This is a post I have recovered from my old blog. I was on my 27th week of my second pregnancy and had 13 more to go… and I was training!
Though every day there were less things that I could do and though it was frustrating to not being able to close properly a triangle any more or to have to support myself on the knees to do push-ups, though I had to deal with people’s well-intentioned but boring daily advices about stopping training .. I didn’t give up. Not yet, soon enough, but not yet.
Why? These are 5 reasons I found to keep training:
- Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. Plato(427-347 BC) . By the ways thanks to Root Mov trainer and BJJ Instructor Simon Pouly http://roots-movement.com/ who pointed out this quotation for me back at the time
It is not only about doing BJJ, it is about staying fit. It is very easy to fall into a spiral of sedentary and lazy life and very hard to get out of it. Specially if you are pregnant. Pregnancy can be easily and wrongly used as an excuse to just sit around and relax. Well, relaxing is good… up to some point! Too sedentary life is not good, for any human being, including pregnant women. Specially for them, sedentary life is related for instance to backache and swollen feet. You can avoid it by doing some sport, BJJ is as good as any other.
Also it would be so much harder to recover from pregnancy and delivery if you take a break for 10-11 months than if you do a short 2-3 months break.
2. Is cheaper! – avoiding financial crisis
If you go to the gym, you don’t spend money (except for the monthly fee). If you don’t go, I am sure you will not stay at home every single day, you end up going out with friends, going shopping.. etc etc… and that costs quite a lot of money, that I assure you, you will need later…
3. Keep you within a acceptable weight
Pregnancy can as well be easily and wrongly used as an excuse to just eat as much as you want. WRONG! Overweight makes delivery much harder (and dangerous, it increase the risk of needing a cesarean birth). It also increases the risk of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure.
But I am hungry! well, then eat a horse if you wish.. but then exercise, burn out some of those calories and keep your weight within acceptable limits.
4. Mens sana in corpore sano: BJJ relieves Stress
Pregnant women are not beings full of happiness, lying on a Maldive beach, eating from silver trays with nothing else to worry than if they should buy blue or pink baby stramplers.
Pregnant women work, have a family, sometimes have other little children, have troubles likes everybody else. They also suffer stress! And sport is known as one of the best medicine to deal with stress. When I am trying a BJJ technique, i fully concentrate on it. BJJ takes my mind off of whatever is troubling me at the moment. Physical exercises switch on particular hormones and chemicals in the brain (like endorphins) that help us to stay relaxed and happy.
5. My personal reason: Because I don’t believe in life after death, i have just this one life to live and I decided some time ago to do rather what it makes me happy and not what others expect from me. BJJ, my training, my team, makes me happy. Period
