Author: Modern Athlete

Having a child is one of life’s greatest joys, but childbirth can definitely compare to an endurance event. Despite childbirth being a natural process, your body is still put under stress and physiological changes occur, so we asked Reproductive Medicine Specialist Dr Chris Venter to give us his expert advice to help new mothers get back on the road.

There are many aspects to take into account after having a baby, and how easy, or difficult, it could be to get those running shoes back in action. “For starters, most women feel out of sorts after having a baby, due to their fluctuating hormones,” say Dr Venter, a former gynaecologist and now a Reproductive Medicine Specialist at Vitalab in Morningside, Johannesburg. “During pregnancy, the levels of progesterone in a women’s body are at their highest level. Progesterone has a calming effect on the brain and once you have your baby the progesterone drops straight down to what it was before you were pregnant. This is when some women suffer from what they call the ‘baby blues,’ or Postpartum depression.”

Dr Venter says that women should give it six weeks before getting out on the road again, for a number of reasons:

CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM: “In the first six weeks after your baby has arrived, your resting heart rate is increased by 15 beats a minute. Due to this, you are also short of breath. Therefore, if any training takes place, it needs to be extremely gradual, and also needs to be monitored.”

JOINT LAXITY: “During pregnancy, your body releases a hormone called Relaxin. It loosens connective tissue, including ligaments that connect bones and help support our joints. This increased laxity allows for expansion of the rib cage, making room for the growing fetus, as well as allowing the pelvis to expand in order for the baby to be delivered. Up until six weeks after the baby, your laxity levels in your ligaments and joints is still high, so by putting too much stress on the body, you can pick up injuries easier, and it is also common to feel sharp pain or discomfort in your lower back.”

BIRTH PROCEDURE: “After having a cesarean done, you need to go for your six-week post-birth checkup and your doctor will then be able to indicate whether you are ready to start training. It is vital that the wound heals properly before putting stress on the body. A natural birth will have you training a lot quicker, unless you experienced a tear, which will mean that you will also need to wait until the wound has fully healed.”

BREAST MILK: “Training too hard or putting your body under stress will decrease a mother’s breast milk. Your routine should revolve around creating more breast milk.”

GETTING STARTED

The latest craze is to take your baby with you in a running pram, and this can be great fun, although hard work on the uphills. It is important to take it slow to start off with, as your baby doesn’t have much of an immune system in the first six weeks and can be susceptible to flu and colds. Any exercise should be started off gradually, and not to the level you trained at before your pregnancy. “You need to listen to your body,” says Dr Venter, “you also need to be sure to invest in good support bras, as in this time you also stand a good chance of stretching your Cooper’s Ligaments, the connective tissue in the breasts.”

With Two Oceans upon us, it’s too late to start introducing strength work into your programme, but if you’re running Comrades or another long race, make sure you get yourself to a gym, because long-distance runners need to prioritise strength training to minimise overuse injuries. – BY RAY ORCHISON

Join me in a quick experiment: Start with a short warm-up – a few star jumps and a couple of walking lunges – then with stop watch in hand, stand with your back against a wall, feet shoulder-width apart, and then slowly slide down the wall into a ‘seated’ position, keeping your knees bent at a ninety degree angle. Now lift and hold your right foot up and start the stopwatch, hold for as long as possible and make a note of the time, then reset and repeat the process by lifting the left leg.

In most cases, the first thing you will notice is that you were able to hold one of your legs up longer than the other. This indicates a muscles imbalance between your left and right side. Ideally, you want your muscles balanced, so that you’re working both sides equally and don’t have one side over-compensating for the weaker side, which often results in an injury or strain on the stronger side, because it’s doing the bulk of the work. More importantly, however, is looking at the number of seconds that you were able to hold this position. Compare your times with the table below.

Rate Yourself

(seconds)
Excellent >100 >60
Good 76-100 46-60
Average 51-75 36-45
Below Average 25-50 20-35
Poor <25 <20 Most non-elite endurance athletes will find themselves somewhere between Poor and Below Average, which is strange when you consider that this test lasts two minutes, while an ultra lasts anything from five hours and up! TARGETING THE MUSCLES
An ultra is nothing more than conditioning the body to perform a single movement over and over, but using the same muscles in the same way increases the risk of overuse injuries. To avoid strain, it’s crucial that you strengthen these muscles, and in running, the most important are the calves, hamstrings, glutes, quads and hip flexors. When these muscles are weak, they no longer perform their task in moving the body forward, which results in the smaller, less-trained muscles doing more work then they’re designed to do. That’s when niggles turn into full-blown injuries, and most often, this will point back to a weaker bigger muscle, such as the glutes.

Athletes who have not done enough strength training will often start a race with good form and posture, but by the end may find themselves bent over at the hips or leaning toward one side, or struggling to lift their legs. These are all indications that their muscles have not been trained to go the distance. As your form breaks down, your speed decreases and you find that certain muscles go into spasm because they’re being overworked. Strength training enables us to maintain good form for longer.

START SLOW
When introducing strength training, start off using light weights and focus on doing the exercise correctly, slowly and controlled – that’s far more important than how much you can lift. In the first three to four weeks, use the lightest weight possible and perform two to three sets of 15 repetitions each per exercise. After the initial three to four weeks, you can start increasing the weight slowly over the coming weeks while decreasing the number of repetitions as you increase the weight.

Ray Orchison is a Joburg-based USA Track & Field and NAASFP certified coach. For more info, contact him on [email protected].

The 3rd instalment of the Modern Athlete Sprint Series took place at Randburg Harriers last night, 27th March 2014. There was a great turnout from the Randburg locals as well as those travelling to the event to join the series. The weather played along and it was a perfect evening for a time trial.

Randburg offered 2 distances, a 5 Kilometre and an 8 Kilomtre. We are reliably informed that there is a 3rd distance which starts much earlier to afford some extra time in the local pub!

Congratulations to Garth Willis (19:46) and Rachel Leistra (20:00) for taking line honours in the 5km, while our own Donald Mathipa (29:18) and Mary-Ann Niewoudt (34:20) were first home in the 8km.

Again some great lucky draw prizes given away with an ecstatic Shaun “Horsepower” Naidoo winning the TomTom watch and 2 lucky shoe winners courtesy SweatShop and adidas.

We look forward to the next event on 2nd April 2014 being hosted by Khosa. Check out our Facebook Event Page for more details.

Results for last nights events can be found at www.championchip.co.za and series standings are available here. Runners need to participate in at least 4 of the events to qualify for the overall series leaderboards. Currently the best 2 results are counting.

See you all at the next event!