Question: Are there any exercises or workouts that should definitely be avoided during pregnancy?
The obvious ones like very high impact movements and sequences should be avoided certainly towards the end of the pregnancy.
This is relevant to the pelvic floor, as well as compromised joints with a flood of prolactin in the body.
Anything that doesn’t allow a free flow of breath should also be approached with extreme caution.
What you breathe, your baby breathes (much like what you eat, your baby eats) so we need to be sure there is never a restriction of breath in all prenatal exercise.
Supine movements (lying on your back) can be a problem for some women as the weight of the baby can press down on a major vein restricting blood to the brain.
Too much abdominal work for pre-natal women can stress the muscles that are wrapping around the baby – despite it being all you want to do to curtail a growing belly!
Overworking the abdominals in pregnancy can lead to diastasis recti later (a separation of the abdominal muscle wall to allow for the baby to grow).
So while pregnancy is not an excuse to ditch exercise altogether, you can leave the crunches behind!
A qualified pre-natal trainer local to you in the UAE can help guide you through the best moves for your core without heading towards ab separation later down the line.
It is necessary to find a balance between the duration of cardio workouts and the intensity.
If the exercise is on high intensity, then the optimal duration can be only 20-30 minutes for each session.
If the exercise is of moderate intensity, your optimal duration will be 30-45 minutes.
If the exercise is of low intensity, it is likely that the duration will be 45-60 minutes.
Each of these exercises can burn a similar amount of calories due to different levels of intensity.
And instead of fat in the fire of metabolism, the blue flame burns protein amino acids.
After two hours of cardio, the body loses up to 90% leucine (an amino acid that predetermines muscle growth).
For optimal fat burning, usually three days a week for 30 minutes with sufficient intensity to burn at least 300 calories per session. Three days a week cardio combined with three days a week of strength training and conservative food cuts will be a great start, and call “basic training”.
After you can complete basic training, if you want to burn more calories, speed up your results or break a plateau, you can increase the frequency of cardio sessions up to 4-6 days a week.
At the end it should be noted that in spite of constant cardio exercise you cannot lose fat. Because there will be no attention to the diet.
An example – two doughnuts – will replenish your body with 600 kcal which equal to hour running on the treadmill. Thus, solving the problem of fat reduction – diet is in the first place.