Look and Feel Better After Delivery

Simple Things You Can Do To Increase Strength

• What: Exercises After Pregnancy book
• Why: Prevent back strain and a multitude of other painful problems
• Where: BeFitMom.com, Amazon

I love this book, and would recommend it to anyone looking to get  a small piece of their anatomy back to themselves after delivery, whether it’s two days or two years later. It doesn’t promise anything unlikely, such as that you will look or feel better than before you had a baby. But it has clear, concise explanations and good illustrations for each exercise. The best part? Exercises can start even before delivery and can be done in the comfort of your own bed. I found concentrating on relaxing and tightening the correct muscle groups while in bed each night helped my mind away from the “Oh, God, what did I forget to do today and how many years of therapy will it cost my child?” hamster wheel of thoughts. That means I wore myself out by stressing my muscles instead of my mind, and resulted in much better sleep, not to mention better fitting clothes and increased self-confidence.

Unlike some other exercises I tried, I know when I did these right, and when I did them wrong, which made correcting them easier and didn’t make my problems worse. (Hello awful back sprain after my third child, where I couldn’t even sit, much less drive myself to the doctor.) The book offers great advice on what to avoid as well as what to do, and also targets specific problems such as that pesky hole in your stomach. (It’s called diastasis recti and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, be thankful.)

Each exercise takes only a few minutes, and even once I worked my way up, the routine didn’t go much beyond fifteen minutes that I would’ve spent lying in bed worrying anyway. None of the exercises require any kind of special equipment, though some include your infant, just in case  lying in bed tightening your stomach muscles isn’t your thing. If you don’t want to commit to the book, try checking it out from the library for a trail run. Better yet, visit the website to see if it might be useful for you.