What is insulin resistance and gestational diabetes?

Your pancreas produces the hormone insulin to control the glucose levels in your blood after you eat and absorb ‘sugars’ (food). During pregnancy the placenta releases other hormones that can interfere with this process. More insulin than usual is needed to control sugar levels, creating a condition called insulin resistance or pre-diabetes. If left unmanaged, your pancreas becomes overworked and may not be able to create enough insulin to control your blood sugar levels. Your glucose levels rise above what is healthy putting you at risk of gestational diabetes

It’s not all being past your prime and over the hill. Age can bring with it a newfound acceptance of your body, a celebration of what it has achieved – or survived, and a deeper appreciation of working out and what it can do for you.

A recent fitness tweet entitled ‘Reason to Exercise’, presumably aimed at motivating young women, included, be one of the hot girls, get the good looking guy and make other girls jealous. The great thing about getting older is you remember these sentiments, but no longer feel them. You chuckle at how ridiculous they are and even feel sympathy for your younger ‘sisters’ who still inhabit this fickle world.

It is the number one excuse given for not exercising – “I just don’t have time”. Whether it is due to long work hours, family commitments, a busy social life, or all of the above, no one seems to feel like they have enough time in each day. If you, like everyone else are feeling time poor and as a result are neglecting your fitness, circuit training could be the answer.

Circuit training is picking several exercises and performing one set of each of the exercises in succession. Then repeating another set of each exercise until the chosen number of circuits have been completed.

Training in this way offers a time efficient workout as it involves moving from one exercise to the next without a break, instead of performing simple sets where you do one set, rest for a minute and repeat the same exercise up to 3 times (and rest 3 more times) before moving onto a different exercise. This literally halves your exercise time by removing idle gym time.

The exercises you include in the circuit affect how hard you work out. Choosing multi-joint movements like squats, will work you harder in a shorter amount of time, compared to exercises that only use one muscle group, such as bicep curls. In order to keep moving through the burn, you could follow an upper body exercise with a lower body exercise, then another upper body exercise followed by an abdominal exercise. This offers muscles recovery time without you actually taking time out of the workout to rest.

These days it is generally accepted that ‘light to moderate intensity exercise’ is not only safe, but beneficial for most pregnant women. Benefits include a reduction in back pain, bloating, swelling and gestational diabetes and an improvement in sleep, weight control and mental wellbeing.

Despite this only 2 thirds of pregnant women participate in physical activity during their pregnancy. Of those that do stay active, 83% choose just walking. Some may add a little prenatal yoga or swimming. Only 10% of active pregnant women engage in any resistance training. Much of this is to do with fear – not knowing what the possible risks are to their baby. However, it is also probably due to the fact that they don’t know how good a little resistance training could be for their body and their unborn bub. Therefore they wouldn’t even think of trying it.