World Masters Champion!

Exercise during pregnancy - a question of intensity..?

When I became pregnant I went on a mission to find some reasonable guidelines as to what I could and couldn’t do in terms of exercise and training. I didn’t know anything about exercise and pregnancy at this point but by enlarge what I did know wasn’t too encouraging. Stuff pregnant friends had been advised rang through my head “you better give up running just in case” one friend and passionate hill runner was told by her GP. “Easy swimming is fine” another assured me or “ Go for brisk walks every day instead of running, cycling etc..”  WHAT?? This was not what I wanted to hear! Brisk walking was not going to produce the levels of exercise-induced endorphins I was used to.

This kind of advice was all well and good for someone who wasn’t too pushed about physical activity, but to someone used to fairly moderate levels of exercise at high intensity it was not what I wanted to hear. I wondered what the hell all the elite athletes at the top end of the scale do? I was sure the likes of Paula Radcliff and Sonia O Sullivan didn’t stop training during their pregnancies. Surely they didn’t just swap running 100 miles a week for easy walks and gentle swimming. I thought I had heard somewhere that Paula in fact had run a marathon while 7 months pregnant in a pretty impressive time!

In my search for information I turned to the 1^st port of call for people looking for information on anything – the trusty internet. This turned out to be a bit of a mission. I suspected that the information must be out there somewhere and that most pregnant female athletes must be following some sorts of training programs, but any concrete reference to what they were doing remained elusive. Googling word combinations such as “athlete” and “pregnancy” and “exercise” and variations of the above yielded results with wildly different advice. Everyone who wrote anything seemed to have an opinion and I could not believe how polarized some of these views were. There seemed to be precious little in the way of advice that wasn’t ultra conservative.

Anyway at this point not finding what I wanted, I put the brakes on and took  a different tack. Being a scientist and also a veterinarian I decided the best approach would to conduct my own scientific literature review to look for good robust peer-reviewed journal articles from a range of physiology and medical journals for answers. The results produced slightly less conflicting views on exercise during pregnancy, but by en large I felt were still pretty cautious in terms of advice. The standard set of guidelines that are referred to in most publications were set by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) first in the 1980’s. These have been recently revised but still remain pretty conservative. ACOG recommend that pregnant women who are free of any complications engage in >  or = 30 minutes of moderate physical activity per day on most days of the week.

During my literature search I was astonished to find that in general there has actually been relatively very little in the way of research on the effects of exercise on pregnant women and their unborn babies in the last 20 or 30 years. I came across one recently written article that explained the reason for this - such research is highly contentious and even deemed in some cases to be unethical. Research to investigate the effects of high intensity exercise on the fetus appears to be particularly fraught with ethical complications, and therefore the number of studies investigating such could nearly be counted on one hand with very few participants in each study.  It is worth mentioning here that based on these limited studies there doesn’t appear to be any evidence to indicate that exercise at higher intensities produces any harmful effects on the fetus, which I found particularly interesting. Despite this lack of evidence, one of the most common suggestions when you seek advice about what level you can exercise at during pregnancy is to reduce the intensity! Really though this is not surprising -The precautionary principle is applied across the board when it comes to pregnancy. This as any women who has ever undergone a pregnancy will know is true, not just when it comes to exercise, everything from supplements to medicines to foods and drink, anything that has not been proved conclusively beyond reasonable doubt to be totally harmless – well you better not!! Just in case that is… No one is going to advice a pregnant woman otherwise for fear of the consequences, if there happen to be any. That’s why taking the approach of listening to your body is probably the best advice anyone can get when wondering what they should and shouldn’t do during their pregnancy: if it feels ok – go for it!

Feature in Fit Magazine

Nice feature this week in Fit Mag about me and Tori and the racing I have been doing on the track  - Check it out! Hope it will inspire afew moms to get back to their pre-pregnancy exercise regiemes or even better try something new!

National Champs with baby on board!

Hi I’m Susie, a 36 year first time mom to a lovely vibrant baby girl Tori, and just 12 weeks after the happy event getting ready to compete in the Irish National Track Championships this coming weekend. I’m feeling great and my life is back on track (pardon the pun) , and  though probably not quite in the form I am capable of just yet,  I have come back post-baby way faster than expected and am going better than ever on the track. Have even posted a few PBs in training so I’m pretty hopeful I will give a good account of myself this coming weekend.. Who says there is no life after a baby!

We live in Dublin and I’m currently on maternity leave and taking some respite from my job  running around the country  as a fish vet. More about that again. I am and have always been a pretty serious recreational athlete who thrives on exercise and the buzz and gerenal sense of well being I get from it.  Everything from running to triathlon to adventure racing, but the current obsession is track cycling. I wanted to write something for the last year about a subject dear to my heart  - I love exercise !  I do and have always done loads of it.  I love competition and would consider myself a committed recreational athlete  – and know there are many women out there  just like me. Women who compete for fun, but are serious about doing well and reaching their full potential for personal reward and fun.

Due to my circumstances I have become interested in is how to fuse this personality with pregnancy and motherhood, which I have strived to do this over the last year. Word got out that I trained all the way through my pregnancy and since the birth of Tori I have received many emails from pregnant women desperate for advice or reassurance. Most of these are like me, with a passion for sport, and represent all levels of ability. Many were told to stop exercising or cut down significantly on it because they were pregnant. They want to know what I did, how much I trained, ask me questions like did I stay on the bike all the way through, what I did in the gym etc. There is a serious lack of good information and advice out there for pregnant women who want to exercise. Note I specify “good”. There is endless not so useful information, and many willing to give advice. From hearsay and opinions of friends and family – which can sometimes be bizarre, to guarded conventional advice from doctors, physios, personal trainers and the likes, all probably afraid they will get sued if something were to go wrong with the pregnancy or during the post-partum period.  Where there is advice it is nearly always depressingly over conservative, especially for women used to high levels of physical activity. The same “one shoe fits all” guidelines are supplied to all those who ask. I very quickly realised the best strategy for me when deciding what to do was not to ask, and to go on a journey and find out what was best for myself and my baby, both during pregnancy and for that time post-birth. . My 'shoes' wouldn’t  fit or suit all either but I took my own path based on my own feeling and research I did, enabling me to make informed decisions about what to do. Despite my concerns pre baby I have found it is most definitely possible to maintain good fitness, and therefore sanity, during pregnancy and post-birth. Fingers crossed for the weekend with my new support team to cheer me on!