The most common theme I've seen within the research has been attempting to answer pregnant athletes' most frequently asked question: what exercises can I be doing? And what exercises should I avoid? So here is my two-cents on no-nonsense scaling for high intensity sportswomen during pregnancy.
Notice I don’t mention any specific movement or exercise and what to sub it out for. That is because the main takeaway from this entire blog, really, is less about the type of exercise or movement, but more about how you do it. Once you have established what is happening to your own body with these movements, you can then make efforts to either eliminate or swap it out for something.
A lot of you will be coaches or competitors yourselves or at least have an excellent knowledge of the movement patterns already – push, pull, clean, squat, deadlift, etc. Any search on google will show you how to replace a pull up with a ring-row, or advise a machine-based cardio piece in place of double-unders or burpees. I won’t do that here.
This is a guide on how to (and again I roll my eyes again at this phrase) ‘listen to your body.’ In fact, as I really do hate that phrase let's replace it with 'learn your pregnant body.'
I will touch on each of these topics individually in blog posts to come, so here is the scaling advice in brief. Number 1 – intensity – is the only one that is for baby. The rest is for you – for a strong pregnancy and way beyond.
1. Intensity
Despite the archaic nature of heart-rate monitoring in pregnancy fitness, do it. Not to keep under the recommended World Health Organisation heart-rate recommendations for pregnant women, but to monitor how hard you’re pushing yourself. Never take it to beyond 90% effort. The only way for a competitive CrossFitter to really know what this means is to be told by technology. Like I’ve said before, we’re used to feeling uncomfortable so we’re unlikely to know where that threshold is.
2. Abdominal pressure control
Watch for coning or doming of the abdomen in any pulling, overhead, hanging, isometric (i.e. planking) or abdominal exercises. Stop or swap out these movements if you see coning. Ask someone to watch. Coning is a sign that you are not maintaining decent intra-abdominal pressure. There will be an entire entry, if not more, on diastasis and coning and how to check this for yourself, this is just a mention.
3. Breathing
This comes as a twin to abdominal pressure control, and again, I’ll dig deeper into this topic later on. The basic lesson is this: when we breathe in our intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) and intra-thoracic pressure (ITP) increases. When we breathe out the pressure decreases. As competitive or experienced athletes it goes to say we’re used to shifting some tin, so to speak. Many of us have learnt that we will harness a lot of power by holding our breath. Some of us may push it out forcefully (ever grunted before?) as we move through something. This is directly using IAP to add to our strength. Breath holding is typically a high load strategy for very heavy lifting. In pregnancy our needs are different. We must not breath-hold or brace hard during the actual lift - it can compromise our pelvic floor. This really does apply to normal life too - we mustn't breath hold for normal functional movements either, i.e. standing up, bending down, etc. For any lifts, squats, or moments of exertion, focus instead on squeezing the pelvic floor and contracting your abdominals and breathe out slowly and continuously. If you struggle to coordinate this, try counting out loud slowly or humming a tune. If you still struggle with this, reduce the load as it's likely you're lifting too heavy.
4. Pelvic Floor
It is not ok to leak. It means your pelvic floor is compromised. Be alert to feelings of pressure in the pelvis or abdomen. Be alert to any bladder leakage, accidental gas leakage (believe it or not this is a sign of incontinence too) or discomfort if running, jumping or working through highly explosive movements. In my own training, I stopped all jumping activities from 16 weeks onwards despite being symptom-free. This was a personal choice – I felt an instinctive need to work on my pelvic floor in an impact-free environment. I do respect that there are women out there that will run throughout their pregnancies and have no repercussions. If in doubt, see a pelvic floor physio, I can’t recommend this enough.
5. Posture
Watch your posture as you grow – take side-on images or videos of your front rack position, bottom of a squat and overhead press as you progress through pregnancy and watch what is happening to your spine curve, your pelvic tilt and where your weight is on your toes. Your centre of gravity will change in pregnancy and there’ll be all sorts of new forces going through your spine and pelvis. When you see this change, this is when you need to scale your movement – reduce the weight, or shift the position of the weight to counterbalance (i.e. from back squat to front squat, or from front squat to goblet squat). Take another photo or video and scale with your coach until your form is preserved.
6. Pain
I almost didn’t write this one as it almost goes without saying. The ligament-loosening hormone relaxin will change the joint stability around the spine and the pelvis – no pain during exercise in pregnancy is good pain. And this goes for the earlier items mentioned – pressure or discomfort within the abdomen itself. If you feel sharp pain, or if you feel marked pain post-workout, and for this I do also mean DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) – then scale that activity going forwards. DOMS means you’ve been lifting or exercising to the point of breaking and building new fibres, and is largely present after a very high volume of reps or after some very heavy lifting. Remember lesson 3 in my last post? Park the ego. No DOMS whilst pregnant is anything much to be proud of.
As you can see with scaling - one size absolutely does not fit all and it’s even clearer when it comes to experienced athletes that we will all have different strengths and weaknesses.
There is not one exercise out there you should or shouldn’t be doing at a set trimester or period of time during your pregnancy. This is why it’s absolutely vital to look through the points above and tailor them to your own journey.
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