Throughout pregnancy the body is under additional pressure from the extra weight you will be carrying, exercise will help build and maintain muscle tone, strength and stamina to help you enjoy your pregnancy more. Exercise can also make it easier to regain pre-pregnancy fitness levels after the birth, and can help offset constipation, tiredness and circulation problems. Remember as well that exercise produces our best friend in labour, endorphins, so it makes you feel good too.

Exercising while you are pregnant can also help you significantly during labour. If there's one thing that I would change about my birth experience, it's that I would have worked on my leg muscles much more than I did. During labour your body will tell you to get into positions which enable the quickest and safest birth, some of these positions you may never have spent much time in and certainly for me, I had never tried kneeling or squatting for five hours before. This resulted in severe leg shake during labour and a couple of days where my legs ached more than any other part of my body. I spent the majority of my birth day on a birthing ball so I would have benefited greatly from taking the time out during my pregnancy to do some birthing ball exercises.

I was therefore really excited when Mark & Martin from Newborn Fitness contacted me about working with them to provide a bonus for their new e-book The Essential Exercise and Birthball Handbook. I have read a review copy of the book and I can tell you that this is something I wished I had when I was pregnant. The e-book is packed full of information and advice and in it you will discover:

• Tons of easy top tips for birthing ball exercises during pregnancy.
• All the latest pregnancy exercise safety guidelines and contra-indications.
• More than 100 full colour images with easy to follow instructions.
• Lots of safe and fun ball exercises for a fit and healthy pregnancy.
• Masses of postnatal ball exercises you'll love doing with your baby!
• Advanced ball routines for more great results after the postnatal period.
• Our 8 super secrets for losing your baby weight FAST!

Who wouldn't want to know all of that? The beauty of The Essential Exercise and Birthball Handbook is that you can use it after your baby is born and continue to benefit from the good work you have started while you were pregnant. I may very well go and dust off my old birthing ball after all :-)

This e-book is great value at only $27 and it comes with 4 great bonuses, one of which is created by me. I have put together a motivation hypnosis download for you to listen to that will help you motivate yourself to get into those good habits and start benefiting from this e-book as soon as early in your pregnancy as you can. Once you have purchased the e-book you will be given a link to a special page on this site where you can access your download immediately.

I thought of the motivation download because I know from my own pregnancy that it is only natural to feel some lack of motivation around exercising when you're pregnant, especially if you've had it tough during your first trimester. The only exercise I managed to do during that time was to get myself out of bed and that was pretty difficult at times, but, if you're having a great first trimester and for those who aren’t, when your energy does come back, exercise can make a big difference to how you feel - throughout pregnancy, it will help you during labour and it will help you gain back your pregnancy body once you've had the baby too.

I can't recommend this book enough so go grab a copy of the e-book and the bonuses, get yourself a good birthing ball and let me know how you feel when you start benefitting from the birthing ball exercises you will be doing now and after your birth.

Yours for calmer births, more often,

As mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, there's a lot of focus about women achieving a natural birth. This post led me further down this road to consider what actually is a natural birth?

Many people would say for example that it's not natural when drugs are utilised, however both in my Programme and when I work with people on a one to one basis I share with them how they can maximise their endorphins during labour, which is a drug far more powerful than morphine. If they learn these techniques, is that natural? For those undertaking HypnoBirthing or HypnoBabies classes, how natural is hypnosis in childbirth? Many would say its a completely natural state which everyone enters, others would classify it as unnatural and inappropriate for birth.

Now lets look at greater intervention, Ceasearians for example are used when it is considered that a baby is in distress or where a vaginal birth is not possible. This level of intervention is generally considered as not a natural birth, however Nile crocodiles* may disagaree. If a Nile hatchling is unable to hatch itself or is in distress, the mother or father (there are no nearby obstetricians) will hear the high-pitched chirping and will open the nest, pick up the egg in their mouth, and roll it between their tongue and the upper palate of their mouth to help crack the shell, and release their offspring. Ask a crocodile whether they have natural births if you dare and I'm sure they would say they all are!

As animals evolve it is natural for new ways to secure the safe birth of our offspring. I'm sure there would have been a time when crocodiles didn’t crack open their eggs and then when they did, this was new and different to them. How different is it for another human to help a baby be born by similar means? We can so easily place women in boxes determined by what type of birth they had, maybe using different criteria would bring us more interesting results. When I'm reviewing the impact of my Programme on a birth, the key criteria for me isnt whether she had gas and air, an epidural or a Cesarean, some of the key measures I use are:

• Did mum and birth companion feel in control of their birth?
• Was the birth as calm and gentle as possible?
• Was mum relaxed throughout the birth?
• Did mum feel empowered after the birth?

What criteria do you use?

I didn’t create this post to give the answers, only to reframe the sometimes limiting views of what something is and what something isn't. Rather than this being so black and white, lets allow ourselves to be comfortable in the grey and continue to make a difference to the things which really matter to mum and baby.

Juliet

* Interestingly the ancient god of crocodiles (Sobek) was first mentioned in the Pyramid Texts for laying his eggs on the bank of the waters and starting the creation process. He was recognised as the god who created the Nile, a god of fertility and rebirth, as well as the symbolic strength of the ruler of Egypt.

During a recent visit to my parents, my father starting telling me about a trip they made to the Grand Canyon. The trip was some time ago now, but for them it was a holiday of a lifetime and they continue to enjoy telling their stories and reliving the experience. On this visit the same stories that I had heard again and again were being told but as my Dad moved on to talk about Las Vegas, he started to tell it in a way that caught my attention.

Rather than the usual stories of how shocked they were at some of the sights (only natural being quite British and in their 60's), my Dad started to talk about what it was like to be in a casino. As he spoke about the environment my ears pricked up… safe….secure…no distractions…keep you focused…people don't realise how much time has passed. Now, I'm not saying that a casino is the perfect birthing environment, but stick with me for a moment and lets just take a look at the evidence...

Casinos are fully aware that when someone is gambling they are in a natural trance state and they use this knowledge to maintain this state and keep them gambling. A trance state is simply where you have a narrowed focus of attention, also called a hypnotic state and it's the same state whether you are gambling, watching the TV, reading a book, listening to music, running a marathon, or in labour. All members of staff in a casino are tasked with creating and maintaining the trance state for people who are gambling, from the people on the door, to the janitors, bar staff and croupiers. Consider how it would feel if everyone you came into contact with during labour, directly or indirectly were tasked with maintaining your inner focus, from the car park attendant, to the receptionist, to the cleaner, the doctor and every other care provider.

When you are in a trance state time passes quickly and you have no real concept of what time or even day it is. This is why there are no clocks in the cleverer Casinos. As soon as someone see's a clock and recognises the time, the focus of attention has been taken away from the activity of gambling and the trance state is broken. It may take some time to re-focus and during this time the conscious mind of the person gambling kicks in and they consider whether its time to leave.

Now lets consider what happens when you are in labour. As you enter your trance state your focus goes from an external view of what is going on around you, to an inward focus of your body and baby, this focus enables you to listen to what your body and baby need to have a natural birth. Add a nice big hospital clock to the wall of this picture and suddenly you are faced with an external focus, together with time bound pressure and in some cases the knowledge of when the midwife shift change is. This external focus which distracts us from listening to our bodies is often why TENS machines, heart monitors and other medical equipment can mentally and then physically get in the way of a natural delivery. Although I advocate for birthing wherever you feel most relaxed, it's often more difficult to control these external distractions when you are in a hospital room than when you are in your own home.

Another thing that they do in a casino is give you a huge drink with a long straw so you don't have to keep going back to the bar. How fantastic, they really do think of everything to keep you completely focused. Consider how you may want to handle keeping your fluid levels up during labour, this would be really useful wouldn’t it?!

The other thing they do is make you feel safe and secure. Whether exchanging large or small sums of money they do so in a locked room where nobody else can view the transaction. They wouldn’t consider exchanging money in corridors, waiting areas or a shared room, people just wouldn’t feel safe, so neither should a woman be in this type of environment while she is giving birth.

So, now lets look at Casinos again:

• They recognise you are in a trance state and how important this is to your activity
• They remove things which may distract you from this trance state
• The provide things which make it easy to maintain your trance state
• They know you need to feel safe and secure so provide the staff and environment to enable this to happen

As I said, I’m not saying they are the ideal environment, but it certainly would be interesting to see what would happen if a Casino manager got their hands on a maternity ward!

To fully understand how you can use the power of your mind to give yourself the gift of a wonderful birth day, check out my completely downloadable antenatal programme called The Psychology of Giving Birth.

Many women use visualisations to help them during labour. It helps to focus the mind inward as well as helps you avoid distractions. Visualisations can also help you focus on a rhythm of breathing. Visualising to help you manage a situation is a form of self-hypnosis and something that you can practise over time to increase the impact is has. One thing I've never been entirely sure about is when antenatal classes are prescriptive in what a woman should visualise. I remember being told to visualise a flower opening during my classes, but no matter how hard I tried, it just didn’t work for me, instead my mind kept going back to visualising what was physically happening. The reason this happened was that I was interested in what was actually happening and how each part of my body was working to enable a natural birth. I decided to take my own visualisation forward and utilised it during labour, as it was something I felt much more comfortable about, I believe it was much more powerful for me that something which didn’t quite fit.

So, if you're pregnant and you are finding it hard to stick with the visualisations you have been given, then think about what interests you have and how your visualisations can fit around those. For example, if you like cycling, imaging a rhythmic wheel turning in time with your breathing may help, or if you like scuba diving, imagine the slow breathing you do through your regulator and how wonderful it feels to be underwater. If you're a care provider, then utilise what resources and skills your client has rather than ask them to learn new skills. You will find they will be able to visualise things much more easily, which will enable them to maintain inner focus and work more effectively with their bodies. The Psychology of Giving Birth programme available on this website works with mum and birth companion to teach them how to create their own relaxing visualisations, once you know how to do this, you will have these skills for life and you can pass this wonderful technique on to your children too.

Following a recent question I posted on Twitter asking people to send me what visualisations helped them during their labour, below are the responses, these also include feedback from mums I have helped. As you can see, many of them are completely unique and wouldn’t be found in any antenatal class! Take a look through these and see if any of them might work for you.

• The actual mechanics of the body and focusing on each part working effectively, almost in slow motion
• Contractions/surges as pate being spread on toast (this lady really missed pate!)
• A feeling of warmth spreading over my body
• I intuitively imagined a flower opening in bloom
• Clouds of different colours - went through the spectrum
• I visualised my cervix opening the size of a football field, with my baby coming through easily and with love
• A quiet warm beach with gently lapping waves
• Being in warm soothing water
• A positive energy force washing over me body in waves (had a particular interest in reiki)
• Breathing in time with a hot air balloon rising and falling across the sky
• My uterus was an icing bag and I was gently massaging the icing down (a cake decorator of course!)
• Fields of wheat in the wind
• Blowing up balloons and watching them drift away
• In a squatting position imagining there was a magnet on the floor helping to draw my baby down and out
• My body was made up of different instruments which made an orchestra, me and my baby were conducting the symphony, each part coming in to play at just the right moment with just the right tune
• There was a wonderful imaginary carer, gently massaging my uterus with each contraction
• In the last few weeks of pregnancy I began to see a more animalistic side come out in me and during labour I completely took on the characteristics of this animal, the animal gave me confidence that my body and mind was capable of a having a natural birth

And of course it's not just the mums who can utilise visualisations, here's some from birth companions too…

• The room was a fort and I only let down the drawbridge to people we trusted
• I was a lion protecting my family
• I was on top of a mountain, being able to clearly see everything and had the strength of the mountain within me
• I was a tree, solid, strong and sheltering my partner

I will continue to share new visualisations I hear about, so if you would like to share yours, please do add a comment.

A great article was published yesterday, which explains how Midwives in Southampton, England, are helping women who have previously had a caesarean section to choose a normal, natural birth for their next baby.

The article, published on the Medical News Today website stated that nationally, the number of c-sections has dramatically increased over the last decade and that this has led the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement to develop a toolkit to help midwives reduce these numbers.

This toolkit has been in development at Princess Anne Hospital for the last 18 months and during that time there has been a 4 per cent reduction in the number of c-sections. This is double the target reduction.

In 2007, 24 per cent of births were by c-section. In 2008 this dropped to 20 per cent, with just 16 per cent of births by c-section in November.

Interestingly, one of the initiatives is to introduce midwife-led care for women having vaginal birth following a previous caesarean.

Helen Barnes, the consultant midwife trainee who helped set up the project, said: "We try not to medicalise the event, so from the beginning the mother will see a midwife, rather than a doctor. They will have a risk assessment to make sure they are suitable for midwife-led care and VBAC, and we fully explain the risks and benefits so they can make an informed choice."

I'm not sure of the plans for this toolkit, but it if it's working it would be nice to this that this would not only be shared with other UK Hospitals, but also internationally.

If you are planning on having a VBAC, try our free download which will help you relax and work with your body.

For the full article:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/139288.php