Kim Clijsters, with one hand on the US Open trophy and the other round her small daughter Jada, joined the ranks of Supermums of our age on Sunday night. The Belgian is being justly feted for an extraordinary sporting achievement, two years after she gave up competitive tennis to start a family.
Clijsters is unusual – most top women athletes are childless – but she is far from alone. Paula Radcliffe won the 2007 New York marathon just over nine months after giving birth to her first child, Isla. Last month, the Scottish golfer Catriona Matthew won the Women’s British Open (her first major tournament victory) just 11 weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Sophie. England’s football team for the European Championship final featured Katie Chapman, a full-time mother of two, and Darcey Bussell, arguably in the most athletically demanding discipline of them all, returned to her leading roles with the Royal Ballet after having two daughters.
Jogging again within 12 days
To most women who have recently been through pregnancy, arduous physical training seems unimaginable when all their instincts are telling them to sit down and have a cup of tea and another piece of cake. Yet Radcliffe, who told one newspaper that the athlete in her did not like being pregnant, was jogging again within 12 days of Isla’s birth and soon afterwards running every other day (although she paid the price in a small fracture at the base of her spine, which put her on crutches).
Pregnancy does, of course, cause physical changes in the body. “The amount of blood in your circulation increases by 50%, so the amount your heart has to pump with each beat increases by about 40%,” says Patrick O’Brien, an obstetrician at UCL and spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. “Some people theorise that this extra training your heart has during pregnancy may stand you in good stead in the future. But if you follow up women after the birth, all of these effects are mostly back to normal by six to eight weeks, and pretty much completely by six months.”
That throws doubt on the theories that pregnancy may actually help an athlete’s performance. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the days when eastern European sportsmen and women walked off with every sporting medal amid dark speculation over their training techniques, it was said that female athletes were even impregnated by their coaches and then forced to have terminations, to get the supposed physical benefits of the early months of pregnancy.
These were meant to include not only better blood circulation, but also increased levels of growth hormones, which are banned substances for athletes because they boost performance. It is certainly true that the body is awash with hormones, chiefly oestrogen and progesterone which maintain pregnancy, says O’Brien, but most of the effects disappear with the delivery of the placenta which produces them. (That may, in part, be why some women suffer “baby blues” in the first few days after giving birth.)
If some women athletes perform better after having babies, it may, in fact, be because they are not training quite so hard. According to Dr David James, associate dean at the faculty of sport of Gloucester University: “It is probably the case that most athletes do slightly too much training, not too little. When other priorities come along and they have necessarily to reduce their training a little bit, that might not altogether be a bad thing.”
And there can be downsides for athletes who have children. During pregnancy, your ligaments and tendons get more stretchy in order to allow movement of the pelvis in childbirth, explains Greg Whyte, professor of applied sport and exercise science at Liverpool John Moores University, who used to be director of research for the British Olympic Association. “In an individual who is already very flexible, that could be a problem.”
Diet is more of an issue
But more of an issue, he says, in athletes returning after giving birth, is diet. Those who reduce their calorie intake to try to lose weight – which can be an issue for endurance athletes – may end up with reduced bone mineral density, and (like Radcliffe) put themselves at risk of fractures. But this tends not to be a problem in sports such as tennis, where muscle mass is needed for strength and power.
The answer, then, seems to be to take your training slowly and carefully after childbirth, which for a top athlete could mean running 10 miles a week instead of 100 or 150 miles. But in the end, says O’Brien, there is no reason why an athlete cannot have her body back.
So what, ultimately, is the biggest factor for women athletes with children in reaching the winner’s podium again? It may in fact be psychological. According to the experts, they may feel more relaxed and confident, because their sport is no longer the only focus of their life. They win because they are not afraid to fail.
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