Exercises to avoid during Pregnancy

While exercise can be fun during pregnancy, you must be careful not to hurt yourself or your baby. Most of the exercises can be performed routinely in pregnancy. However, you need to change them according to your trimesters. Some exercises might be difficult to perform in the last trimester wherein you could continue to do minimal exercises along with stretching.

Here are a few exercises to avoid while you are pregnant:

You should not scuba dive during pregnancy because your developing baby is at risk of developing problems such as decompression sickness. This is an absolute ‘NO’ during pregnancy.

• Avoid exercises that involve lying down on your back after your 16th week of pregnancy. This reduces blood flow to the fetus and causes hypotension.
• Avoid activities such as horse-riding, downhill-skiing, ice hockey, gymnastics and cycling that may cause you to lose balance and fall. There are high chances of being injured while doing these.
• Contact sports like squash, judo, boxing, kickboxing, etc can cause you and your growing baby unnecessary harm.
• Heavy-weight training lifts put too much stress on the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal system. So avoid them too.
• Exercises which involve lying on the stomach need to be avoided
• Any sports at altitude more than 2500m above the sea level may induce altitude sickness, which in turn can reduce the oxygen supply to the fetus.

Enjoy your pregnancy!