Previous installments of Feel the Burn can be found here. “Working Out in Your First Trimester” is here.
Ah, the magical oasis of your second trimester. FOR SOME, right? If you’ve already been told to elevate your legs above your head and are on full pelvic rest and feel like garbage, please close this tab immediately and do whatever it is you’re doing to keep your sanity.
If, however, you’re having a pretty normal pregnancy, the second trimester is where it’s at. You (especially if you’re on round #2 or more) look Definitively Pregnant, your puking is ideally under control (YMMV, my cousin threw up literally every day of all three of her pregnancies), but you’re not yet beginning to experience the MASSIVE STRUCTURAL FAILURES that await many pregnant people in the third trimester. That thing where you need to pee, but when you sit to pee, the baby moves and blocks off your ability to pee, so you can’t pee? Let’s not borrow trouble, we’re not there yet. Let’s talk about exercise.
For me, it’s absolutely been easier to work out in my second trimester than in my first. What’s gone is the bone-crushing weariness, which really knocked my training on its ass more than the nausea. I felt like Beth March, some days, like [wanly lifts pen, sets it back down.]
If I had to define the transition between the first part of pregnancy and the second part, at least when it comes to physical activity, I would say that the roadblocks to working out change from Feeling Like Shit, Generally Speaking, But Your Body Is Recognizably Your Own:
…to Body Presents You With Physical Limitations and Spatial Issues, But Your Energy Is Back (I know Bella’s wasn’t, but she was under pretty extreme circumstances):
Think how great the Twilight screencaps will be when we get to the third trimester! But I digress.
Something I had been prepared to adjust in the second trimester, and was happy to discover is over-hyped, is the ol’ you-can’t-lie-on-your-back-no-more. I had been bummed about it, because so many of my favourite exercise moves involve lying on my back on a weight bench (presses! skullcrushers!), or lying on my back on a mat (pelvic lifts! VARIOUS HAMSTRINGS) and, well, you just know that you’re going to be forced to add in extra squats and lunges to fill in the time you would have spent, happily, on your back.
Now, the not-lying-on-your-back thing comes from the TruFact that when you do, the weight of your full uterus will smush this vein that returns blood from your lower body to your heart and make you all dizzy and stuff. That’s why they want you to sleep on your side instead of your back in pregnancy. This presents a problem for only those witches and freakazoids who are capable of sleeping on their backs. Back-sleeping is a sign of demonic possession. Everyone is supposed to sleep on their stomachs with one leg flamingo-d up and out to the side. That’s just science. But, yeah, that’s what the back thing is about.
THEREFORE, many people will tell you you can’t lie on your back to exercise, which is untrue. Being on your back for brief periods of time is fine. Like THE VAST MAJORITY of pregnancy-related things, your body will tell you when to get off your back. I have this from Qualified Medical Professionals.
Do you feel dizzy? Get off your back.
Do you feel fine? Keep on keepin’ on.
Every week, I go to the gym, and my people say “you still good on your back?” and I say “I think it’s okay this week, but probably next week will be the last week!” and then:
Months come and go, but instead of being depressed about Edward, you’re happily exercising on your back like a boss.
Now, this will end at some point, I have no doubt. But for now, these are the actual things I am not doing anymore, because of weird pressure or bad feelings:
1. Reverse twisting crunches on an incline bench (Actually my best move, damnit.)
2. Full sit-ups (I know, I know, people don’t even do them a lot anymore, but I LOVE FULL SIT-UPS and have a very flex-y spine.)
3. The Roman chair back extension stuff.
So, you know, not a ton of actual restrictions. But then…this is the other thing, at least for me, about the second trimester.
I AM LOSING STRENGTH. I HATE IT. I HATE LOSING STRENGTH.
I’m just…weaker. I can’t do the same weights. I can’t do full push-ups. Everything is eroding, little by little.
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. – Galadriel
And it’s okay, it doesn’t really matter. But it does matter, to me, a little? It doesn’t NOT matter. And it’s strange to watch your body change. We don’t really talk about weight on this site, ever, which is a very deliberate choice of ours and we’re happy with it, but I had planned on gaining a bit less weight with this pregnancy because last time I put on more than the recommended amount (which is fine, it’s SO individual) and the hardware in my left leg (titanium rod, handful of screws just below the knee and just above the ankle) started to bug me and the scar tissue got weird and I developed a really impressive dragging limp for a couple of months.
Which was not my favourite thing, obviously, so I was all “well, I will eat with greater awareness and I’m a very fit person now and will have a different experience and blah blah” but, in fact, I am having an identical experience, because this is just what my body does when there is a baby inside it. My mom gained the same amount of weight, to the pound, both times, and I think that’s me, too. I’m limping already.
All of which is to say that you’re working with what you have, we all are, and there will be days where that’s fantastic, and days where you’re just showing up. Being a fitter person is great. It is not a bulwark against the realities of change and a way to ward off age and the natural processes of the body.
Please enjoy your day.
Tags: feel the burn, fitness, pregnancy, working out
Related Posts
Tocolytic: On Pregnancy, Premature Birth, and the Female Body
Loco Parentis: On Having Baby Number Two
I’ll Be Watching Kimberly Walford Break Deadlifting Records All Day
First Steps: Searching for My Birth Family
My Real-Time Responses To Headlines On The Men’s Health Website
Trapped in the Stairwell: My Birth Story
For some reason this makes me want to get pregnant so I can exercise.
I was going to say the same thing!!
When I was pregnant with my second child, I was worried about my health (and weight) because I was feeling really dragged down. We talked about nutrition and I sheepishly said to my doctor, “I eat about one cookie a day…” She laughed and said in that voice that equates “Bless your heart!”: I THINK ONE COOKIE A DAY IS FINE.
Where is the maternity t-shirt with this printed on it!?!?
I still eat one cookie a day, though I haven’t been pregnant for a while.
I eat one cookie every day with my coffee. My baby is in college now
“Mommy’s Little Helper” is what I would have on my cookie jar, if I could even keep cookies around long enough to necessitate a jar for them.
Bless your heart indeed, I just wrapped up my first trimester and I go through a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies about every day and a half.
I am neither pregnant nor planning to be, but I love reading these for Nicole’s very matter-of-fact approach to fitness and for gems like: “Being a fitter person is great. It is not a bulwark against the realities of change and a way to ward off age and the natural processes of the body.
My username is apparently well-chosen, because I am a back-sleeping witch. Excellent.
My first pregnancy, I was so paranoid about the “don’t be on your back” thing that I started training myself to sleep on my side in the first trimester. This time, I’m like, eff it, I am going to enjoy every second of sleeping on my back until I literally pass out if I try. This poor child is already suffering from second-baby syndrome pretty hard.
I sleep on my back too, so I guess I’m also a witch. A witch with an implanted heart device that precludes even the notion of stomach-sleeping. *sob*
I picture you doing 70s style pimp walk, so carry on you bad-ass mo-fo.
Just entered my second trimester on Thursday. The amount of exercise I am NOT doing but should be is staggering. I spend way too much energy being bitter at poor baby #3, whose only crime is preventing its mother from the stomach-flamingo sleep position.
I get you; I felt so guilty for not doing proper amounts of exercise. I am goal-oriented and felt like if I wasn’t able to keep up a solid pace I was a failure at being pregnant. I also measured myself against the “fit moms” that I’d see walking around in yoga pants, bellys-out.
Just do calf raises in the shower, or swing your arms around more when you walk, or strap on some headphones (cause earbuds suck) and dance around. But don’t feel upset about not being able to exercise.
Ditto, and I am relieved to hear I’m not the only one harboring unjustified ill will toward my fetus. Good luck finding some extra energy this trimester.
You too! My rhinitis is starting earlier than last time, which makes my CPAP machine extra useless. Last night I slept wedged into the sofa, with my neck arched to the sofa’s arm trying to open up my nasal passage. Who says pregnancy isn’t sexxxxxay?
FLAMINGO LEG BELLY SLEEPERS UNITE.
with the use of many pillows I have been able to maintain this superior sleep position through 6 months of pregnancy.
Oh I am happy to hear this. I can sorta sleep on my side, but the best sleep is flamingo leg belly – it’s even better if you can get a cat in the small of your back to anchor you in place.
You know what’s up! There’s no sleep problem a zillion carefully placed pillows can’t fix. Bonus points if you share a bed with another human and hiss at them for daring to adjust even an inch of your pillow sleep fortress.
Those long body pillows are a game changer, too.
I seriously need a diagram for how to make this work.
1. Lift one leg to approximately 90 degrees, as if imitating a Capt. Morgan’s commercial.
2. Allow lower leg to retreat towards body, as if about to do a flying snap-kick.
3. Accomplish these tasks while lying down.
Alternately, it’s like curling into the fetal position, but with one of your legs refusing to participate.
I read Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project and she described it as “flying Superman position” and I was all CANNOT UNSEE.
Four Minute Body calls it the “Commando Position”, and I am HAPPY to have a better term for it.
That book, man. There’s a chapter on how Chipotle is the perfect food if you leave out the rice.
AND a chapter on how to give women orgasms that is treated as The Holy Sex Grail and is basically just decent foreplay.
Dear The Four-Hour Body: I am not a sheet of tissue paper. Kthxbai.
Toasties, I recently learned that my brother’s girlfriend is with child! I am very excited to be a Cool Aunt in the spring. I love kids as long as I have no real responsibility for them and I fully plan to spoil the fuck out of this kid. AW YISS.
There was a baby shower for my boyfriend’s niece-to-be this weekend and she got so much pink and girly stuff (though not in TRULY egregious amounts, there was lots of gender-neutral stuff) that I am now shopping for feminist-themed baby gear. I think she might need a stuffed Marie Curie (her dad is a biologist, her mom is an engineer)
Here are some things I intend to purchase for this child:
periodic table wooden blocks
this adorable-looking book based on The Raven
this BALLER AS HELL vintage racecar toy
BUBBLE KITTY
k I’m going to stop now but I could go on FOREVER, I love baby stuff so much and I obviously don’t have the opportunity or reason to buy any since I am a happily childless person
“Like THE VAST MAJORITY of pregnancy-related things, your body will tell you when to get off your back. ” YES THIS. I fall asleep on my side and wake up on my back and for a while was freaked out and my midwife was like “don’t even think about wasting any time worrying about this – some women sleep on their backs their entire pregnancy – if you feel bad, you will move”
Nicole, can you please speak to potentially-separating abdominal muscles in pregnancy and what to do (or not do) to avoid aggravating this?? I have heard from various people different things, and want to get my facts straight!
I took ballet for a semester in college, and my teacher had separated abs from her pregnancy! It terrified me because it was one of those pregnancy-body-changing things that I had never heard of before… plus the image of your muscles separating is not uh pleasant.
yes I just barely learned that this is a Thing and it really freaks me out. A friend recently offered to let me feel the gap between her muscles and I politely declined. I have heard certain exercises (like plank) make it worse, and I need to know WHAT so I can avoid them.
I’m not Nicole, but I have conversed with her over the internet! And I also know about diastasis rectii, what you’re referring to.
There’s little to be done to prevent it, it either happens or doesn’t. And if it does, you should ask your GP or OB for a referral to physical therapy. If you can’t get physical therapy, there are some tips online about how to do the exercises, but if possible try to see someone who knows what to do – they are very targeted exercises.
are they exercises for post-pregnancy? and even if there’s little to be done to prevent it, are there certain things to avoid that could make it worse?
They are post-partum exercises, yes. I don’t think you can really avoid it because, at a certain point in pregnancy you can’t really do anything with your recti muscle group. But don’t worry too much about it online. Do you have a doctor you can talk to about them? If so, go talk to that person. Otherwise, I’ve heard 1 in 3 women get it. And speaking from experience, not every woman realizes she has it. Which is to say, it is sometimes not that drastic.
So pregnancy is basically a mysterious grab bag of bodily changes?
Basically!
I had total abdominal muscle separation — basically, if you poked my belly on the center line after my first kid (and second kid) was born, you could feel my liver (hyperbole, but you know what I mean). There were no symptoms other than the disturbing ability to poke deeply, no loss of strength or function, no issues at all. I would not worry about this.
I thought it was permanent — the separation stayed separated for years — but then it closed up again sometime when I wasn’t paying attention. Again, not an issue even a little bit.
Yep in a nutshell!
This happened to me (diastasis rectii) and I didn’t realize it until well postpartum. And yeah, my belly isn’t the same now, 5 years later. Neither is my little dude (and for that I am grateful). Honestly, it doesn’t bother me as much as the changes that happened to my bust (I was big before and got bigger and stayed that way).
To put it mildly.
No kidding, right? To be honest, though, life is also basically a mysterious grab bag of bodily changes, whether you have a kid or not.
Avoid crunches and anything that pinpoints the rectus abdominis muscles is what I was told by midwives. That can exacerbate diastasis rectii. But really, Marissa’s right that it will happen or doesn’t. It’s not the biggest deal – after my first, I had a separation of about 3-fingers’ width. A year out (before OOPS pregnant again), it had shrunk down to just a small gap you could around my belly button. That was without therapy or targeted post-pregnancy exercises. I just avoided crunches postpartum and gradually started exercising normally again and my abs gradually gained strength. If you end up with it, I second the recommendation for finding a physical therapist – there are some that specialize in postpartum issues and can give you advice on pelvic floor strengthening, too! I plan to do that after this one.
SEE also, on happens or it doesn’t: stretch marks. Rub whatever you want on your belly, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t get them, and women who were younger and gained less weight did. This time maybe I will! WHO KNOWS.
My midwife told me this is also true for perineum stretching – do it/don’t do it, apply pressure and hope for the best
I remember my husband looking up at me from his horrifying copy of “The Birth Partner,” and saying “I will help you stretch your perineum if it is important to you, but I’m really, really hoping it is not important to you.”
It wasn’t.
Love and compatibility explained, in one post about perineum-stretching.
That’s adorable.
I am now sitting in my office, feeling around above my belly button, to see if my abs separated when I was pregnant 2+ years ago (apparently they didn’t? Or they went back together?). I share this to point out how people tend to panic* about body-horror stuff during pregnancy, when, in reality, most of it is nbd.
* – No one here is panicking, but the wider culture does like to scare the pants off of people who can potentially get pregnant. It’s mean and not helpful.
I had abdominal separation big time (Baby Siniichulok was large, low, and very much in front). My idiot OB refused to check me for it and told me that I didn’t have it and could just carry on doing regular exercises, and of course I actually did have it. I finally got physiotherapy about six months after learning this (I had a weak core and it was hard to do stuff or stand up straight, and regular exercises had no effect), and it all but disappeared really quickly with the proper exercises. So don’t worry! They’re very easy exercises too.
Hahaha just wait until after you’ve had the second one and you’re proud of yourself for getting back in shape and get out there and run and end up peeing yourself. I do my Kegels all the time and still my pelvic wall is like yeah, we can run or not pee, but we can’t do both.
Everyone is supposed to sleep on their stomachs with one leg flamingo-d up and out to the side. That’s just science. YES. Someone else gets this.
Hello, fellow right-thinking person!
Oh man oh man Christy and I were JUST DISCUSSING how much we miss posts like this by Nicole and we were like “I guess we’ll have to wait until after she has the baby.” BUT NO. WE DON’T. AND WITH TWILIGHT IMAGES AS WELL. *squees*
Sulagna, what are we doing reading these comments? I am screaming on the inside with each progressive topic (ab separation, PERINEUM STRETCHING). I know that I don’t belong here but I can’t look away!
I love it! It’s fascinating, I’ve never read anything about exercising during pregnancy before. So I will keep this in mind until I need it like, 50+ years from now, or whenever I have a baby.
Oh maaan I just read until the end and Nicole I’m sorry you’re limping 🙁 *internet hugs, if applicable*
It is fascinating. My first close friend just got pregnant, so I’m trying to learn about pregnancy and babies and it is very overwhelming. There is so much information out there. I don’t want to overwhelm her by emailing her everything Nicole has ever written about pregnancy and motherhood, but maybe it’d be helpful? I don’t know.
All I managed to do exercise-wise while knocked up was walk on a treadmill a couple of times a week, which resulted in a baby who insisted on being held and walked around the house if she was to chill out.
I’m 21 weeks so these posts are catnip for me 🙂 Thanks, Nicole!
I am an endurance rider, which is basically ultramarathoning on horseback. I was out this weekend for a moderate 17 mile ride with some friends, and one of them warned me about that! She said her son (who’d been trotted endlessly down the trail in utero) refused to be soothed by rocking and insisted on being jiggled up and down.
I am not pregnant- nor, for a multitude of reasons, am I ever likely to be- but I do have a couple of chronic illnesses, and it is soothing to read about you pregnant folks and how you’re dealing with your bodies doing things that are kind of out of your control. It makes me feel less weird and alone, so thank you.
Also weird flamingo sleeping for life. I picked up one of those long body pillows at Ikea on a whim a few months ago and it has been one of my best ever purchases. ::curls up around it like koala, drifts off::
I sleep on my back too, so I guess I'm also a witch. A witch with an implanted heart device that precludes even the notion of stomach-sleeping. *sob*
No kidding, right? To be honest, though, life is also basically a mysterious grab bag of bodily changes, whether you have a kid or not.
I kicked Pure Barre’s ass in the second trimester, even completing the 20 classes in 30 days challenge. I felt so badass that I was all “I’m going to be one of those women who’s at Pure Barre the morning she goes into labor!” Fast forward to 34 weeks, and I’m learning to pick up things with my toes because bending over is too much work. It’s all walks around the neighborhood for me these days. Looking forward to your third trimester post!
I kicked Pure Barre's ass in the second trimester, even completing the 20 classes in 30 days challenge. I felt so badass that I was all "I'm going to be one of those women who's at Pure Barre the morning she goes into labor!" Fast forward to 34 weeks, and I'm learning to pick up things with my toes because bending over is too much work. It's all walks around the neighborhood for me these days. Looking forward to your third trimester post!
You will not lose all your strength, not even close! And being physically fit before pregnancy will be a big help, trust me.
You will not lose your strength! You will put it into your baby, who will become stronger by stealing your lifeforce.