Planks are AWESOME during pregnancy. It is really difficult to find good abs exercises to do while pregnant. You do not want to risk abdominal separation with crunch-like exercises. Planks are a great way to keep your core strong, keep back pain at bay, and make contractions more effective when you do go into labor. Continue reading
This is a simple bodyweight workout you can do right at home. It takes only 12 minutes, but it will challenge your ENTIRE body. Without having to do a single crunch your core muscles will be activated during the whole workout. After having a baby you probably can’t wait to get your old figure back and finally have a flat stomach.
The exercise pictures below were taken three months postpartum (obviously except for the cross punch picture!) and you can still see a bit of my post-baby belly. Continue reading
Only two more weeks until my first half-marathon post-baby. My little girl is now six months old and until last week I wasn’t sure if I was going to get enough training in. But getting the registration confirmation gave me a motivation boost and Continue reading
Warming up before working out is very important. Warming up before working out during pregnancy is even more important! It does not only loosen stiff muscles, but when done properly it can improve your performance and most importantly it will reduce your risk of injury during the workout.
Goals of the warm-up:
To answer lilla’s question: “Did you keep working out with Zuzka for a while after you found out [you were pregnant]? And if yes, for how long?”
I am generally a very active person. Before I got pregnant I had already started training for a marathon, I was learning how to dance tango and went salsa dancing. In the morning before work I did some yoga (yogatic) and a short homeworkout (bodyrock / zuzka light) two or three times a week. Generally I did some kind of activity on a daily basis.
These are definitely not a traditional pregnancy exercise, but they do offer a number of benefits through their broad muscle engagement and explosive nature! Swings are usually performed with both hands on a kettlebell. However by doing single-arm dumbbell swings, you make sure that your growing belly will not be squeezed during this exercise. Dumbbell swings can be just as effective as kettlebell swings and are ideal for keeping it safe during pregnancy. Continue reading
I am a former bodyrocker. I used to follow the workouts posted on bodyrock.tv, and then later also zuzka lights zwow’s. However when I became pregnant I could not do the same workouts anymore. It was very frustrating to first chose a workout for the day and then think about how I could replace every other exercise in that workout with a different one that would be suitable for me. But since I read about all the benefits from staying fit during your pregnancy I wanted to continue working out. I really missed an alternative to bodyrock, that would have workouts for pregnant women. A site providing workouts that could easily be done at home, without any equipment and especially a site with a variety of workouts. The pregnancy exercises you can find online tend to be endless repetitions of each other and I got bored with them. So hopefully my routines will help some of you to stay motivated and keep fit with all the changes you are going through.