Regular pre-pregnancy exercise helps ward off pelvic pains

You may want to start regularly exercising before pregnancy as a team of researchers has found that doing so may protect you against so-called pelvic girdle pain as the fetus grows.

Lead author Katrine Mari Owe of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health pointed out that between 20 and 40 percent of pregnant women experience some pelvic girdle pain late in pregnancy, associated with joint and ligament changes in their body caused by the growing baby, Fox News reported.

Though the long-term effect of exercise on pain remains unclear, women who exercise regularly pre-pregnancy are more likely to continue throughout pregnancy, she and her colleagues wrote.

Even women who exercised only once or twice a week (before pregnancy) had lower risk of developing pelvic girdle pain compared to those who did not exercise at all, Owe added.

The study is published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.