The Waiting Game

The waiting game is what I'm currently playing right now and what I will continue to do for the next 3 weeks and 3 days.

'What is she talking about?' you may ask, especially if you are a male (sorry for the judgement) and or haven't gone down the pregnancy route before. 

After having a child, 6 weeks is the amount of time that patients must wait before engaging in certain physical activity such as running, sex and higher impact activity. 

The why for this is because internally your body needs to heal after the 9 months and labour it's just been through. Just as my doctor stated, I feel great now, as if I could run but running this soon could cause damage. 

When doing my own research I found the following things that can happen if starting too early:

Abdominal muscle separation can happen during labour, with postpartum exercise too early you can risk abdominal muscle damage...See this link at baby center for more information.

Your adrenal glands have the possibility of being tapped out to empty if exercising too soon, throwing off the healing process of the rest of the body. See Family Education website for more info.

Also at family education website I learned that joints can still be loose post pregnancy like they were during pregnancy causing greater chance of injuring yourself. 

I'm sure there is many other things that could happen too and from other running moms that I've spoken too they have all warned me not too run too early due to internal damage so I'm going to follow their advice and wait to get my run on till I hit my 6 weeks and see my dr for my post partum checkup. Better safe than sorry, I want to run for the remainder of my life and I don't want to ruin that by starting too soon.

Some wise words that I have heard from my mom, my friend Delynn and other wise women in my own words is, The body takes 9 months to nurture and create a baby, it takes another 9 months for the body to fully get back too normal.

What I will do that is safe, approved exercise prior to running:

• Walking daily with my daughter Iyla and boxer dog Kaiser daily
• I will start my weight program beginning next week, using Iyla with some of the exercises (a post will follow on how she is involved) 
• Eliptical
• Stretching
• Kegels too

This was our first walk on June 26th