Fitness professionals face pregnancy knowledge gap despite NICE guidance
Those responsible for the health of pregnant women aren’t clear about safe recommendations for diet and exercise, says the body behind new guidelines issued to the NHS – which then ignore the role of fitness professionals in pre- and postnatal health.
Guidance on weight management before, during and after pregnancy has been released by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), an independent advisory body to the Department of Health. The advice comes at a time of rising obesity among pregnant women1.
Experienced exercise instructors are still calling for definitive guidance from within the fitness industry in light of the NICE guidelines, however. Judy DiFiore, a specialist in pre- and postnatal fitness and director of Pushy Mothers, said: “There’s a lot of poor advice out there, either from instructors who just aren’t qualified in this area, but also from the lack of concrete information. There are guidelines from the bodies like the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, but there tends to be pages and pages of stuff, and it’s not always specific to the client you’ll have at hand.”
Guidance developer Professor Annie Anderson said of the NICE document: “Dispelling the myth of “eating for two”, highlighting the importance of being physically active during pregnancy and encouraging weight loss after pregnancy is the cornerstone of this guidance.”
The guide recommends 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a day, with the key messages:
- Recreational exercise such as swimming or brisk walking and strength conditioning exercise is safe and beneficial
- The aim of recreational exercise is to stay fit, rather than to reach peak fitness
- If women have not exercised routinely they should begin with no more than 15 minutes of continuous exercise, three times per week, increasing gradually to daily 30-minute sessions
- If women exercised regularly before pregnancy, they should be able to continue with no adverse effects
Read the full guidelines here (PDF).
1 NICE figures
