First Pregnancy

Hi, I'm Leah Stewart and you are about to watch my pre and postnatal series one here on PyLadies anytime. I was super honored a few years ago during my first pregnancy to be invited here to teach pre and postnatal [inaudible]. And I'm really excited that you're interested in doing this series alongside with me. So my first series, I kind of want to explain it a little bit to you. I really feel that pregnancy and labor and birth is really this fantastic, um, movement between a woman and her body, a woman and the baby inside. And then of course after the baby's born, the woman and the little baby that she's holding is this wonderful dance between all of this wonderful elements that we know so much about, but yet we don't know anything about it at the same time. So it's a wonderful mystery of life and how all of this happens.

So in the first series, I really wanted to kind of, um, take PyLadies repertoire. The classic plot is repertoire that we all know and love. And my goal, my primary goal was to simply just modify all of the exercises that we love to practice each and every day on a make it safe for our pregnant women's safe for her body and safe for a new mother as well. So that was my goal. I was thinking, okay, how can we do the a hundred when we have a belly and we can no longer do it traditionally on our back inflection. How can we do the swan dive without rolling on our belly that we're not able to lie no longer able to do? Or how can we do a chest lift after we've had birth, when we're really concerned with kind of returning those stretched out abdominal muscles. So that was my primary goal in this first series. And I think you'll see that I tried to accomplish that.

And so I want the single leg stretch look like the single leg stretch. I want the double leg kick to look like the AA kick, but just in a slightly different way. So that was my name, main goal. And how I did that was I'm Bassey train. So I look at everything as with the muscle focus, let's see, objective, and then how can we create that more variation or that modification. And that was my goal here and my goal was to help you and to help me while I was pregnant, just to feel strong and connected to my body so that I was able to prepare myself for labor.

And being a first time mom or first-time pregnant woman at that time, I really had no idea what to expect. So my goal was to just give myself that confidence. You're going to find it's a lot of mat work in this series from ball exercises to therabands, you're gonna find reformer work. That's just really fun. Everything from meeting 19 weeks pregnant, I think the last class I was 37 weeks pregnant. So through my whole pregnancy to be able to see my belly grow and see how the work adapts accordingly to that. So again, think of this series as a pure modification of all those bloody movements that we know and love. And I hope that you enjoy it and embrace it, and I hope that it makes you feel really wonderful and strong.