The first goes to the gym where she multiplies muscle strengthening exercises. The second alternates yoga and mobility sessions. Pregnant at 7 and 8 months, tennis player Amandine Hesse (188th in the world) and double Olympic judo champion Clarisse Agbégnégnou continue to train, with a well-rounded belly.
“We can’t change our daily life overnight. But I admit that continuing the sessions during pregnancy allows me to feel good about my body”, testifies Amandine Hesse. “What was crazy about early pregnancy was that the times when I felt the best, when I didn’t feel tired and I didn’t have nausea, was when I was exercising.” adds the one who did not want to wait until the end of her career to have a child.
Continuing training while pregnant is safe for the athlete, although they should always be supervised and adapted. Thus, beyond two or three months of pregnancy, training is no longer carried out for performance purposes. “We are going to avoid intensive training to stay at training at 80% of the maximum heart rate”, explains Carole Maître, gynecologist at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (Insep), which trains future French champions. “During the second and third trimesters, we will adapt the training by reducing the intensity, the duration of the sessions as well as the frequency”, supports the specialist.
At the same time, physical exercises must also be adapted. “In the first trimester, we will focus on sheathing, muscle strengthening, running, cycling. From the fifth month, we will limit running, which leads to shocks, and put more emphasis on cycling and strengthening muscular, with appropriate weights”, develops Carole Maître.
Can an athlete practice to the end? Yes, answers the specialist, but under certain conditions. “You can swim up to 15 days from the end, with shorter, less intense, and less regular sessions. The athlete can also pursue all that is related to relaxation, muscle strengthening of the upper body, and walking.”
Depending on the sports practiced, athletes keep more or less long, on the advice of their doctors, the technical training related to their discipline. “During my first pregnancy, I was very apprehensive, because on the throw, there is a lot of tension on the abs, on the rotators, remembers Mélina Robert-Michon, Olympic vice-champion in the discus throw and mother of two children aged 12 and 4. But I launched normally until the fourth month before adapting, and until five and a half months during the second pregnancy. The athlete then adapted his technical exercises, “with less stress, weight and tension”, until about seven months, then maintaining physical support almost until the end. “At the end, I was too crowded”laughs the Iséroise.
For the goalkeeper of the French handball team, Laura Glauser, the situation was different. “I stopped handball training around three months of pregnancy because I had a little bleeding. I was very scared. So I only continued physical interviews, cycling, bodybuilding in particular, with the trainer club physical up to a week before giving birth.”
If Mélina Robert-Michon was able to practice throwing so far into her pregnancy, it is also because she says she has “listened to his body”. The athlete’s feelings guide the adaptation of training. “It’s essential, nods Carole Maître. If one day, we are less able to do a session, we modify or reduce it.
Amandine Hesse confirms, referring in particular to the start of her pregnancy. “Some days there were exercises that I didn’t feel like doing, like jumping, moving, so I would decrease a bit.” “It’s made-to-measure, confirms his trainer for three years, Benoît Hennart. Before the sessions, we are in constant discussion with her, to adapt the training according to her state of form.
As during pregnancy, postpartum recovery takes place gradually with priority given to the rehabilitation of the perineum, which is reworked between eight and ten weeks after birth. “Always taking into account the feeling, we gradually resume, through technique, sheathing, muscle strengthening of the upper body, explains Carole Maître. In a second step, after four months, we resume everything that is running, fast movement, impact on the ground. The main thing is to preserve the function of the perineum, which has the function of supporting the organs of the small pelvis.”
Maintaining a training rhythm has benefits for the athlete, both during and after pregnancy. “She will keep her respiratory and endurance capacities as well as her muscular capital, which is lost very quickly, in order to anticipate the recovery”, develops Carole Maître.
Beyond the physical reasons, maintaining practice and contact with the sports environment is essential for the athlete’s psychological well-being. “Keeping up with training was good for my head. My two pregnancies were a way for me to regenerate nervously. These parentheses gave me additional motivation“, Mélina Robert-Michon book.
“During our career, we chain sessions, objectives. During my pregnancies, I had no constraints, so I experienced my sport under a completely different approach.”
Mélina Robert-Michon, Olympic silver medalist in discus throwingat franceinfo: sport
Maintaining training also allows athletes to control their weight gain, which is essential for a rapid recovery. The more the athlete has practiced during the pregnancy, the easier the recovery will be. Again, it’s all in the dosage. “If we resume too quickly, too hard, there will be a risk of stress fracture”, warns Carole Master.
“You have to pay attention to the perineum obviously, but also to the shoulders, which will again be very much in demand. [dans le cas du tennis]“ adds Amandine Hesse’s trainer, Benoît Hennart. “For the recovery, everything also depends on the delivery, whether the doctors perform a cesarean section or an episiotomy. This plays on the time and the way to resume. It’s a bit of stress”, observes the player.
/2022/05/18/phpT8FQnr.jpg)
In addition, the workouts allow you to maintain useful sports abilities on the day of delivery. “In high-level athletes, it has been found that the labor of childbirth is shorteremphasizes Carole Maître. Their stamina helps them. You also have to get rid of a preconceived idea: iThere are no more caesarean sections or forceps extractions among top athletes.”
However, the recovery remains tough. All the athletes interviewed confirm this. “It feels like we’re starting from scratch. remembers Laura Glauser, who gave birth to a baby girl in April 2018. Physically and muscularly, it was different. The body takes a hit. But I had big injuries afterwards, and for me the hardest part was coming back from my injury and not from my pregnancy.”
The first months represent a significant change between breastfeeding, lack of sleep and a life disrupted by the arrival of a child. After the birth of her daughter Lou in 2017, windsurfer Charline Picon decided to gently resume physical training after three months. “You apprehend your new role as a mother, this new life, and the sporting project necessarily evolves. I was no longer focused solely on myself. Lou became the center of my project”, details the 2016 Olympic champion, silver medalist in 2020.
If the return to training sessions was physically tough, the Royannaise “recovered” the technical part more easily. “I quickly understood that the body had a memory. When I got back on the board after six months, I realized that it was like cycling, you can’t forget it.”
“There were some days when I felt like I was never going to get back to my fitness, says in turn the winger of the French basketball team, Valériane Ayayi Vukosavljevic. HAS other times, I felt that my muscles were there, that it was simply necessary to reactivate all that a little, just like the joints too, which we solicit a lot during our career and much less during pregnancy. The bronze medalist at the Tokyo Olympics resumed competition two months after giving birth.
By sharing their training sessions on social networks, athletes are trying to break the myths that a pregnant woman cannot practice sport. “It shows that we are capable of doing more things than people think”, agrees Amandine Hesse, who herself looks at what other pregnant athletes publish for inspiration.
Last summer, Valériane Ayayi Vukosavljevic also moved the lines. She hid her pregnancy during the Olympics, before revealing it just after the competition when she was three and a half months pregnant. “It was not my goal at the start but I hope that on my small scale, I was able to convince that it was possible.”
The Ministry of Sports has worked on the subject, publishing in February a guide entitled High-level sport and maternity, it’s possible!, in order to give keys to the athletes. They welcome the initiative. “Overall, it’s a subject that has evolved in the right direction. But I think there is real work to be done on coaches, because they are at the heart of the athlete’s project. If the coach doesn’t support him, it’s immediately harder, notes Mélina Robert-Michon. Gynecologists also need to be better trained on the subject.” There is therefore still a long way to go before these sportswomen questioned are no longer seen as exceptions.