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As some women in BJJ will already know, the process of becoming a mother is very hard on the body and the ‘big joke’ is that just when you need to be in your best condition to cope well with sleep deprivation, nursing, and a constant cycle of picking up and putting down your baby, [...] Read more »
Pregnancy and birth takes a substantial toll on your body (and mind) and the conventional wisdom is that it takes a year to fully recover from the experience. Keeping active through your pregnancy can help you to perform well during the birth as well as to maximise your recovery postpartum. In the UK, the guidance [...] Read more »
If you like fighting, you’ll love giving birth. Like a competition setting, birth is 90% mental, 5% doing what your body knows what to do, and 5% respecting the advice of the people coaching you from the sidelines. As with competition, you’ve got a ‘burn down’ to the big day, during which time you can [...] Read more »
While I enjoyed a wide range of activity during the second trimester, including BJJ training, the final stage of my pregnancy presented greater challenges to staying active; by the start of the third trimester the bump was becoming extremely unwieldy. During the final phases of the pregnancy I found my mobility went way down as [...] Read more »
For the last decade, Western medicine has recognised the importance of exercise during pregnancy (where a pregnancy is low risk). While there are some restrictions and caveats, women can enjoy a wide range of activity during pregnancy, working to a level of exertion proportional to their pre-pregnancy activity levels, i.e. very active women will be [...] Read more »
Claims I’d read during the first trimesterthat the second was much more ‘enjoyable’ turned out to be accurate. Happily, from weeks 15/16 the constant nausea stopped and extreme fatigue subsided. While I’d been hitting 3 workouts a week during the first 16 weeks, these were very half-hearted sessions and during the second trimester I felt [...] Read more »
Oh my goodness. I’ve reached the milestone of 36 weeks of post-ACL op recovery. O frabjous day callooh callay! The past three weeks have seen continued improvement since Weeks 31-33, during which time I was able to increase activity levels and use self-massage to effectively eliminate some chronic pain in the knee. Swelling and stiffness [...] Read more »
During the 13th week of my ACL recovery, I was able to confirm that I was in week 5 of pregnancy. We’d been seriously considering starting a family in recent years and once we had dates for the ACL op and had gotten to a point in my recovery when it was well underway we [...] Read more »