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,

You may have been wondering why it has been a little quiet recently within the Birth Download camp, well this is the reason. We have been busy beavering away on a new product for mums and their birth companions to help them discover how to use the power of their body and mind to birth in a calm, relaxed and controlled way.

The Psychology of Giving Birth Programme

If you are interested in learning techniques to enable you and your birth partner to be in total control of your birth day and to tap into your own natural pain relief to allow you to birth in the most natural way possible with a minimum of intervention then this message is for you.

If you are anything like me when I became pregnant I suddenly started to worry about what labor would be like. How painful would it be? Would I cope? Would I tear? Would it put me off ever having children again?! Then, to make matters worse, I found that other women were only too happy to share their "horror stories" with me and, although their intentions were to probably to help me prepare for what they believed was to come, I started to truly believe that pain and trauma were inevitable. These kind of stories are everywhere - TV, radio, magazines, the internet... it seemed like everywhere I turned there was another story of a long painful birth. As well as all of this my birth companion wanted to make sure that he played as big a part as possible in the birth of our baby and not just stand on the side lines until the whole thing was over.

This is where our search for something different began. The Psychology of Giving Birth Programme is the result of that search:

The Psychology of Giving Birth Programme

Here's a sneak peak at what you'll discover in "The Psychology of Giving Birth":

- Techniques to enable you to have a clear view of what you want your birth experience to be like
- Discover visualisation skills and breathing techniques to stay relaxed throughout birth
- Learn how to prevent the risk of tearing
- How to work with your contractions and minimise any discomfort
- The little known secret to be able to control any fear or anxiety which may creep in
- The very best ways to have a birth companion who is completely prepared and knows how to really help
- How to minimise the risk of intervention
- Learn to go within and listen to your body
- How to look forward to your birth day

And that's just a fraction of what you'll find in the "The Psychology of Giving Birth Programme". Not only that but for a short period of time you will get a number of bonus modules as well.

Take the first steps towards a calm and gentle birth today and check out the The Psychology of Giving Birth Programme.

As always, wishing you a wonderful birth day
Take care
Juliet Eccleston