise at a mild (50% rate of perceived effort) or moderate (70% rate of perceived effort) intensity? Maybe, maybe not. In some studies, it’s important to note that the sample sizes are smaller, so it will be harder to see big differences between groups.
Currently, research is showing that there is not a significant difference between exercising at a mild or moderate intensity level throughout pregnancy and the benefits of increased blood vessel formation in the placenta.
But when they look at the sedentary groups, that were either active throughout the day (without structured exercise) or not very active, they did find a difference between the two groups.
So, the hypothesis is that if there is a larger sample size, we will likely see a difference between exercising at a mild intensity level versus exercising at a moderate intensity level, showing more benefit to exercise at a moderate intensity level.
One study by Clapp et al. also explored the timing of exercise and the development of the placenta. In this study, they found that exercising during the first half of pregnancy had more of an influence on the development of the placenta.
It can be really hard to exercise during the first trimester, while we’re experiencing extreme fatigue and nausea, but if we keep in mind that even mild intensity exercise is still beneficial for placenta development, we can go for easy walks and still reap the benefits!
And the good news is, the first half of pregnancy is within the first 20 weeks–so if you are resting the first 12-13 weeks of pregnancy, you still have about two months of time to begin workouts and improve the functional capacity of your placenta for your baby!
Want more?? Join our prenatal and postnatal fitness programs! MamasteFit is unique in that we are one of the ONLY prenatal/postnatal training facilities in the United States. We develop our workout programs from our experience of working with in-person pre/postnatal fitness clients and work closely with physical therapists to refine our programming. In addition, we are birth workers, so we combine our experience as perinatal fitness trainers and birth professionals to ensure that our programs actually support your birth preparation and recovery!
Our prenatal and postnatal fitness programs are offered in two formats:
- Teambuildr App: list of exercises with demo videos with options to track your weights and progress within the app!
- On-Demand Videos: full length workout videos you follow as you workout at the same time
prenatal Fitness Programs
Learn the science of pregnancy and birth to take the mystery of labor away! Understand why you are feeling what you feel, and learn strategies to confidently move through pregnancy and birth!
- 9h+ of Video
- Support Group
- Close Captioning
- 5 Workouts/Week
- Gym Workouts
- Self-Paced
Instructor
GINA
Workout on-demand with our prenatal fitness workout videos! Each workout is 30-40 minutes to follow along as you exercise at the same time!
- Birth Prep
- All Trimesters
- Mobility Work
Instructor
GINA
Find comfort and relief from pelvic girdle pain throughout your pregnancy and postpartum period! This program incorporates myofascial sling focused exercises to stabilize across the pelvic girdle joints.
- 3 Weeks
- On Demand Workout Videos to Follow
REFERENCES:
Clapp, J. F. (2006). Influence of endurance exercise and diet on human placental development and fetal growth. Placenta, 27(6-7), 527-534.
Hardy, D. B., Mu, X., Marchiori, K. S., & Mottola, M. F. (2021). Exercise in Pregnancy Increases Placental Angiogenin without Changes in Oxidative or Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.