Exercise during pregnancy not harmful to baby

November 15, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News, Pregnancy

Exercise performed during the latter half of pregnancy doesn’t appear to be harmful to the developing baby.

Research at Polytechnic University-Madrid have published research indicating that mothers who exercise while pregnant aren’t likely to put their developing child at risk.

“An exercise regime carried out during the second and third trimester of pregnancy does not harm the health of the fetus,” said lead author Dr. Jonatan R. Ruiz of Karolinska Institute, Sweden, in collaboration with Polytechnic.

The researchers looked at 160 healthy women between the ages of 25 and 35 who didn’t regularly perform any exercise and had no risk of premature birth. All were women set to become pregnant. Half of the women acted as the control group, not doing any exercise during their pregnancy. The other half performed a carefully supervised exercise routine in collaboration with experts of the gynecology and obstetrics unit of Hospital Severo Ochoa in Madrid.

The authors gauged a number of factors during the study, including the weight and size of the fetus in the second and third trimester, pre-pregnancy body weight of the women, and whether diabetes developed during the pregnancy.

“Body size and gestational age, as well as other health parameters, were similar in the group of women who followed the exercise regime compared to those who did no form of physical activity during pregnancy, which indicates that exercise poses no threat to the health of the fetus”, said Ruiz about the research, published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The group did find, however, that the women who didn’t exercise tended to have heavier babies. They also noted a correlation between the mother’s pre-pregnancy weight and the babies birth weight.

“Sedentary mothers gave birth to heavier newborns. This relationship, however, was not observed in the group of women who exercised during pregnancy,” Ruiz added.

The study results shouldn’t be confused with a Norwegian study recently published that indicated that women who exercise heavily at regular intervals reduced their fertility.