Anemia of Pregnancy and Exercise (part 2 of 3)

Welcome back to our three-part discussion about anemia of pregnancy.  Last week we talked about the natural expansion of blood volume, anemia, hemoglobin, iron-rich foods and supplements.

In addition to increasing iron-rich foods in your diet and taking herbal iron supplements, you can also boost your hemoglobin with exercise.

Now, I am NOT the exercise police!  I am a couch potato.  I don’t enjoy exercising.  I don’t even like thinking about exercising.  

Studies show that only 20 minutes of exercise twice a week results in an increase in hemoglobin!  This information that gets me off the couch and moving!  The exercise must be enough to get you breathing heavy.  When your muscles need more oxygen to work, the body responds by increasing the heart rate and breathing to supply more oxygen more quickly.  But the body doesn’t want to work that hard, so it also builds more hemoglobin so the next time you exercise it doesn’t have to raise the heart rate and respiration rate as much.  Amazing!  This is why when you first begin to exercise you are exhausted very quickly, but after a couple weeks of regular exercise you can do so much more with ease.  Your body has increased the hemoglobin to carry oxygen to the body more quickly and efficiently.

Swimming is also a fantastic exercise to raise your hemoglobin! It is easy on your body and fun to do.  When swimming make sure to only do the freestyle or breaststroke, if you’re feeling adventurous you can do the butterfly, but that stroke is hard enough when you’re not pregnant! Avoid scuba-diving because the pressure changes can be too much for the bag of water to withstand.  Doing any inverted underwater moves, like handstands or somersaults, has been shown to cause baby to flip to breech, so I would avoid that as well (unless your baby is breech already and you want to turn him back to head-down!)  Also, make sure to drink plenty of water after any sort of exercise to keep you and baby hydrated!

Another great effect of exercise and the resulting hemoglobin increase is that labor will be easier.  Oxygen will be more abundantly supplied to your uterus (a large muscle doing a lot of work) and your baby!  This means the baby will fare better during labor, your contractions will hurt less and your birth will be easier.

Hopefully this information will inspire you to get out a walk today.  At a minimum, walk briskly away from home for 10 minutes, then turn around and walk briskly back.  That’s all it takes to signal your body to build more hemoglobin.

I’ll meet you back here next week when we will discuss iron supplements to avoid during pregnancy and why.

I’m going for a walk now!

Blessings!

:) Deborah