What is Fetal Programming?

By anncowlin | Published January 1, 2012

What is fetal pro­gram­ming? Every per­son liv­ing on earth was first exposed to a uter­ine envi­ron­ment that helped deter­mine their life­time health and devel­op­ment. The term for this phe­nom­e­non is fetal pro­gram­ming. It is a hot topic and deserves attention.

Accept­ing the impor­tance of fetal pro­gram­ming places respon­si­bil­ity on the mother-to-be to do all she can to insure her body pro­vides nutri­ents and oxy­gen to her grow­ing infant while avoid­ing pos­si­ble risks and tox­ins. At the same time, genetic and envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors con­tribute greatly to the poten­tial for some dis­or­ders and prob­lems that arise. Thus, we must be care­ful in assign­ing guide­lines for accept­able behav­ior or blame for poor out­comes to preg­nant women.

On the one hand, we can all see the neg­a­tive con­se­quences of some­thing like fetal alco­hol syndrome…clearly the result of mater­nal behav­ior. Is a preg­nant woman whose baby has been dam­aged in this way guilty of abuse?

But, what if a mother is obese, eats poorly and ends up with an infant with a dis­turbed metab­o­lism. Is this abuse? What if the mother has an infec­tion that results in cere­bral palsy? Or what if she lives near a high­way and invol­un­tar­ily inhales fumes that neg­a­tively affect the placenta?

How do you get a healthy baby? Of course, there are no guar­an­tees. There remain many unknown fac­tors that can affect the course and out­come of a preg­nancy. Some fac­tors we are aware of, such as avoid­ing cer­tain fumes or chem­i­cals.  There are some behav­iors we know can max­i­mize the poten­tial for a good out­come, such as eat­ing ade­quate pro­tein, aer­o­bic con­di­tion­ing and strength train­ing. [Note for new readers…lots of these fac­tors have been cov­ered in our pre­vi­ous posts.]

But, what about all the things we don’t know about?

If these goats eat the wrong grass, will they go into labor?

Here is a cau­tion­ary tale:  There is a species of goat that, if they eat a cer­tain type of skunk grass on day 14 (and only day 14) of preg­nancy, will not go into labor. Why? Plant tox­ins in this grass inter­fere with the devel­op­ment of a small por­tion of fetal brain, the par­aven­tric­u­lar nucleus. This nucleus is involved in the sig­nal­ing cycle of labor. With­out it, the mother will not go into labor!

What are the take-home mes­sages here?

  • Prob­a­bly no one is ever a per­fect fetus…too many pos­si­ble threats.
  • There are some threats we can avoid…being lazy, over-eating, smoking.
  • There are some threats we can­not avoid, so we do the best we can.

Do the best you can by your baby…aerobic fit­ness, good nour­ish­ment, sleep, good hygiene and de-stressing your life.

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Birth of Pregnancy Exercise: Evolution of DTP

By anncowlin | Published June 20, 2011

Some­times it is fun to look back at the long road to the present! Recently, I was inter­viewed by our local online media out­let (the Bran­ford CT Patch) and was really thrilled with the result­ing story. It focused on the 30 year road of DTP and I thought you might find it interesting.

Here is the link to the story and the subtitle:

http://branford.patch.com/articles/ann-cowlin-a-prenatal-fitness-pioneer-celebrates-30-years-of-work

What started as a “fledg­ling exper­i­ment” has become one Bran­ford woman’s life work.

Thank you for tak­ing a look!

Still look­ing for new ways to develop core strength & coor­di­na­tion for new moms…start with the pos­ture on the left (inhale) and move to the one on the right (exhale). Keep the trans­verse abdom­i­nal sucked in. Repeat.…

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Postpartum Exercise: Creating Your 3rd Body

By anncowlin | Published June 3, 2011

Recently, while talk­ing with some moms in our post­par­tum exer­cise class, DTP’s Mom-Baby Fit­ness™ pro­gram, I real­ized it has been a while since I have addressed the notion of what we call “the 3rd body.” This stems from the idea that before you are preg­nant, you live in your 1st body; then, while preg­nant, you live in your 2nd body. After giv­ing birth, many women feel their options are to try to get their first body back or live in what they are left with after birth. We sug­gest another way:  cre­ate your 3rd body.

We dis­cov­ered this 3rd body in work­ing with women to gain the fit­ness nec­es­sary to have a healthy recov­ery and enjoy moth­er­hood. What we found was that women were often becom­ing more fit than they had been before preg­nancy, with less body fat and more mus­cle, yet their clothes did not fit the same.  Some­times the flar­ing of the ribs and/or hip bones made for a larger waist – despite less fat!

Many clients also feel a new, deeper sense of their core devel­oped. In fact, over time they real­ized they actu­ally liked this body bet­ter in some ways! After all, they came into the world with the pre-pregnancy body, but this body they actu­ally cre­ated out of the pro­found expe­ri­ence of the phys­i­cal self that preg­nancy and birth pro­vide. It extended the empow­er­ment of birth into motherhood.

Extend­ing this metaphor even fur­ther, of course, leads to the 4th and 5th bod­ies, if you have another child. Even­tu­ally, there are more bod­ies as women go through per­i­menopause, menopause, post menopause, and what I like to call the phe­nom­e­nal wis­dom stage. Each body rep­re­sents a new oppor­tu­nity to become some­one strong and profound.

I fig­ure I am to body #8 now, and in each stage I have found some­thing incred­i­ble that I could not have at other stages. Long ago I gave up look­ing for my past bod­ies. Each one has been bril­liant in some way, but in the end it had to be left behind if I was to enjoy life’s path to the fullest.

Liv­ing in the moment does require know­ing where you are in time, space and energy. So, dis­card your past bod­ies with delight and move on. Use your energy to cre­ate your­self in the present.

It’s a process and you won’t fully live in your next body until you own the toll of the last one. A post­par­tum mom may expe­ri­ence hair loss, big­ger feet, a mal-aligned spine, con­stant thirst if she is breast­feed­ing, exhaus­tion and a jelly belly. But, all these things will pass with time, if you eat right and exer­cise reg­u­larly. Oh, and you can bring the baby, who will have a blast meet­ing other babies!!

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National Children’s Study: help improve children’s health & well-being

By anncowlin | Published April 8, 2011

The goal of the Study is to learn how to improve the health and well-being of chil­dren. To do this, the National Children’s Study is exam­in­ing the effects of envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences on the health and devel­op­ment of 100,000 chil­dren across the United States, fol­low­ing them from before birth until age 21 years. There are two ways moms can help:

1) If you are preg­nant, par­tic­i­pate in the study. Find the cen­ter near­est you at the national website:

http://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/studylocations/pages/map.aspx

2) If you are a mom, tell peo­ple about the study. Here is the study’s home page:

http://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov

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Active Pregnancy — the rationale

By anncowlin | Published November 26, 2010
Mov­ing into Motherhood

It’s time to hit the main theme again:  Aer­o­bi­cally fit women are at reduced risk for things that go wrong in preg­nancy, improve their tol­er­ance for labor and birth, and recover more rapidly in the post­par­tum period.

Mov­ing into Motherhood

The arrival of the hol­i­days pro­vides a good rea­son to bring this up, yet again! Preg­nancy is a gate­way time in women’s lives…we become more aware of our bod­ies, our sen­sa­tions, our feel­ings, our needs, and how ver­sa­tile and amaz­ing our bod­ies are. We can make peo­ple with our bod­ies! Dur­ing preg­nancy, we often take precautions…we eat more care­fully, avoid tox­ins, try to avoid stress. When the hol­i­days arrive, we see indul­gent behav­ior in a dif­fer­ent light.

Yet, even with all this focus on behav­ior, we some­times miss the biggest aid to a healthy preg­nancy:  phys­i­cal fit­ness. Research clearly demon­strates that fit women do bet­ter, are health­ier and hap­pier. More and more in the U.S. we see dis­or­ders of nor­mal organ func­tion that accom­pany seden­tary pregnancy.

Let’s look at this a lit­tle closer (yes, I am going to repeat myself some more, but it is an impor­tant con­cept to spread). We live in a body model that rewards an active lifestyle.

Being seden­tary causes things to go wrong

Not mov­ing cre­ates bio­chem­i­cal imbal­ances because the car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem atro­phies and mol­e­cules cre­ated in the brain or brought in through the diges­tion may not get where they need to go for a healthy metabolism.

Your car­dio­vas­cu­la­ture is the high­way that brings usable sub­stances to the place they are used. You have to help it grow and develop, use it to pump things around and give it a chance to be healthy. Aer­o­bic fit­ness does all these things.

Advice for young women of child­bear­ing age

If you are think­ing of preg­nancy, have recently become preg­nant, or work with women of child­bear­ing age, we encour­age you to open avenues of activ­ity for your­self or oth­ers in this pop­u­la­tion. You can learn more from our blog dancingthrupregnancy.wordpress.com. You can seek out local pre/postnatal fit­ness experts on this site. Yoga is nice…we use some of it in our work, along other spe­cific exer­cises for which there is a direct health ben­e­fit. But, we also see yoga con­verts who come into our pro­gram in mid preg­nancy unable to breathe after walk­ing up a flight of stairs. How will they do in labor? Not as well as those who have been doing aer­o­bic dance or an ellip­ti­cal machine 2 or 3 times a week.

The AHA/ACSM guide­lines for the amount of aer­o­bic exer­cise needed to improve car­dio­vas­cu­lar sta­tus hold true for preg­nant women just as they do for the rest of the pop­u­la­tion – a min­i­mum of 150 min­utes of mod­er­ate, or 75 min­utes of vig­or­ous, or a com­bi­na­tion of these lev­els of inten­sity, per week. If you are not get­ting this level of activ­ity, you are putting your health – and that of your off­spring – at risk.

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Buy the Book!

By anncowlin | Published November 3, 2010

Recently, we have expe­ri­enced grow­ing inter­est in infor­ma­tion included in the text­book, Women’s Fit­ness Pro­gram Devel­op­ment. So, we decided that site read­ers might want to pur­chase this text if they are seri­ously inter­ested in sub­jects per­tain­ing to women’s health fit­ness. The book opens with a chap­ter on how women dif­fer from men in their phys­i­cal, men­tal, emo­tional and social devel­op­ment and how these dif­fer­ences affect our moti­va­tion to be active. Sec­tions on ado­les­cence, preg­nancy, the post­par­tum period and menopause explain what hap­pens dur­ing these crit­i­cal and uniquely female life tran­si­tions, what is known about the impact of exer­cise on health dur­ing these times, and how to develop effec­tive pro­gram­ming for these pop­u­la­tions. It is avail­able through the pub­lisher, Human Kinet­ics, or through Ama­zon or Barnes & Noble.

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High Birth Weight: The New Adverse Outcome

By anncowlin | Published October 6, 2010

While pub­lic aware­ness of low birth weight and pre­ma­ture infants is becom­ing — at long last — inter­est­ing to the main­stream cul­ture and media, another phe­nom­e­non is begin­ning to shake the pro­fes­sional birthing world:  high birth weight. Because it is occur­ring in a more afflu­ent ele­ment of soci­ety, it is alarm­ing. This tells us that you can­not buy your way out of preg­nancy risks that are cre­ated by a seden­tary, toxic food life-style.

Here is the dilemma:

Nor­mal weight and some over­weight women who eat too much in preg­nancy tend to have babies who are, basi­cally, already obese at birth. There­fore, these infants already have meta­bolic and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dys­func­tion. Babies born over 8 lbs. 14 oz. are at increased risk for Type 2 Dia­betes and heart disease.

Inter­est­ingly, the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine  recently issued new guide­lines on preg­nancy weight gain. After nearly 20 years of adher­ing to the “nor­mal” weight gain being 25 to 35 pounds, the Insti­tute rec­og­nized that pre­na­tal BMI plays a role in how much weight gain is nec­es­sary for a healthy pregnancy.

The evi­dence that under­lies this change demon­strates that gains greater than 22 pounds — for all clas­si­fi­ca­tions of pre­na­tal BMI — is the demarka­tion point for increased health prob­lems.  More infor­ma­tion on this is avail­able at:  New IOM Guide­lines.

We have known for a while now that obe­sity in preg­nancy puts mother and infant at risk for a num­ber of prob­lems from car­dio­vas­cu­lar, meta­bolic and immune dis­or­ders to pre­ma­tu­rity, low birth weight, increased need for cesarean birth and slow recov­ery. Add another one:  Obese new­borns with increased risk for heart and metab­o­lism problems.

Ref­er­ence on weight gain and high birth weight:

Lud­wig DS, Cur­rie J. The asso­ci­a­tion between preg­nancy weight gain and birth­weight: a within-family com­par­i­son. Lancet. 2010 Sep 18;376(9745):984–90. Epub 2010 Aug 4.

A good ref­er­ence for issues sur­round­ing obese pregnancy:

Leddy MA et al. The Impact of Mater­nal Obe­sity on Mater­nal and Fetal Health. Rev Obstet Gynecol 2008;1(4):170–178.

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Fitness Starts Early!

By anncowlin | Published September 20, 2010

Preg­nancy fit­ness is not only impor­tant for moms, but for the fetus as well. Evi­dence is clear that aer­o­bic fit­ness improves brain, heart, immune and meta­bolic function…at all ages, includ­ing in utero. If con­tin­ued early in life, healthy phys­i­cal adap­ta­tions that occur in the uterus become rein­forced behav­ior, prepar­ing a good foun­da­tion for a healthy lifestyle. Babies are acute observers of move­ment and activ­ity, and learn from each other. A key com­po­nent of a good mom-baby pro­gram is the inter­ac­tion of the babies them­selves. A good teacher will facil­i­tate healthy activ­ity among our small­est class members!

There is grow­ing evi­dence that at all ages, aer­o­bic fit­ness pro­duces the great­est num­ber of ben­e­fits. Recently, researchers deter­mined that aer­o­bic fit­ness in 9 and 10 year olds pro­duced ben­e­fits in the devel­op­ment of two impor­tant brain regions — the basal gan­glia and the hip­pocam­pus — that are sig­nif­i­cant fac­tors in problem-solving intel­li­gence. This is just one of the lat­est reports that tells us the capac­ity to absorb and use oxy­gen (which improves with aer­o­bic fit­ness) is a key to health, qual­ity and length of life…beginning in the womb!

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Moving Together Creates a Community of Support

By anncowlin | Published December 5, 2009

Pic­nics, play groups, com­mu­nity of support…these are ways par­tic­i­pants extend the “mus­cle bond­ing” expe­ri­ence of exer­cis­ing together as preg­nant women and new moms.

A picnic is a great way to extend the community of support.

A pic­nic is a great way to extend the com­mu­nity of support.

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Pregnancy Pathway, Pregnancy — Behavior: Avoiding Risks

By dancingthrupregnancy | Published August 30, 2009

Some­times it seems like preg­nancy is a time of restric­tions. Avoid­ing risks can be one thing that makes it seem that way. But, bear with us here in an inter­est­ing trip through dan­ger and find­ing you find ways of enhanc­ing your pregnancy!

Risk Fac­tor #1:

Lack of pre­na­tal care. More than any­thing else, be sure you have care. Hav­ing some­one mon­i­tor your health and that of your baby dur­ing preg­nancy is vital to a good out­come.

Risk Fac­tor #2:

Not exer­cis­ing. Seden­tary behav­ior increases the risk for meta­bolic, car­dio­vas­cu­lar and immune disorders.

I know, I know, you don’t have time to exer­cise. Well, pay now or pay later, as they say. Make time to go to a class (make sure it includes 20 –30 min­utes of aer­o­bics) a cou­ple times a week. A class will also pro­vide social sup­port, another fac­tor that enhances your preg­nancy. Take a walk at lunch time. Prac­tice relax­ation techniques.

Risk Fac­tor #3:

Breath­ing dan­ger­ous fumes. Yes, this includes smok­ing and second-hand smoke. But, it also means avoid­ing envi­ron­ments where there is a lot smog (near high­ways), liv­ing with mold or dust, and fancy cleansers that may have dan­ger­ous chem­i­cals in them. Stick with vine­gar, ammo­nia or bleach as cleansers.

Smog can endanger your fetus!

Smog can endan­ger your fetus!

We are learn­ing that com­bus­tion exhaust from cars and trucks can neg­a­tively affect birth weight and pre­ma­tu­rity. If you live or work near a high­way or in an area where smog is preva­lent, what are your options? Can you trans­fer or move? Can you wear a mask? Talk to your care provider and fig­ure out the best pro­tec­tion for you and your fetus.

Risk Fac­tor #4:

Poor Nutri­tion. Yup, just go back one entry and find out how food affects preg­nancy. If you don’t eat enough pro­tein and drink enough water, you don’t make suf­fi­cient blood vol­ume to nour­ish your pla­centa and thus your fetus.

Read labels!

Read labels!

Eat whole foods and learn to read labels when you buy processed foods. What is a “processed” food? Any­thing with more than one ingredient!

Some pro­cess­ing (ex: home­made soup) takes lit­tle nutri­tion away, but some pro­cess­ing (ex: potato chips) takes every­thing good away and replaces it with unsafe sub­stances. Look for low sodium, low sugar, high vit­a­min and min­eral con­tent items with no sat­u­rated or trans fats.

Read the ingre­di­ents; if you don’t know what the words mean, maybe you want to pass it up.

Risk Fac­tor #5:

Alco­hol and Drugs. Com­mon items can be as dan­ger­ous as street drugs, which

There is plenty of time in life for a glass of wine...later.

There is plenty of time in life for a glass of wine…later.

No. No. No. Only meds from your prenatal care provider are okay.

No. No. No. Only meds from your pre­na­tal care provider are okay.

Caffeine? Only one cup & only if you must.

Caf­feine? Only one cup & only if you must.

can severely com­pro­mise you baby’s future. If you have a drug or alco­hol habit, get help.

Risk Fac­tor #6:

Genet­ics. You can have genetic pre­dis­po­si­tions for many preg­nancy issues. How­ever, that does not nec­es­sar­ily mean you will develop a given dis­or­der. For exam­ple, nutri­tion and exer­cise greatly reduce the risk and sever­ity of meta­bolic issues. Some genetic issues are unavoid­able how­ever, and your care provider will alert you to these, if they are relevant.

Risk Fac­tor #7:

Social issues — iso­la­tion, lack of sup­port, abuse, poverty. All of these fac­tors can have neg­a­tive effects.

If iso­la­tion is a sim­ple mat­ter of need­ing to meet other moms-to-be, join an exer­cise pro­gram. That way, you get both sup­port and exer­cise; just be sure it includes aer­o­bics, along with cen­ter­ing, relax­ation and appro­pri­ate strength.

If your sit­u­a­tion is more dire, seek the help of a care provider or social worker at your local hos­pi­tal or clinic. Safety and sup­port are crit­i­cal for you at this time. Get the help you need. There are peo­ple who care. And, if you know of some­one who needs help, help them.

If you have other risk fac­tors to offer, please post them in the com­ments. Thanks!

What’s next?  BIRTH!!

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