Physical exercise during pregnancy – benefit or risk

C. Bosoancă, M. Mitran, S. Vlădăreanu

Rezumat: During pregnancy, some complications or chronical diseases, like stress urinary incontinence and low back pain, depression, higher cardiorespiratory fitness, gestational weight gain and diabetes worth an additional attention. Starting from this point, physical exercise represent an important measure to prevent these problems and also, a real instrument can be used to minimize the consequence or damage to the mother and fetus. However, engaging in regular exercise is a challenging behavior because many women are not sufficiently active. For this reason, doctors who interact with pregnant women need to present them the importance of exercise and also, to recomand physical activity. Another important measure that health professionals need to adopt is to encourage women planning to have children to adopt an active lifestyle before they conceive. Recent studies show that, in most cases, psysical activity is safe for pregnanat women, but also the intensity of practice should be mild or moderate for previous sedentary women and moderate to high for active women The most important health benefits of exercise included maintenance of prenatal aerobic and musculoskeletal fitness levels, facilitation of labor, improve psychological adjustment to changes of pregnancy and improves levels of maternal glucose tolerance.
Cuvinte cheie: physical exercise, pregnancy, health benefits, activity, exercise intensity, fitness.