Do you know the golden rules of getting back into running safely postnatally?
4 December 2015
I get asked about running all the time:
When can I start?
How best to get back into running?
The GP told me I can run so why does X, Y or Z feel wrong?
I’ve started running again and my knees hurt. Why?
And so it goes on…
In short, it’s high time I explored this subject in a blog, so here we go: the golden rules of getting back into running the safe way after having had a baby.
- You’re in the middle of your 6 week check-up, the GP tells you that everything is absolutely fine so you ask “Am I OK to start some gentle jogging again?”. The answer you get might well be “Yes, of course you can. Just stick to light jogging to start with and build things up gradually”. So, safe in the knowledge that your GP has given you the green light you head off home, pull on your running shoes and go for your first postnatal “light jog”. OMG, you feel as though you might wet yourself and your innards are going to fall out. Help, what’s going on? Golden Rule #1 (you are going to hate it): running – and that includes “light jogging” (whatever that means) - fall into the category of impact exercise. You need to wait a good 6 months postpartum before introducing impact work into your fitness regime.
- So let’s go back to that statement in the first point I made:
“OMG, I feel as though I am going to wet myself and my innards are going to fall out”. What’s going on? It’s all to do with your pelvic floor muscles. Imagine your torso as a kind of shopping bag with the back and tummy forming the walls of the bag, your internal organs the contents of the shopping bag and – yes, you guessed it – your pelvic floor as the base of the bag. It has a pretty important job: it’s essentially holding everything up inside you. The pelvic floor has had a rough old time, what with pregnancy and the weight of a growing baby bearing down on it for 9 months, the effects of the hormone relaxin which softens the pelvic floor muscles and – let’s not forget – labour and birth. To sum up, the pelvic floor is a whole lot weaker after pregnancy and needs to be strengthened and generally treated with care. If it “gives up” on you here’s what can happen: incontinence when you cough, sneeze, laugh, jump, jog etc, and if things get really bad, a prolapse – the innards fall out of the bottom of the shopping bag. A truly nasty, graphic image designed – I admit – to shock you. Golden Rule #2: treat your postnatal pelvic floor with great respect and with much love and attention by learning how to do your pelvic floor exercises properly (most of us get them wrong); doing these exercises every day; building them up in terms of frequency and intensity over the months; and not undoing all this good pelvic floor work by taking part in impact exercise too early – that’s the 6 months golden rule, remember?
- So we’ve spoken about the pelvic floor – the very foundation of your working body – and that leads me neatly to the other building block of a fit body: the tummy muscles. I told you that the poor old pelvic floor suffered in pregnancy now imagine what the tummy muscles have had to undergo. They were stretched beyond recognition as your bump grew, and highly stretched muscles = weak muscles. You may well also be amongst the 60-70% of women whose deepest layer of abdominals separates in pregnancy to allow room for your baby to grow. Golden Rule #3: be sure to check carefully for abdominal separation or get a specialist in pre/postnatal exercise to check for you. If you have a gap, ask what the gap is, above the belly button, below the belly button and also AT the belly button. It is measured in terms of how many of YOUR fingers can fit into the gap. Remember the results, as they will affect what you do next and how you do it.
- And this leads directly to Golden Rule #4: before you even contemplate starting up running again, weak, stretched or – worse - separated tummy muscles need to the re-built and restored the safe and CORRECT way for the postnatal body. Think about it this way: you wouldn’t build the 5th floor of an apartment block before having laid the foundations and then built the ground floor, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors, would you? The pelvic floor and your deep abdominals are the foundations of your fitness “apartment”. So work on them first. You saw I wrote the word “CORRECT” in capitals. That’s for a reason: your postnatal abdominal strength needs to be constructed in a very specific way and not by going to the local Legs Bums and Tums class.
- And that probably leads to the simple question “so what are the ground, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors then?” which, in turn, takes me to Golden Rule #5. During those first 6 months of the postnatal period, you’ll be putting in place your fitness foundations – strong pelvic floor and strong deep abdominals – and then you’ll be gradually building up your general stamina and strength floor by floor, keeping things low impact. Now I know that for a runner this is an irritating thing to be told. “What? How can I possibly get a good workout and build my fitness levels without impact and without running?” Believe me, you can, quite easily. Let’s look at building strength: start with body weight exercises (squats, lunges, press ups, tricep dips etc) and then as you improve you can bring in weights and work systematically through every muscle group in the body. Any impact here? No! Effective? Yes! Cardiovascular fitness: OK, so you want to gradually build up your stamina. Start with good old power pramming – that’s a brisk walk with the buggy! Add in some hills, vary the speed, lengthen the distance, and you have a workout. If you can wangle childcare then I would strongly encourage you to take up deep water aquajogging. This is THE perfect non-impact way of rebuilding your postnatal running fitness, without doing horrible things to your joints and pelvic floor. In deep water, wearing an aquajogging belt, you will be able to mimic the running movement pattern and put together workouts that replicate what you used to do on land, all without messing up those foundations that you are busy rebuilding.
- I‘d like you to see Golden Rule #6 as a kind of “umbrella” rule that arches over and encompasses all other rules and it is this: good form. Whatever fitness you do postnatally you absolutely HAVE to do it with really good technique. The postnatal body is far more vulnerable to injury and prior to pregnancy and so good technique is your friend, your protector. Make 100% sure that all your 0-6 months pre-land-based-running-fitness is spot on technique-wise and then when you start up with running, get someone who knows his or her stuff to observe your gait. Perfect gait will protect your ankles, knees and hips. If things are not quite spot on, go to a specialist running shop, have your gait filmed and analysed, and then make sure that you are fitted with the correct running shoes, with insoles if necessary.
Sticking to these 6 Golden Rules will ensure that you run longer, faster, better and for many years to come. Take the shortcut, miss out the foundations and – well, you don’t need me to tell you what happens to a building with shaky foundations…