I think the findings of this article are great! One more reason, and many of us need them, to stay active during pregnancy! I hope you are enlighted as I was...
EXCERSIZING FOR TWO
Almost anyone who’s been pregnant remembers the profound link that can develop between a mother-to-be and her unborn child. You feel that life inside you, both physically independent and braided with your own.
Now, new research suggests that the bond may be stronger than had been suspected. 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.
This training response lingers apparently even after birth, the new science shows. Babies born to mothers who exercised while pregnant were found to have healthier hearts than other infants a full month after delivery.
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.
When Dr. May examined the fetal cardiac readings, in an earlier report published last year, she found that fetuses whose mothers had exercised showed lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability than those whose mothers had not worked out.
For her most recent presentation, Dr. May asked the women to return to the lab again, this time a month after giving birth. The newborns, healthy and no doubt squalling, underwent another cardiac exam.
For her most recent presentation, Dr. May asked the women to return to the lab again, this time a month after giving birth. The newborns, healthy and no doubt squalling, underwent another cardiac exam.
The previous results held, 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.
“It’s exciting research,” Dr. May said, though it is also preliminary and incomplete. Just how a pregnant woman’s jogging or power-walking remakes her unborn child’s heart remains unknown, she said. Mother and fetus have, after all, completely separate cardiac systems and blood circulations. But certain hormones released during exercise do cross the placenta, Dr. May said, and could be stimulating changes in the developing fetus’s heart.
Read the full article here: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/exercising-for-two/
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