Competing/training while pregnant

I swam through 2 pregnancies, the first just recreationally (a mile a day, didn't belong to Masters yet) and the second I trained and competed through. I did normal workouts with flip turns during the 2nd pregnancy, although I was annoyed by having to take more bathroom breaks (and couldn't do dolphin kick during fly, so I pulled the fly). In the last trimester, I couldn't stop very long between sets or the baby would stretch out an arm or leg causing me pain when stretching during the strokes (I'd have to quit and get out). My teammates laughed at me because every week I got lower in the water. After she was born, I had the best flutter kick of my life just from keeping myself off the bottom of the pool those last months. In the first trimester I started races in the water because my teammates were freaked out and insisted "No blocks", but I swam so slowly that I went back to the blocks. At close to 8 months the doctor told me to stop going off the blocks (I complied). At 2 weeks past the due date, I volunteered to go off the blocks again (the answer was no!). In the 2nd trimester I was low on iron. When they increased my iron pills, I got faster even though I got bigger. I was fortunate to have progressive doctors who worked well with athletes, although I did still worry about doing something that would hurt the baby. However, I have a theory that pumping that blood through there during workouts helped her because she had a knot in her cord when she was born yet she weighed 10 pounds! The only place I felt normal during both pregnancies was in the water. Each pregnancy was different. The first baby moved during all of my swims and seemed to match my stroke timing. The second one seemed to roll up in a ball and get out of the way (except for fly). This is all just personal experience, every pregnancy is so different, and of course you have to check with your doctor.

Thanks everyone, for your stories and your reassurance. I'll check out some of the links and the books and try to calm down a bit. Considering how long I've been swimming, I doubt I would be able to stress myself to the point I actually hurt the baby. It's just hard sometimes to keep from getting overly worried about every little thing.

The woman who was swimming at the pool and disappeared had her baby over the weekend. I was talking with one of my older sisters about exercise 7 pregnancy. she said that the wednesday before I was born my mother played tennis. I was born on a Monday. No one knew she was even pregnant. I was born hte day after Easter. The thursday before, my mohter was up on a lader hanging curtains. She wore a girdle the entire time she wsa pregnant with me. My older siblings say that's why I'm so weird. I thin htat's why I can keep secrets.

My older siblings say that's why I'm so weird. I thin htat's why I can keep secrets. You can keep secrets eh? Cool. My name is //** ERROR 28503 CONNECTION LOST **//

It's been great reading through all this as I have just found out I am pregnant and have been feeling sick as anything and feel unable to do much exercise at all which is driving me mad! I have been running (slower than normal) a couple of times and I plan to get back to the swimming club tomorrow if I can get out of bed early enough to meet them! I feel inspired to 'get on with it' after eading some of these comments so thanks for putting my mind at rest!! And good luck to all those pregnant women out there who want to continue training!

Congratulations on your pregnancy- you're probably feeling pretty good right about now! I just entered my last trimester and I still feel really good in the water. I've been swimming 3 to 4 times a week the whole time, and have gone from doing 3K per workout to 2000- 2500 now that I'm slower. I'm still doing flipturns too, and I find that butterfly is the only stroke that I can't really do anymore, but I still do a lap or two each workout. I tell my doctor that I still work out 6 days a week and she just says 'That's great'; I too wonder if she knows that what I do now is probably more than what 'normal' people do when they exercise (which is still nothing compared to the old 4 hours a day in the pool!). Just pay attention to your body and swim easy or take extra rest if you need it- you'll know your limits. Just stick with it the whole time- I have acquaintances that are pregnant that don't exercise and they always complain about how they feel. Maybe I'm an anomoly but I've felt good so far and I think maintaining a decent level of fitness has had something to do with it. Good luck!

I had 4 pregnancies but only 1 kid. I swam during all of them but once problems arose, I was told to back off. With the 4th, I was at Nationals competing not knowing I was pregnant. Once I confirmed it, I was told to cut back a bit and no competing. Of course, I have a history of bad pregnancies so my doctors were more cautious. One thing I noticed was that open turns, during the morning sickness (which for me was 6 months) was much better than flip turns. I did all the strokes and had no major issues until 3 weeks before my son was born. Sadly, then they put me on bed rest. Blah. I have heard about the maximum heart rate. I want to say it's 120 or 130's. Watch it and just listen to your body. My coach told me not to do hypoxic at all and when we did 15 sec of vertical kicking with our arms over head, I kept mine in the water. Just small things to make it easier on my body. Congratulations and I hope this is a smooth 9 months!

I am currently pregnant with my second. I didn't swim at all with #1 (who will be 3 next month). This year, I'd been training really hard all season, hoping to go some lifetime bests at Austin SCY Nats. Well, a planning miscalculation resulted in me being pregnant at Nats! Whoops... Anyways, here's how my meets went leading up to and through Nationals. Note: all weeks quoted are obstetrical weeks, ie. weeks from last period. For actual weeks pregnant, subtract 2. 6 weeks pregnant: Indiana States, unrested. Not feeling pregnant at all yet, no nausea, no fatigue. We only went to one day of the meet and I swam 3 events (50/100 free, 100 IM). Swam a LIFETIME best unrested 100 free. No clue if this was due to surging hormones or just that I had been swimming great all season on my 100 free. Started feeling crappy about 3 days after this meet. 9 weeks pregnant: Illinois States, at very start of Nats taper. Swam 11 events over 2 days. 50/200/500 free, 100/200/400 IM, all 50s of stroke, and 2 50 frees on 2 relays. Good Lord! Anything over 100 yards, I did not take at all out pace, since my main goal was to score points for our team. I still went very hard, but it was more like an all-out practice hard swim (and the times were comparable). Feeling very very nauseous at this meet. I tried to wear my Tyr leg suit for the 50 free and felt horrid after about 10 minutes of wearing it. Turns out the compression was just too much - as soon as I took it off I felt much better. Competed the rest of the meet in a drag suit. Had one fantastic swim... was only 0.04 off my lifetime best ever 50 free split 11 weeks pregnant: SCY Nats in Austin, shaved and tapered. Ha, shaved and tapered. Yeah. I'd say I hit my peak of nausea and fatigue around weeks 11 and 12. I only swam 4 of the 6 events for which I was entered: 50 free/fly/*** and 100 IM. In general, my body felt like it would during an in-season meet where I was pretty broken down. Very happy with my 50 free - only 0.15 off lifetime best. 50 fly was ok, 100 IM was ok (esp. given how my breaststroke turned out). 50 *** was hands down probably the worst race of my entire life. I went over 3 seconds (in a 50!!!!) slower than last year. My dear husband, in an attempt to rationalize the swim, said, "Well, you were riding really low in the water and just couldn't get over the wave. You have gained a lot of weight in the last month." Hmmm... true statement, though possibly not the best thing to say to a hormonal nauseous pregnant lady. Sorry this is so wordy... Hopefully others will find some useful info here about competing during the first trimester. I plan to keep training through this pregnancy (I'm at 14 weeks now and FINALLY feeling a little better!) and put some info up on the Karen's Pregnant Blog thread. My goal is to stay in decent enough shape that I can have a semi-ok meet at LCM Nats in Indy next year. I'll be the one there with a 9 month old and a 4 year old! Note: I DID dive in for all my races, but I stopped doing dives in practice and during warmup at meets. So my first start off the Austin blocks was for my 50 fly! I had no pooch yet, just that nice bloated look, so I figured baby was still safely tucked behind the pubic bone and tummy muscle. My doctor said max heartrate of 140. Since I have no additional risk factors, I figured if I was back to 140 within a minute, I was doing ok. There is absolutely no medical logic for this minute, it's just what I felt comfortable with. My coach, a labor and delivery nurse for over 20 years, said that more important than heart rate was keeping body core temp down. We practice in an 80F pool and since it was taper time, it wasn't like we were doing mega aerobic sets (which tend to heat me up more) so no issues with core temp. Like Allison, I also stopped the hypoxic stuff, which sucked because we do a lot of hypoxic stuff at taper time. I also noticed it took me a very long time to warmup and that I was extremely out of breath for about the first 500-800 yards.

I'm in my 34th week, still swimming 5x week. I'm still doing flip turns (though they look a little ungainly) and still swimming some butterfly. (Mostly in 100 or 200 IM sets, so never more than about 50 fly at a time). I have been swimming masters for 16 years now, but I didn't compete in HS or college, so it's not like I'm one of those Olympians in the fast lane normally. When I'm not pregnant, I am smack in the middle of the pool, and now I've moved down a lane or two. However, I'm mostly swimming on my own these days because of scheduling conflicts with my team's practice schedule. I did swim the 3000 postal event last year when I was about 11 weeks and pretty much swam my normal speed. I didn't really notice a significant slow down or a lack of capability until I got to my third trimester. Until then, I was swimming my standard 3000-3500 yds per workout, and holding my 200's under 3:00. These days, however, it's a real effort to swim a 200 in anything less than about 3:35 and I usually need to do a 4:00 interval if I want to do more than 1. Here's what I've found so far: 1. My body will not let me do what it can't do. So I don't worry that much about target heart rate. Earlier in my pregnancy I was working hard and still doing sprints. As I have gotten more pregnant, my body has given me the feedback to slow down. Now if I sprint at all in a workout, it's only for one or two 50's and that's it. I was a little concerned at one point that I was pushing too hard, so I had my friend who is an OT bring her blood pressure cuff and her pulse oximeter to the pool and had her test me after my workout and everything was totally fine. My theory (and I'm not a doctor, so take it with a grain of salt) is that you can't go by some arbitrary HR limit. It's much more important to know what YOUR body can do. For me, I'm not having a problem if I get my HR to 140-150 because I recover pretty quickly (i.e within a couple of minutes). But for others, even getting up to 120 could be a problem if they don't recover for a long time. Ultimately, if your body is telling you to back off. Do it. Don't push through it you aren't feeling good. 2. I feel MUCH better if I swim any given day than if I don't. Even if you just get in the water for 20 min and paddle around, it's better than not going at all. Early on, it helps with queasiness. Later on, I'm finding, it helps keep the swelling down in your hands and feet. 3. I can still do all of the strokes, including fly, much to my surprise. I think a lot of this was that I spent 6 months before I got pregnant working with a physical therapist and a pilates coach to strengthen my core muscles to deal with a chronic bad back. I have found that fly and *** particularly require this core strength. You can 'cheat' if you aren't pregnant and compensate with other muscles, but when you are pregnant, you don't have that luxury, so if you aren't using your core in those strokes, you may have a very hard time doing them. 4. I mix up my workout as much as possible to make sure I work as many different muscle groups as I can. And I particularly try to make sure I really work my core muscles on all of the strokes. Here's a workout I did last week as an example. 200 free warmup 400 reverse IM warmup 4 x 150 Kick/Drill/Swim (by 50's) 2 x ...... 350 free on 6:30 ...... 200 IM on 4:00 ...... 100 free on 2:00 easy ...... 50 free on 1:00 fast 200 free/back warm down (alternate by 50) --------- Anyway, sorry for the long winded post and CONGRATULATIONS to everyone who is reading this and thinking about swimming during her pregnancy. I highly recommend it. We'll see how delivery goes, but so far even the benefits of minimal morning sickness, greater energy, and no lower back pain have been worth it for me.

Congrats to all of you! You already know how to do the best sport for pregnant women! I am happy to say that the pregnancy phase of my life is over (I threw up EVERY DAY and thru delivery for BOTH pregnancies!), but I will say that swimming was the best thing when I was pregnant. I had clearance from my doctor/midwife, and swam 5-6 times weekly (except for a few weeks when I was high risk with the second). As another poster said, it really helped my nausea- I would get up, throw up, swim, then I could eat a little. It also seemed to set my body clock. The babies would sleep while I swam, slowly and steadily (which, luckily, is how I swim anyway), then wake up while I was in the shower like clockwork! I did Boston Light swim at a few weeks (did not know yet) and did 1650 at NE SCY meet right before I delivered my son- I rather enjoyed the look of surprise (horror?) on the faces of the college-age lifeguards, and my kids get a kick out of the story!