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16.11.2014

Study: strength training after giving birth

While women who do strength training after giving birth gain more strength than women who don't, the positive effects on body composition are not as big as you might think. Researchers at Brigham Young University in the United States report on this in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. They suspect that main benefits of doing strength training after giving birth are psychological.

Study
The researchers performed an experiment with 44 women, all of whom had had a baby during the eight months prior to the experiment. The women were 6.5 kg heavier than before they had become pregnant.

The researchers got half of the women to do stretch exercises twice a week [Control]. The other half of the women did strength training twice a week [Resistance Training].

The workouts were simple but thorough full-body workouts. Each workout consisted of 1-3 sets of basic exercises including leg-extensions, leg-curls, leg-presses, biceps-curls, shoulder-presses, chest-presses, lat-pulldowns, seated-rows and curl-ups. The women did sets of 8-12 reps and rested for 90 sec between sets.

Results
At the end of the 18 weeks that the experiment lasted the women who had done resistance training were of course stronger. The women in the control group had gained less strength.

The body composition of the women who had done resistance training had improved slightly more than that of the women in the control group, but the difference was not significant.

Conclusion
Although the effects of strength training on body composition were disappointing, the researchers believe that resistance training does have positive health effects for young mothers. "Postpartum may be a particularly high risk period for insufficient physical activity", they write. And strength training is an excellent form of physical activity.

The researchers also suspect that strength training has interesting psychological effects on this group. Eighteen women in the study said that they were suffering from post-natal depression. These symptoms disappeared in nearly all of the women who were in the strength training group. In the other group only half of the women reported a decrease in these symptoms. "These trends suggest that additional investigation of the role of resistance training for depressive symptoms is warranted", the researchers write.

Source:
Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2014 Apr;24(2):414-21.

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Light fitness programme not a problem for pregnant women 22.01.2010