Exercise Stuff

Formulating my plans with regards to exercise for my pink sway, and curious what you guys think.

I am a regular practitioner of Ashtanga Mysore-style yoga, I practice 6 days per week, and it does build some muscle while being light cardio. I need to carry on with this no matter what, as I'm working towards building a career in yoga.

In addition, I have a gym membership, and go most days. For cardio, I do the zumba and spinning classes regularly, and I also do pilates about 2x per week and XCO about 2-3x per week. For those not familiar, XCO is resistance training mainly for the core, it does get the heart rate up though not as much as other cardio. All of these classes are about 45 minutes each including a 5 minute cooling down at the end. I've also been trying to get myself used to the cardio machines. And as is typical in The Netherlands, I cycle for transportation, usually about 30-60 minutes per day. This cycling is not nearly as hardcore as a spinning class.

We plan on starting to conceive this March, so my thinking is to, this January, to try to go for 90 minutes of cardio 6-7 days per week. This can be a combination of a spinning or zumba class with 45 minutes on the machine before or after, or it can be just 90 minutes on a machine. My logic in this is so that I can carry on with my Ashtanga practice, but with extra time to offset the muscle gain from yoga, as Atomic did say that any time spent beyond 45 minutes doing cardio begins to burn muscle. In addition though, if possible, I would like to carry on at least once per week doing a pilates class. The reason for this is that I have mild scoliosis in my back, and pilates has been brilliant for straightening this out, which I get a feeling will prove to be even more useful once I'm pregnant.

So is this a good plan? Can I still carry on with the pilates? And if I do the LE diet, should I consider raising my calories up from the 1500-1800 mark? I'm 5'10"(175 cm) and weigh 145 lbs(65 kg).

That, and just trying to get in perspective when the best time is to fully shift into swaying mode where diet and exercise are concerned, I go off the pill in March. Thanks! :-)

Forgot to add, my husband does strength training twice per week and uses the car to commute to work, sometimes we cycle together on the weekend.

I personally think it will be hard to work out that hard and do the LE diet. I think that is why most of us go to couch potato. I stand up on this diet and get a dizzy spell. So be careful!! Also, I worked out a ton when I conceived my boys. With DS2 I was doing hour long classes plus running 3 to 5 miles daily.

What kinds of classes?

Body Pump, Running Class, Yoga,a tae bow type of class all cardio, and pilates. Did you work out when you conceived with your previous pregnancies?

Just FYI, body pump is all about muscles, not cardio. So if you were doing that a lot, you were building muscle. :)

About the bodypump, that, and I dropped the Tae bo after reading another post by Atomic suggesting it may raise testosterone. Speaking of which, I'm wondering if extra peppermint tea may counteract the effects of the Ashtanga yoga.

We haven't had a child yet, and I think I may be the only person on here who is swaying for a firstborn. However at least one girl is important to us for personal reasons, we're planning on just 2 children, and twins run on both sides of our family, so my husband made a good point that if we sway now, we'll probably end up with at least 1 daughter.

I think that's a sound plan. At that level of exercise I would not worry about the Pilates 1x a week, it's fine.

I do think you are going to need more cals than the average person. I would have you START diet at 1800-2000 cals and see if you lose weight and how rapidly. If you don't lose, you can always cut back, but it's better to start higher and cut back, than to start off starving and risk ovulation.

Coolness, thank you, will plan on that then. 1 more thing, how far in advance is good to implement the more cardio-intense conception fitness regime? I've heard 2-3 weeks for the diet should be plenty.

the sooner, the better for exercise - it may take a bit of time for exercise to start shrinking muscle mass and there may be a brief period of time where your T goes up after starting it, before the overtraining reduces T.