I am in the final stretch now. Since my daughter was born early it could be any day now! Just wanted to update you on how things are going since this will probably be my last prenatal entry. I am still teaching dance, which I think is both good for me but has been very difficult. I started asking my subs to start following me and to take some of the more strenuous activity off of me. But it is keeping me active. I am finding just getting up and down to be a major chore. If my daughter asks me to play the tickle monster game (chasing her around the house with one of her stuffed animals) one more time I am going to loose it 🙂
Other than that my exercise routine has lessened quite a bit. I still stretch my body every night before bed. I just want to make sure I am limber for labor. I still am doing push ups, squats and a few yoga poses maybe once a week. I was trying to accomplish that every other day but now I am just too sore.
The biggest thing that I am doing for my body is simple being aware of my posture. In pregnancy we have to be so careful about standing, sitting and even laying down correctly. Please look at my posture page for pregnancy to get a better idea of what good posture is. Keeping good posture helps to keep us strong. This is important in pregnancy as well as just after and beyond.
I developed back pain when my daughter was about 9 months old. This was a result of not having good posture while I was pregnant and then carrying a baby around just made it worse. The back pain eventually led to weekly headaches. This carried on for a couple years. I finally sought help when my daughter was about 16 months. It has taken me about a year but I have been pain free now for a couple months. Even now that I am 8 months pregnant!
What I did was seek help from a great ballet teacher that I have and an Alexander Technique teacher. They both taught me a lot about my posture and the misconceptions that I had. I know that they had the same end results for me but they went about things very differently. I had to sift through everything that they both were saying and decide what made sense for me. When I became pregnant this time around I stopped my lessons. Mostly because of the morning sickness. This gave me time to really let things sink in and to figure out my own body. Once I became aware of things that I was doing and where I was holding tension things started to make sense for me.
I feel much better now and just have to remember to continue to be aware of what my body is doing. Awareness is key to basically any challenge that you may have. The more aware you are the easier it is to correct the things that your body is doing to counteract good posture. Now when I notice even the slightest bit of pain I just focus on it and my body corrects it on its own. Good posture is strength training. You begin to use the correct muscles to stand and sit. This makes those muscles stronger and relieves pain.