Pregnancy Yoga

Photo courtesy North End Yoga

I've never really had a good body image. My best friends during those awkward stages of puberty and unfortunate weight gain were wonderfully, beautifully, jealousy-inducingly thin (you know who you are). So as vain as it is for me to admit this, one of my biggest concerns with getting pregnant has been the impending weight gain and subsequent weight loss.

Now I realize that I will gain weight. And by weight I mean there is another human inside me gaining it's own weight and becoming more humanly everyday. I have no problem with that. The fear and anxiety comes in gaining too much weight and not being able to lose it and forever being the person who just never went back to her normal self after pregnancy.

In order to overcome this, I am trying to make a strong effort to exercise (safely and moderately) and now that my morning sickness is basically gone (Hallelujah!) I am trying to do a little exercise. This usually consists of short walks/jogs through our neighborhood with my husband. I like to do 5 minutes walking, 5 minutes jogging, 5 walk, and 5 jog. It's short and I take the jog at a mind numbingly slow pace but it gets my blood flowing and I feel good about it. I find that after spending a month and half almost entirely in bed, I'm a little out of shape. The key to this pregnancy exercise stuff is to never work so hard that you can't carry on a conversation while exercising.

SO today we just took a 20 minute walk and I thought I'd try out some pregnancy yoga. I have the most amazing pregnancy app EVER called Pregnancy Companion. I paid to get the full version and it's got a ton of great features like a weight tracker, a way to make sure you're getting the right number of calories, a forum to ask doctors questions, a way to look and keep track of your favorite names, your status in pregnancy, a way to keep track of contractions (when that time comes) and a wellness section that shows pregnancy yoga as shown in the photo below.

So if you are in the market for a GREAT pregnancy app, I highly recommend this one. Anyway, these are the pregnancy yoga poses that I tried out today. It doesn't tell you how long to hold the poses which is kind of nice because I can just hold it however long feels good. I've done a little yoga before, so thankfully I already knew how these poses were supposed to work since there was no video to follow or anything. And I was able to choose my own music.

Some of the poses were a little more difficult than I remember, what with the being out of shape and all. But I feel really good. And it feels so good to be exercising again. My body is just so happy. I'm going to try really hard to keep up with this throughout my pregnancy and hopefully it will help me to A. not gain too much weight, B. get back into exercise easily after I have the baby, and C. make it through labor and delivery a little easier.

But in case you're into following a video with an instructor, just go ahead and search pregnancy yoga on youtube. There will be so many results that you won't know what to do with yourself. I'll try some of those out at some point.