Fit For Birth

Fit For Birth is a health education and training company for fitness and wellness professionals. We educate Pre & Post Natal Leaders to inspire the use of natural methods to avoid Infertility, Mechanized Childbirth and Disease in our infants.

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Four Holistic Pregnancy Health Tips for Fitness Professionals

Despite living in an age that demands quick fixes and pill-popping remedies, the synergistic combination of wellness factors may prove more effective for preparing our mothers-to-be and their unborn children for optimal health.  For fitness professionals, understanding foundational elements beyond exercise is critical for inspiring the highest level of health for our pre and postnatal clients.

Pregnancy offers a unique opportunity for re-establishing wellness.   Science continues to reveal that the rising rates of infertility, mechanized childbirth and infant chronic disease are caused by a combination of stress, environmental factors and personal health choices. Evidence for a preventive and integrative approach continues to mount.

It has already been established that infertility and infant disease are linked to preconception and perinatal conditions, choices that parents make before and while pregnant.  Stress reduction, improved nutrition, environmental toxin reduction, and improved overall maternal health can postively impact infertility and infant disease rates. Furthermore, it has been more than a decade since exercise has been proven to significantly counter the incredibly high rates of surgery and drugs during labor and deliveries.

Together, stress reduction, nutrition, home detox and exercise are four “medicines” that are difficult to bottle and sell.  This is where pre and postnatal fitness professionals can have a powerful impact.  

Fitness professionals are often a primary source of general health information for our clients.  In addition to exercise, we can teach our clients techniques for de-stressing, reducing household toxins, remaining well-hydrated, and eating natural foods.

What follows are some key facts and coaching considerations that can easily be added to your coaching during a personal pre-conception or prenatal training session.  

#1 De-Stressing

“Positive maternal emotions have been shown to advance the health of the unborn child,” says Thomas Verny, MD, who is the author of Pre-Parenting, Nurturing Your Child from Conception, and considered one of the world’s leading authorities on prenatal psychology.  Verny wrote, “…thoughts which infuse the developing baby with a sense of happiness or calm can set the stage for a balance, happy, and serene disposition throughout life.” Although a multitude of methods exist, from visualization to meditation, prayer, and journaling, finding a method that you and your clients believe in is the key.

#2 Removing Household Toxins

Choosing natural household products and cleaners is another big step toward achieving prenatal wellness. Many people do not realize that most of their dangerous environmental toxins are usually ones they’ve brought into their own home.  Key areas for your pregnant clients to look into are: filtering drinking and bathing water, buying natural household products, avoiding chemical cosmetics and synthetic air fresheners, and staying far away from any lawn that has been treated with pesticides or fertilizers.  Some fertilizers and cosmetic ingredients are known to cause birth defects.  You can dramatically increase the value of your services by bringing awareness to your prenatal clients.

#3 Basic Nutrition Foundations

Since the majority of women are dehydrated prior to conception, the first nutritional component they should consider when pregnant is drinking water.  Once pregnant, the developing fetus places enormous demands for water.  F. Batmanghelidj, MD, (“Dr. B”), author of books like, Your Body’s Many Cries for Water and Water for Health, for Healing, for Life, discusses pregnancy: “By the time it grows to be a full term baby, about a trillion cell divisions will have taken place.” He also says, “Every time a cell gives rise to a daughter cell, 75 percent or more of its volume has to be filled with water. In short, growth depends on the availability of water.” The importance of water in the pregnant body is further emphasized with the following jingle that I’ve often heard one of my mentors, Paul Chek, HHP, announce: “The solution for pollution is dilution.” Water is needed to flush daily cellular (and other) toxins away from mother-to-be as well as baby.

Then there are the foods our pre-conception and pregnant clients are eating. In a nutshell, it seems wise to choose natural unprocessed “in-tact” foods that are not grown with chemicals or pesticides. “The diet we enjoy in the twenty-first century differs markedly from the diet enjoyed by past generations,” says Carol Simontacchi, certified clinical nutritionist, and author of The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children.  She explains the traditional diet of past generations, “The one commonality they have is that the traditional diets are nutrient-rich in proteins, essential fats, unrefined carbohydrates (in the form of brightly colored vegetables and limited grains and fruit), and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and enzymes).” Finally, “Our diet of highly processed foods and artificial beverages,” compares Simontacchi, “doesn’t build better babies.”

#4 Exercise Before, During, and After Pregnancy

Of course, exercise is a powerful “medicine” for perinatal women.  And it is now research-proven to be a remarkable aid in the birthing process.  Several decades of research was performed by Dr. James F. Clapp, III, and published in Exercising Through Your Pregnancy, now in its second edition. Concerning labor difficulties, Clapp writes, “The women who continued to exercise had a striking increase (more than 30 percent) in the incidence of uncomplicated, spontaneous delivery, and, the duration of active labor was much shorter.”  In fact, the percentage improvement regarding necessity of drugs and surgery during delivery is astounding for women who exercised, and is detailed one after the other in Clapp’s research.  Clapp summarizes, “All aspects of growth and development after birth in babies from exercising mothers are equal to or better than those observed in the [offspring of mothers who did not exercise.]”

Four Business-Building  Action Steps for Prenatal Fitness Professionals

If you are a wellness professional who works with prenatal clients, teaching them to apply just some of these foundational components is critical to providing the highest quality service to your clients.

Considerations for the pre and postnatal fitness professional:

Lead your client through some kind of mental imagery, meditation or positive journaling as part of her session time with you.

Offer your client a session at the grocery store, where you coach her on choosing healthier foods and home products.

Help your client track her water intake, aiming for more than half her bodyweight in ounces each day.  (Remember that other beverages generally don’t count).  

Inspire your client to maintain her exercise even during challenging times of pregnancy (ie. morning sickness, third trimester discomforts).  Consider offering shorter sessions more frequently, and/or online video call sessions that make it convenient for her to work with you.

In addition to offering better service to your pre and postnatal clients, fitness professionals can use any one of these four action steps to adjust your business and take it to the next level.  You can build your “niche within a niche” by being “the prenatal trainer that trains your mind as well” or the one who “will detox your home and kitchen.”  The opportunities are vast when you have the right information, and followup with your personal passion.  Happy prenatal training!

For more on prenatal fitness, visit us online at http://getfitforbirth.com/

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Diastasis Recti Solutions for Fitness Professionals

Diastasis Recti is a rapidly booming pre and postnatal topic and fitness professionals must be able to intelligently address client’s needs. Diastasis represents a foundational core dysfunction that must be addressed if your client desires optimal function.

Diastasis Recti is commonly defined as abdominal separation. It occurs in pregnant and postpartum women, but also in newborn babies and even large-bellied men. This kind of core dysfunction is so widely pervasive in our society that even when a client doesn’t yet show a diastasis separation, she is likely at risk. Core dysfunctions that result in diastasis are likely to be associated with or correlate to a number of other debilitations that are commonly exacerbated around the perinatal period. These debilitations are so common-place that our society now thinks of them as “normal.”

Image: Diastasis Recti -  

Source: http://www.moveforwardpt.com/symptomsconditionsdetail.aspx?cid=f8a7ad12-eadf-4f42-9537-e00a399c6a03M

Here are the words of one woman who posted to a group forum on Diastasis:

“The pain that comes with this condition is ruining my life. I can't remember the last time I lived a day without having to swallow pain medication. I can't exercise anymore. I can't have sex anymore. I can't play with my kids. This is ridiculous. Nothing I try works to improve this. What am I supposed to do?”

Anonymous Post to PeerTrainer.com. Topic: Diastasis Recti

Diastasis can be considered the symptom of chronic core weakness. Just like core weakness can cause back pains, disc herniations or lead to knee, ankle, or neck pains, it can also lead to diastasis. This happens when the core’s inner unit is not effectively transferring forces; when it is not regulating intra-abdominal pressure effectively. If an excess of pressure is consistently forced into the tendinous linea alba sheath rather than balancing synergistically throughout the abdominal muscles, the forces may be great enough over time to cause a severe stretching. In theory, this can happen to anyone, but especially a pregnant mother who has a fast-growing uterus that requires her core to adapt relatively quickly, potentially stretching the connective tissue.

Image: Anterior sectional view of the abdominal cavity, revealing the linea alba tendinous sheath. -  

Source: http://teachmeanatomy.info/abdomen/muscles/the-abdominal-wall/

There are two types of pregnant moms who are likely to incur a diastasis stretch of the linea alba. Most common is the woman who is “core amnesiac.” This means that the woman has very little core awareness before pregnancy (like most of our clients when newly starting with us). The under-activation of the core often means that the diaphragm, pelvic floor and transverse abdominis do not function with the appropriate tension at the appropriate times, leaving the belly to be overly relaxed. Once pregnant, that lack of core awareness simply perpetuates, and the relaxed belly muscles relax farther than they might otherwise. The vast majority of prenatal clients will fall into this category.

The other common type of diastasis-risk prenatal client is the opposite: instead of a relaxed core, she has a tight or over-active core. This is more likely to be a fitness enthusiast, and sometimes those who have taken their love of abdominal exercises to a level that may no longer be serving them (Pilates, for example). In this case, your client may have learned to constantly tighten her stomach, and will often be proud of her tight abs. Tight abs are great on the occasions that they should be tight, but not necessarily all the time. The diastasis occurs when this tight TVA is trying to hold back a uterus for nine months. The uterus will win. As the uterus grows outward, it can force a stretching of the linea alba sheath, and now this “super-fit” woman is surprised to find out that she has diastasis. Pregnancy can often exacerbate previous symptoms or reveal musculo-skeletal challenges that are likely to occur years later. This is where misalignments such as pelvic girdle pain, sacroiliac joint dysfunctions, symphysis pubis dysfunctions, sciatica, disc herniations, piriformis syndrome, and many other challenges can arise. They are all generally symptoms of the “stress” of pregnancy being placed atop an already faulty musculo-skeletal alignment.

As a solution that will last a lifetime, have no side effects, and require no surgery, Fit For Birth teaches the Core Breathing Belly Pump (CBBP)™. It is defined as, “the rhythmic inhaling and exhaling that maintains activations of the diaphragm, transverse abdominis (TVA) and pelvic floor (PF) muscles to dynamically maintain intra-abdominal pressure so that the core may assist in stabilizing, accelerating, and decelerating any exercise.” Effective prenatal coaching emphasizes a balance between core amnesia and the excessive all-day holding of a super-tight TVA. More specifically, it can be thought of as coaching the natural rhythmic breathing cycle of concentric TVA contraction (on the exhale) followed by an eccentric TVA contraction (on the inhale). The natural rythmic cycle should be predominantly powered by the diaphragm all day long, with more activation and tension during the times that are necessary (like during exercise). Naturally, the core tension would be less aggressive during easier activities of daily life, but still needs to be coached into greater activation in most clients!

In many ways, CBBP™ is similar to other diastasis prevention and treatment techniques, like the Tupler Technique®, but is also being regarded as a simple foundational principle because it’s based upon something your clients do 20-25,000 times every day: breathing.

The most important aspect of the CBBP™ is that your client can perform a proper diaphragmatic breath, which is unfortunately difficult for the vast majority of pregnant (or non-pregnant) clients. In brief, the first two-thirds of a “deep inhale” should notably enter the ribs, belly and back first. It is then considered biomechanically correct for the chest and shoulders to rise in the final third of the inhale of a “deep breath,” but not before. After asking just a handful of clients to “take a deep breath,” you will start to see patterns and build your familiarity and expertise in coaching.

If the diaphragmatic breath is not optimal, core activation techniques like the CBBP will not likely be enough to prevent core dysfunction symptoms like diastasis recti. In the human body, the diaphragm muscle is top of the totem pole. And in most of your clients (often nine out of ten) it will literally need to be trained, like lifting weights.

Helping your clients create a balance of diaphragmatic breathing and core-TVA activation before, during and after pregnancy will help them have optimal core strength while decreasing their chance of having abdominal separation.

Find more articles about postpartum exercise techniques for fitness professionals at GetFitForBirth.com

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What’s the Difference Between Prenatal Yoga and Corrective Exercise?

Article by James Goodlatte

Recently, I was asked, “What’s the Difference Between Prenatal Yoga and Corrective Exercise?”  These are two rather different exercise methodologies but it looks like some explaining is in order.

I immediately thought of a yogi client, Leslie, who approached me for corrective exercise years ago.  She was regularly practicing yoga and feeling immense pain daily in various joints.

Leslie came to me with the goal of feeling stronger and “seeing if there was anything that could be done” with her severe hip pain. Upon further inquiry, I discovered a few unique details about her life.  She was in her 40’s, and had recently delivered twins.  She was single, had dated primarily yoga instructors since her 20’s, and was highly immersed in the practice of yoga in fitness gyms, small studios, in the heat, and at home.  She was experienced in group classes, and had had her fair share of one-on-one sessions too.

I did my usual assessment, which began with us talking about her goals, and my finding out her history of yoga and current exercise habits.  She was regularly practicing some version of yoga every day with a scattering of other activities like weight training.  I found out that she was experiencing the hip pain every day: when she walked, exercised, got out of her chair, and just moved in general.  She noted that her pains always felt better after doing a yoga class.¹

I then performed a breathing, flexibility, and movement assessment.  I typically go into an assessment looking for the “gross” issues, those things that stand out as major.  There were a few things that stood out for me, particularly that three of her joints were far too flexible from a corrective exercise point of view.  One of these “too flexible” areas was that her hip external rotators were super-loose, with nearly 90 degrees of movement compared to the expected 45 degrees.

At the end of my assessment, I presented her with what I thought were the three most outstanding imbalances.  All three were hyper-flexibilities, one of which was her hip rotation.  I asked her which yoga poses she performed most regularly, and she promptly showed me several movements that exactly matched her hyper-flexibilities. One of them was a version of “pigeon pose,” which correlated directly with her excessive hip external rotation. In short, I concluded the session by asking her to stop doing those yoga poses altogether.

A few days later, she sent me this text: “I cannot impress upon you what it feels like to NOT have pain after 20 years.”

I often say that corrective exercise is a blend of personal fitness training with physical therapy. Corrective Exercise teaches you how to move with the correct muscles, enabling fluid joint movement and the potential avoidance of nearly any joint or muscle pain.

Westernized fitness yoga is essentially movement centered on the breath.  I often say that if I had to prescribe one type of exercise for the masses, it would be yoga, considering the population’s imbalances as well as yoga’s incredibly well-rounded skill set development.  (Yoga has the nature of improving strength, flexibility, balance, agility, power, and more, compared to cycling, for example, which is focused upon endurance, and only in one plane of movement.)

Yoga has become a mainstay for the prenatal population largely because of two reasons.  One, there is a cultural acceptance that it is a safe “low-impact” exercise.  Two, in a world that offers very little to the pregnant mom who traditionally has wondered if she should exercise at all, there is a relatively widespread availability of yoga classes.

If you are practicing yoga, corrective exercise can enhance your practice.  Corrective exercise gives you knowledge into your specific imbalances, which allows you to know which poses are best for you, while revealing which poses may be worsening your alignment.  Just this morning, I consulted a postpartum yoga client, Stephanie, who had nearly non-existent diaphragm function.  She goes to yoga class every week, hears the instructor tell her to breath deep into her tummy, but has never been coached on how to actually activate the correct muscles.  How many other people are doing yoga today with the wrong muscles?  To be sure, this client left our first session with significantly improved diaphragmatic function.  She couldn’t believe how in just 25 minutes, she was able to reach a sense of balance and connection that she hadn’t felt in years.

That’s the power of corrective exercise. Yoga-goers can use it to assess their foundation alignment, and immediately improve their practice.

My work with Leslie helped her heal 20 years of chronic pain after just the first session, and I didn’t even teach her anything new to do.  I just looked at her body from the unique perspective of corrective exercise and revealed how she can enhance the yoga practice that she loves.

¹The likely reason that Leslie felt hip pain relief after each of her yoga sessions is that stretching has a kind of neurological numbing effect.  This effect can sometime help in the short term, even while hurting in the long term.

Find out more about prenatal fitness at getfitforbirth.com.

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A Holistic Approach to Pregnancy Wellness for Fitness Professionals

Holistic: 

Achieving a harmonious whole that is more than the mere sum of its parts.

Wellness: Being healthy in body and mind, especially as the result of deliberate intention.

Despite living in an age that demands quick answers and pill-popping mindsets, the synergistic combination of basic wellness factors may prove more effective for preparing our mothers-to-be and their unborn children. For fitness professionals, understanding foundational elements beyond exercise is critical for inspiring the highest level of health for our pre and postnatal clients.

Pregnancy offers a unique opportunity for re-establishing wellness. There are three unsettling trends in the modern world of baby-making.

One, many couples cannot get pregnant. Infertility is defined as the inability for a couple to conceive after trying to do so for longer than one year, not just after a few tries. The U.S. infertility rate is one in eight, according to “Reduce Chemicals to Increase Fertility” on WebMD. Other modern countries, such as the U.K. and Canada, now have rates that are even worse. According to an article called, “Infertility Time Bomb Warning” from BBC, that figure in the UK is one in seven and Assisted Human Reproduction Canada puts their country’s figure at one in six. And rates are steadily rising everywhere, as are the recognition of problems associated with assisted reproductive technology (ART).

Two, if a woman is able to conceive, there is a significant chance that surgery or pharmaceutical drugs will accompany her labor and delivery of her child. One in three women will be given the minor surgery called episiotomy and another one in three will have the major surgery called C-section. In addition, various drugs will be administered to the majority.

Three, after climbing the hill of conception, pregnancy, labor and then delivery, the risk of your client’s child fast succumbing to developmental disorders and disease is profound. Autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, diabetes, and cancer have been rising over the last few decades.

Science increasingly proves that disorders like these are a multifactorial combination of stress, environmental factors and personal health choices. Evidence for a preventive and integrative approach has been mounting.

Causes for both infertility and infant and childhood disease have brought prenatal food choices, pharmaceutical drug usage, toxic household products, and perinatal stress to the forefront. For example, on May 10, 2012, the European Environment Agency captioned “Chemicals which disrupt the hormone system—also known as ‘endocrine disrupting chemicals’ (EDCs)—may be a contributing factor behind the significant increases in cancers, diabetes and obesity, falling fertility, and an increased number of neurological development problems in both humans and animals, according to a review of recent scientific literature commissioned by the European Environment Agency (EEA).” The EEA reports that these chemicals can be found in “food, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, household products and cosmetics.”

Another example is an Infertility Fact Sheet published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs (OPA), which asks the question, “What decreases the chance of getting pregnant?” The answer included a list of preventable causes: stress, poor diet, drugs, environmental toxins, among others. And a 2004 National Cancer Institute (NCI) Fact Sheet specifically discusses causative factors for child health: “…parental medical conditions during pregnancy or before conception; maternal diet during pregnancy…”

In other words, big governmental agencies around the world have already established that infertility and infant disease may be due to preconception and perinatal conditions and choices that parents make before and while pregnant. And the solutions are found in stress reduction, nutrition, environmental toxin reduction, and overall maternal health—four “medicines” that are difficult to bottle and sell.

Fitness professionals are often the primary source of overall health information for our clients. In addition to exercise, we can coach our clients in techniques for de-stressing, reducing household toxins, remaining well-hydrated, and eating natural foods.

What follows are some key facts and coaching considerations that can easily be added to your coaching during a personal pre-conception or prenatal training session.

“Positive maternal emotions have been shown to advance the health of the unborn child,” says Thomas Verny, MD, who is the author of Pre-Parenting, Nurturing Your Child from Conception, and considered one of the world’s leading authorities on prenatal psychology. Verny continues, “…thoughts which infuse the developing baby with a sense of happiness or calm can set the stage for a balance, happy, and serene disposition throughout life.” Although a multitude of methods exist, from visualization to meditation, prayer, and journaling, finding a method that you and your clients believe in is the key.

Choosing natural household products and cleaners is another big step toward finding prenatal wellness. Many people do not realize that most of their dangerous environmental toxins are usually ones they’ve brought into the home themselves. Key areas for your pregnant clients to look into are: filtering drinking and bathing water, buying natural household products, avoiding chemical cosmetics and synthetic air fresheners, and staying far away from any lawn that has been treated with pesticides or fertilizers.

Drinking water is the first nutritional component that most pregnant women should consider, since the majority of women are dehydrated prior to conception. Then once pregnant, the developing fetus places enormous demands for water. F. Batmanghelidj, MD, (“Dr. B”), author of books like, Your Body’s Many Cries for Water and Water for Health, for Healing, for Life, discusses pregnancy: “By the time it grows to be a full term baby, about a trillion cell divisions will have taken place.” He also says, “Every time a cell gives rise to a daughter cell, 75 percent or more of its volume has to be filled with water. In short, growth depends on the availability of water.” The importance of water in the pregnant body is further emphasized with the following jingle that I’ve often heard one of my mentors, Paul Chek, HHP, announce: “The solution for pollution is dilution.” Water is needed to flush daily cellular (and other) toxins away from mother-to-be as well as baby.

Then there are the foods our pre-conception and pregnant clients are eating. In a nutshell, it seems wise to choose natural unprocessed “in-tact” foods that are not grown with chemicals or pesticides. “The diet we enjoy in the twenty-first century differs markedly from the diet enjoyed by past generations,” says Carol Simontacchi, certified clinical nutritionist, and author of The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children. She explains the traditional diet of past generations, “The one commonality they have is that the traditional diets are nutrient-rich in proteins, essential fats, unrefined carbohydrates (in the form of brightly colored vegetables and limited grains and fruit), and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and enzymes).” Even more, “Our diet of highly processed foods and artificial beverages,” compares Simontacchi, “doesn’t build better babies.”

Of course, exercise is a powerful “medicine” for perinatal women. And it is now research-proven to be a remarkable aid in the birthing process. Several decades of research was performed by Dr. James F. Clapp, III, and published in Exercising Through Your Pregnancy, now in its second edition. Concerning labor difficulties, Clapp writes, “The women who continued to exercise had a striking increase (more than 30 percent) in the incidence of uncomplicated, spontaneous delivery, and, the duration of active labor was much shorter.” In fact, the percentage improvement regarding necessity of drugs and surgery during delivery is astounding for women who exercised, and is detailed one after the other in Clapp’s research. Clapp summarizes, “All aspects of growth and development after birth in babies from exercising mothers are equal to or better than those observed in the [offspring of mothers who did not exercise.]”

If you are a wellness professional who works with clients who are pregnant or who will one day want to be pregnant, teaching them to apply just some of these foundational components is critical to providing the highest quality service to your clients.

Considerations for the pre and postnatal fitness professional:

Lead your client through some kind of mental imagery, meditation or positive journaling as part of her session time with you.

Offer your clients a session at the grocery store, where you coach her on choosing healthier foods and home products.

Help your client track her water intake. (Other beverages generally don’t count).

Inspire her to maintain her exercise even during challenging times of pregnancy (ie. morning sickness, third trimester discomforts). Consider offering shorter sessions, and/or video call sessions that make it convenient for her to work with you.

For more on prenatal fitness, visit us online at http://getfitforbirth.com/