The best pregnancy exercises to help you feel your best are not complicated or fancy, but simply require you to put in the work, even when you may not be feeling like it! These exercises will help strengthen your pelvic floor, relieve back pain, and prepare you for labor.
Pregnancy is a time where you probably won’t feel like your best self all the time. With morning sickness, tiredness, extra weight, fluctuating hormones and emotions, and all the other demands placed on your body, pregnancy just makes everything more difficult. However, that doesn’t mean you should just give up on yourself. Lying on the couch and eating endless snacks won’t make you feel any better. You owe it to yourself and to your growing baby keep your health a priority.
Today, I’m going to talk about my best pregnancy exercises, and why they are helpful. Try incorporating any or all of these strengthening exercises into your workouts, and keep aches and pains related to pregnancy at bay for as long as possible. (For ideas for full body workouts that are pregnancy safe, click here.)
Why exercise at all?
There are many benefits to exercising while pregnant, for your body, mind, and soul. For you, mama, exercising can improve mental health by boosting your mood and relieving stress and anxiety. The benefits for your body are almost too numerous to count, and include preventing gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and hypertension, preventing back pain and pelvic floor discomfort, and encouraging better posture. Exercising prepares you for labor, and helps you recover faster afterwards. It can also help you get a better night’s sleep!
Benefits for the baby are numerous too, and includes a healthy birth weight for the baby, better cognitive and cardiovascular function, and fewer risks of complications during pregnancy and delivery. It’s almost like exercise during pregnancy gives the baby a healthy head start!
How and when to exercise
While exercise is important, if done incorrectly, it causes more harm than good. This post focuses mostly on strengthening exercises that will help a pregnant mama feel her best and prepare for labor, especially as the months roll on. For more detailed information about what you specifically should and shouldn’t do by trimester, check out these posts as well. (First trimester exercise, second trimester exercise, running during pregnancy expectations, core exercises)
For now, even if you haven’t been exercising regularly, you can still start, as long as you ease into it, talk to your doctor, and listen to your body. Shoot for at least 2-3 cardio sessions that last about 30 minutes per week, as well as two strength training sessions per week that include the exercises I am going to mention below.
For cardio, the best pregnancy exercise I would recommend is walking, which is low-impact and still has so many health benefits for you and baby! Swimming is also an excellent option. I enjoy running, and you may too. As long as you have been consistently running before and during pregnancy, you can still do it, with modification as time goes on of course. For more about running through your pregnancy, read here.
Strength training is also incredibly important for how your body will feel during pregnancy. Many aches and pains that go along with being pregnant are related to the extra weight your muscles and tendons must bear as your belly grows. You will feel the extra burden of that weight probably mostly in your lower back. These best pregnancy exercises will help keep those aches and pains at bay, as well as train your pelvic floor to keep performing, despite the growing pressure on it!
Best pregnancy exercises
Squats! However you do them, just squat. Do air squats, or add weight however you like to make it more challenging if your body is accustomed to it. Squats are one of the best pregnancy exercises because they strengthen a lot of the muscles of your pelvic floor. You will also use these muscles during delivery. Wall sits are also great to target these muscles.
I also highly recommend anything that works your posterior chain, or any of the muscle groups that run along the back of your body. These include your glutes, your lats, hamstrings, erector spinae muscles, trapezius, etc. Strengthening these muscles are key to preventing back pain and keeping your body in alignment! Focus on doing these exercises correctly and your pregnancy posture will improve. Best pregnancy exercises for your posterior chain include rows, lat pulldowns, and bridges, and a few others demonstrated in the video. There are a million variations of these exercises, so find one you like!
Lastly, you do still need to work you core. But you need to do it correctly. Pregnancy is not the time for your usual ab routine. Read more about this here. The ONLY two core exercises you need from the second trimester on are cat cows and bird dogs, which will work your pelvic floor and your posterior chain muscles at the same time!
Listen to your body
Pregnancy is a time to try your best, but not push too far. If any of these exercises are causing more aches and pains, or discomfort of any time, stop doing them. But I would encourage you to not give up on yourself. You will thank yourself later on. Go get em’ mama!
For all pregnancy related posts, click here.
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