Exercise, Fertility, and Pregnancy: How Much Is Helpful—and When It Hurts with Dr. Hannah Ryles

Hannah Ryles

It isn’t just about trying to get pregnant. Yes, this is one phase of your life, but ultimately if we can get you to be a more healthy version of yourself, that’s going to be a win. And ideally that results in a pregnancy. Ideally that results in a healthy baby, but really what’s most important is a healthy patient for their lifetime.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Today, we’re joined by Dr. Hannah Ryles. She’s a board certified OBGYN trained at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago. And she’s one of the medical advisors for Expect. That’s a first prenatal and postnatal fitness app where every workout is reviewed and approved by an OB- GYN. Now, Dr. Ryles brings a rare combination of clinical expertise and real-world experience. In her practice, she sees firsthand how exercise influences menstrual health, ovulation, metabolic regulation, pregnancy outcomes, and postpartum recovery. Something that our listeners are very interested in learning more about today. She’s passionate about helping women understand that movement isn’t just about fitness. It’s one of the most powerful, accessible tools we have to support fertility, pregnancy, and long-term hormonal health. Today, we are diving into the latest research on how the right kind of exercise can optimize fertility, what’s safe, and also what’s not, and when you’re trying to conceive, and how postpartum training affects reproductive health far beyond the aesthetics.

Dr. Ryles, thank you for being here, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Hannah Ryles

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about this.

Lorne Brown 

This is kind of the first time we’re really getting to meet and know each other. So for everybody’s sake, including my own, I want to know a little bit about you and curious, what drew you into obstetrics and when did fitness become part of your medical lens?

Hannah Ryles 

Just a little bit about me is that my dad was in the military, so I kind of moved around a lot, got to fortunately see quite a few different cultures. Grew up primary. I spent a big chunk of my time in Japan before coming back to the States for college, and then stayed around in Philadelphia for undergrad and then med school, and then actually came to Chicago to pursue fellowship training in gynecologic surgery. And so I actually focus specifically now more so on gynenecology and conditions like endometriosis, pelvic pain and fibroids, but definitely also see patients and have previously worked with pregnant patients and I still see postpartum patients as well. But what initially drew me to getting involved and expecting is just really the power of exercise. So just from a personal story, I had my first kid in residency and whenever I was delivering patients, the patients that had the best labors and the easiest recoveries, I would always ask them.

I was like, “What did you do in your pregnancy that your labor was so quick?” And a lot of them had a common theme, which was exercise or a healthy lifestyle. And so that really inspired me. So by the time that I got pregnant and was going through my own pregnancy with my first kid, I was really motivated to stay fit. And honestly, I increased my exercise a little bit as well because I saw that there was a lot of evidence to support exercise for improving pregnancy outcomes, improving your recovery, improving fetal outcomes. So there’s just a lot of evidence for that. And that’s what really motivated me. And I really feel fortunate that I had a smooth recovery as well, which I credit a lot to the exercise programs that I did. And then I think that it’s just so important to prescribe exercise. It’s not something that doctors always prescribe, but it’s something that’s so important to the overall health of a patient that that’s what really drew me to it.

Lorne Brown 

The areas we’re going to talk about, I want to talk about the pregnancy part because you talked about increasing your exercise in pregnancy, and I want to make sure we have time to talk about the preconception. A lot of our listeners are wanting to grow their family. Some of them are going through IVF, and I think that’s an important area to discuss. You said you increased your exercise. So it makes me think of, are there misconceptions the public has about exercise during pregnancy because you actually said you increased your exercise during pregnancy?

Hannah Ryles 

Absolutely. So that is a nuanced point because there are definitely a lot of misconceptions about pregnancy and exercise. So the one misconception, just to address it right off the bat, is that you shouldn’t increase your exercise in pregnancy. I think that it depends. You want to be safe about the exercise that you’re performing in pregnancy. Any amount of exercise is going to be healthy in pregnancy. So incorporating any exercise program into your daily habits is going to be beneficial with the caveat that it’s not a situation where more is better. So there are nuances to that where you don’t want to just go from being completely sedentary to starting a vigorous high intensity interval training program, which is kind of why to bring Expect into it is why it’s so helpful to have programs like Expect, which all of their programs, all their fitness programs are OBGYN approved so that you know you’re not going to overdo it.

So for example, if you’re someone who’s never exercised before, you don’t want to go straight into spin at the highest level if you’re pregnant, because that actually can be detrimental. That has been shown in the literature to be detrimental in pregnancy, but also possibly in the preconception phase too. You don’t want to be exercising too vigorously. So the reason that expect is really helpful is that it actually has everything broken down by phases. So it actually has preconception each trimester of pregnancy, first trimester, second trimester, third trimester, and then postpartum, postnatal programs to make sure that you are exercising at a level that’s safe for you in that particular phase. So it’s kind of personalized in that way.

Lorne Brown 

So we’re going to dive into preconception and all the trimesters and posts, but we just mentioned it as passing the Expect app. So can you actually, we don’t always pick up what we say in the intro. Expect is an app, and you said it’s an OBGYN approved. Can you share a little bit more about this app? And they just go to the app store and look under Expect, EXP, ECT. That’s what they’re looking for.

Hannah Ryles

Yes. Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

We might as well talk a little bit about Expect, and then we’ll pull some of those questions from all the areas of reproduction to postpartum.

Hannah Ryles 

Awesome. Yeah. So Expect is just an app that you can download in the app store. It’s pink with a little X logo. And to talk more about it, the founder, they really saw the power of exercise for helping pregnant women have, again, easier pregnancies and easier recoveries. And they just saw the benefit and there wasn’t that much out there to help pregnant women who might not have been necessarily exercising beforehand. How do they start a pregnancy or an exercise program in pregnancy? Because there are some nuances there, as I mentioned, that you don’t want to just go off the bat and go into a high intensity exercise program. And so the app, every single fitness, a lot of them are videos, some of them are audio, but every single program is OBGYN approved so that multiple OBGYNs have looked through those videos and approved them for specific stages of pregnancy.

So again, preconception all the way to postpartum. And the reason that’s important is because there are certain things in pregnancy that you want to avoid. So if you’re in the second trimester and beyond, for example, you don’t want to be lying on your back for too long. So little things that someone who is not an OB- GYN might not have thought about in terms of making sure that the exercise that you’re doing is actually safe for you in that phase of pregnancy. And then the other part about the app that’s really nice is that there’s internal cues in each video. So the instructors are making these videos for specific phases of pregnancy or preconception or postpartum. And so there’s cues in there to make sure that you’re breathing. And it kind of goes against regular fitness culture, where in regular fitness culture, if you’ve gone to a spin class, they’re like, “Push harder and keep going.

” And that’s the culture of high intensity workouts that a lot of people are doing nowadays, which is great. But if you’re pregnant, you might benefit from a program that’s specifically designed for you that relies on these internal cues within the videos that say, “Hey, make sure you’re breathing, make sure you’re drinking enough water.” It just helps be more specific about the program.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for that. So again, everybody, that app is called Expect, and you can get that off of the app store. Now we’re going to focus on movement. And in our practice at AccuBalance, we’re often sharing how there’re these pillars of health that we do before we bring in our interventions. In our practice, we’re using acupuncture, supplements, herbs, and diet lifestyle. So the pillars are diet, stress management, sleep, avoiding toxins, and movement. So today we’re going to focus on movement. So this is one of the key pillars and it’s interesting. It’s one of the pillars that doesn’t get a lot of attention, as in we mention it, but we don’t go into detail. So people know exercise is important now, but what kind or what I shouldn’t do. So that’s what we’ll dive into. And I thought maybe we’ll go through the journey of preconception and the trimesters and postnatal.

Now, I’m curious about exercise and movement and how it matters for fertility, because there is research that exercising, excessive exercise, and I’d like you to define that, can interrupt with ovulation and your fertility. And so can you share about movement exercise when it comes to benefiting ovulation, metabolic health, and hormone regulation? Give us the theory behind it. And then when does it become counterproductive and when does it become helpful?

Hannah Ryles 

Absolutely. And this is why we do recommend working with a provider or having programs that are specifically tailored towards your phase because it isn’t one of those things where you can just say, go exercise and that’s going to fit everyone and benefit everyone the same way. So two big categories. Generally exercise is thought to be helpful, obviously, but you’re absolutely right. The big caveat that I want to focus on first for the preconception and fertility aspect is you can overdo it. And that’s really important to emphasize. So most of the literature out there suggests that for healthy weight women, moderate physical activity is likely beneficial for improving fertility outcomes. Then, and I’ll go into what counts as moderate and things like that, but vigorous activity actually, as you just mentioned, has been shown to possibly reduce fertility outcomes in healthy weight women. And so you don’t want to go from being sedentary to starting a vigorous exercise program if you’re trying to conceive and you’re having difficulty conceiving, that possibly could harm your chances if you’re in the healthy weight category.

The other thing before I go back into what counts as modern vigorous is that that is different though. So the literature does seem to suggest that for women with metabolic conditions like PCOS or who have elevated BMI, the literature is a little mixed, but it does seem to suggest that vigorous activity actually still is helpful for improving your fertility outcomes if you have those conditions because those conditions might themselves lead to anovulation. And if exercise can improve your chances of ovulation through the various different pathways, but improving insulin sensitivity, reducing your androgen levels and improving inflammatory markers, in those patients, there actually is some evidence that vigorous activity has been helpful. So it is a little nuanced there.

Lorne Brown 

Can I highlight something you said there just because it’s what it does? So if you exercise and it doesn’t impact the insulin resistance, your cell’s receptive insulin, if it doesn’t impact inflammation, you may not see the benefit. So it’s just like sleep, good sleep will lower cortisol help with metabolic health, right? Stress, lower stress. So just when you look at those pillars of health, we talked about diet. A diet can lead to insulin resistance, higher blood insulin in your blood and inflammation and therefore derogatory disorders or poor pregnancy outcomes. Lack of sleep, same thing, too much stress, same thing, lack of movement. So again, that’s why lifestyle is a big bracket and movement is an important part of it. So the idea of the exercise is we can see these biomarkers change. And that’s what you guys probably with your Expect app have learned as well, if I’m understanding correctly.

Hannah Ryles 

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think overall exercise and health is supportive of a healthy lifestyle. So it helps improve all of those markers that you just mentioned.

Lorne Brown

Would you call an emerge doc once we were talking and he said walking is not exercise. If it doesn’t elevate your heart rate, it’s not exercise. He calls it walking. Now- 

Hannah Ryles 

Oh, I would disagree. 

Lorne Brown 

That was his line. I want to hear, because you guys are behind the Expect app, you are seeing this population. He is not. He’s seeing people that are getting their arm stitched back on a heart attack. He’s an ER doc. You’re somebody that works with women’s health, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum. Can you talk a bit about the exercise? What’s an intense exercise or not? What about walking? What about heart rate? Things that you may measure like HRV or heart rate or just enjoy yourself in the forest?

Hannah Ryles 

I would disagree. I definitely think that walking can be exercise. Any type of movement I think is helpful. And so there’s many different pillars of exercise. So to get into just, I want to answer this first part of what constitutes moderate exercise. So moderate exercise based on international guidelines is about 150 minutes per week. So that’s about three to five sessions of moderate activity. So what moderate activity will be is something that elevates your heart rate. You’re going to get a little sweaty. You’re going to be able to still speak in short sentences, but you shouldn’t be able to sing your favorite song. So that’s things like light spinning or light jogging, even walking around certain hills or doing a little bit of steps and things like that. Vigorous exercise is where you are really pushing yourself to exhaustion. And that’s where the evidence suggests that that could be harmful specifically for healthy weight women, is that vigorous exercise, which a lot of different studies define it differently, but some of the studies that I saw more recently define it as pushing yourself to exhaustion.

That’s where it could possibly be harmful, especially for fertility. And then there’s different heart rate markers. So moderate intensity is more defined as 50 to 75% of your maximum heart rate, which is 220 minus your age. High intensity or vigorous is defined as 75 to 95% of your maximum heart rate. So that’s where you’re really, really pushing yourself. But one other thing I just wanted to mention is that any type of exercise … So I think a common misconception is a lot of people look at yoga and don’t think of it as an exercise because their heart rate might, especially some more milder phones of yoga, they might not think of as exercise, but exercise is not just about raising your heart rate, it’s also about stress management. And so walking, if that improves your mental health, to me, that’s a huge benefit. And we can’t necessarily measure that, but there have been studies that showed that even just walking a few times a week, adding a walking program into your daily or weekly habit can reduce your stress, which we know stress can impact fertility.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Perfect. Thanks for sharing that. And there it ties into the whole lifestyle. So it’s kind of like, you don’t choose one, I’m just going to go on a diet. It’s like sleep, rest, diet, movement, and stress reduction. And they all kind of support each other. A healthy diet’s going to support your level of stress and your motivation to exercise, vice versa.

Hannah Ryles 

Absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

So going back to the fertility journey, and even in pregnancy, if it fits here, how does somebody know if they’re pushing themselves too hard? Do you actually have certain red flags? I mean, an obvious one to me when I see the high end athletes, they lose their cycles sometimes. So any other things that blood markers or other things that you could use as a red flag to let somebody know they’re exercising too intensely or too hard?

Hannah Ryles

Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the most critical one is the menses in the fertility journey is the most important marker. So we want to make sure that that’s regular. Some other red flags that you’re pushing yourself too hard is if you’re pushing yourself to exhaustion. So if you are someone that’s trying to conceive and you’re of healthy weight and you routinely are exercising, some of the studies show that you don’t want to be having vigorous exercise where you’re pushing yourself to exhaustion more than five hours a week. So that’s the total amount of time spent exercising in a vigorous exercise program that they saw a decreased fertility in these studies. So some other things is that if you are experiencing pain, if you’re losing weight and you’re in the healthy weight category, that’s also a red flag in the fertility journey. So again, that’s with the caveat that there are some studies that for patients who have an elevated BMI or have PCOS or other metabolic conditions, the evidence is less clear about vigorous exercise where it does seem that it’s possibly still beneficial in those patient populations.

Vigorous exercise can still be beneficial in those patient populations, but for women in the healthy weight category, you don’t want to be losing weight.

Lorne Brown 

I like this as there’s no general person, right? Generally, it’s an individual thing. And you remind me of a saying in Chinese medicine that says, “Too little is too little and too much is too much.” So you talked about the weight. We know there’s research that if you have a high BAMI, and so there’s excessive overweight and you’re not ovulating regularly and you lose anywhere between five to 10% of your body weight, it starts to help with ovulation and fertility, right? Totally. And then you’re saying if you’re already of normal weight or less and you lose five to 10% of your body weight, this actually could be detrimental. So if too little is too little too much, too much.

Hannah Ryles

Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

The exercise that I’m hearing is: it depends where you are. Are you in that normal BMI weight or less, then the too much exercise probably is going to be detrimental, could be. And if you are overweight, I’m in my weight loss stage now. I was 30 pounds overweight and now I’m … So I could benefit from the … If I was trying to conceive, I could benefit from the more vigorous exercise. You, on the other hand, may not benefit from the accident.

Hannah Ryles 

Yeah, no, absolutely. You’re exactly right. It’s about personalizing. And so that’s why there’s no one size fits all, but I would say the one size is that if you’re going to add some movement into your life, that’s going to be beneficial.

Lorne Brown 

Still on the fertility side, just some of the conditions that impact fertility, can you share a little bit of, again, and maybe it’s just a repeat, but you mentioned PCOS, so that metabolic disorder, probably, I think it’s the most common cause of auditory disorders in women leading to infertility. Insulin resistance, any deeper insight or anything in the Expect app for those people to support them on this journey. And also because of pregnancy, I’m going to ask, I’d love for you to actually add the story. I did interrupt you there

Hannah Ryles 

Oh, no worries.

Lorne Brown 

… because it’s not just getting pregnant. We want a healthy pregnancy. And at the end of the birth, our goal is always a healthy mom and healthy baby.

Hannah Ryles 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

And so let’s say they don’t do the exercise, they have PCOS, insulin resistance, and they take Clomid or Letrozole or even IVF and they get pregnant through support that way, but they didn’t deal with the metabolic disorder. We know that there are health repercussions to the baby, to the mom, and then for the mom later in life as well.

Hannah Ryles

Absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

So our goal is not just to get pregnant, we want a healthy pregnancy, healthy baby. So again, with the PCOS insulin resistance and even endometriosis, maybe there’s stuff you guys have discovered that helps with that as well.

Hannah Ryles 

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is that with metabolic conditions like PCOS being just the most common ovulatory dysfunction disorder is that more intense exercise is recommended and beneficial. And I think going back to your point, it isn’t just about trying to get pregnant. Yes, this is one phase of your life, but ultimately if we can get you to be a more healthy version of yourself, that’s going to be a win. And ideally that results in a pregnancy. Ideally, that results in a healthy baby, but really what’s most important is a healthy patient for their lifetime. And so I think the Expect app, I think there’s things in the pipeline moving forward where you can personalize your conditions. Let’s say PCOS, I don’t think that’s there right now. We can check with the people from Expect, but I do know that there’s things in the pipeline for people who are trying to conceive in the future.

And so they may personalize it a little bit more in that sense. But I think the biggest thing is that incorporating a physical activity program is likely going to be beneficial for your fertility journey. And I think the biggest thing I just want to mention is that it’s really helpful to use your fertility desires as an anchor. And so we talk about this a lot in OB-GYN where we have a patient coming to us, they’re newly pregnant and they want to change their whole lifestyle because they are now newly motivated to have a healthier lifestyle, not just for themselves, but now for the baby that they’re carrying. And fertility is similar. You have a goal in mind, and really it’s about improving your lifestyle so that you can be the healthiest version of yourself. And so just to bring it back to expect real quick is the reason that it’s so beneficial is that it follows you throughout that whole fertility journey.

You can start in the preconception phase through the different trimesters of pregnancy and then postpartum. And so we talk about in medicine, the best, let’s say contraception or birth control, the best version is the one that they’re going to use and can use consistently. So the best form of exercise is going to be the one that you’re going to stick with. So what’s nice about it is that it can kind of follow you through that whole program. You don’t have to have a separate exercise program preconception and then switch to a different one for pregnancy and switch to a different one postpartum. You can use it throughout that whole journey.

Lorne Brown 

Perfect. And we’ll make sure we put the Expect link to the app in our show notes as well. And with the PCOS, we talked about PCOS and the exercise will usually benefit them and there’s different phenotypes. So again, I’m assuming coming back to individualize the thin PCOS type, again, just because you have the diagnosis of PCOS, movement’s important, but then again, the type of movement and how intense it is would change if you’re the thin PCOS type versus the high BMI PCOS type

Hannah Ryles 

Absolutely. And I mean, within the medical field part of that, absolutely, you’re right, there’s different phenotypes of PCOS. So a patient with more androgen excess still might benefit. Even if they’re thin, they still might benefit from exercise because we know that exercise has been shown to reduce androgen levels. It has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity, things like that. So it’s nuanced and it’s a little complicated, but you’re right, there’s all these different phenotypes.

Lorne Brown 

I got to give a shout out to our endocrinologist, Dr. Jerilynn Prior in British Columbia because she’s done some research on exercise. She’s done a lot of research on PCOS and exercise as well. She’s on one of her episodes, people. So check that out. Do you have experience or anything to share regarding IVF? Some women, and I’m talking about they’re going towards a retrieval where their ovaries are going to be purposefully hyperstimulated to get as many follicles as possible. Is that in the Expect app or do you have anything to share on that? Because I do know the clinics do talk about dos and don’ts for exercise, worried about certain exercises that could cause a contortion of the ovary and the ligaments and stuff, which can be dangerous and painful.

Hannah Ryles 

That’s very true. I think that might be, again, we might have to check with the Expect team on that, but that might be built into this preconception fertility program that they’re building out, which is not currently available, but it’s likely going to be available in the future. But with that said, there is recent or newer research suggesting that even in patients who are undergoing IVF, starting an exercise program actually showed improvement in the IVF success rate. And so I’m trying to find this article that I had written down here, but it was a meta-analysis, I believe, that looked at patients who were undergoing IVF. Yes, it was a meta-analysis from 2018 that they looked at physical activity before their IVF cycles, and they actually found a significantly higher clinical pregnancy rate with an odds ratio of almost two, and also improvement in live birth rate with an odds ratio of 1.95 compared to inactive women.

So this is very important because I think it goes into what you had been saying before about the traditional teaching within IVF was to recommend stopping exercise or just being very careful about exercise. But there’s newer research that suggests that exercise does seem to benefit even patients who are undergoing IVF. We have a little bit more research to suggest that it does seem to help improve natural fertility, but even those patients who have gone and gotten to that stage of IVF, it can be helpful. I do want to address one thing that you had mentioned is there are times where a doctor might recommend being careful about your exercise. Let’s say if you’re stimulated and your ovaries are larger, you’re absolutely right. There is a risk of torsion of your ovaries if your ovaries are enlarged. So during that specific STEM phase, they might recommend being careful or just choosing your activities carefully.

But aside from that, it does seem that physical activity does seem to benefit even patients who are undergoing IVF.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. So you may be able to go on a stationary bike and a nice walk, but you may not want to jump on a trampoline.

Hannah Ryles 

Exactly. Yes

Lorne Brown 

Exactly. So exercise may change.

Hannah Ryles 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown

Yeah. So it’s not an excuse not to exercise.

Hannah Ryles 

Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. You still do the movement. Can we shift into pregnancy? How do you shift during the trimesters? And I have this memory from years ago. She must have been … I don’t know her. She’s running. She’s jogging where I was walking and she’s wearing a top, so her belly’s exposed. She looks like she could deliver any moment now, and she is a run-in. And I was just wondering how those ligaments were working. So you’ve been pregnant, you’ve exercised in pregnancy, you work with women. When I saw that, I actually thought, is this good for her or not? And so now I have you. It was beautiful. It was crazy beautiful watching this. I mean, literally, some people really showed 80 moments now. Maybe that’s what she was doing, going  on and run to get the baby out

Hannah Ryles 

To try to have her baby.

Lorne Brown

She may share, but so through all the trimesters, first, second, third, and even postpartum, does the exercise change? Any types of exercise you recommend? And then the woman I saw jogging, in your mind, is that like, no, that’s excellent? Or no, there’s some risk to that because of the size she was at to her frame and her ligaments.

Hannah Ryles 

Yeah, absolutely. So for the first part of your question, does it change or should it change? It should. So there’s a couple different things with the different trimesters. So in the first trimester, generally most exercise is safe, but you want to avoid exercises that are going to cause excessive heat. So it’s the same reason that saunas and hot tubs are not recommended in the first trimester. You don’t want to do hot yoga in the first trimester because we want to avoid anything that’s going to raise your internal core temperature. And that’s just because that’s where the neural tube is developing and all the organs are developing the first trimester. So there’s a couple other things in the first trimester that you might want to avoid, but that’s the biggest one. And then in the second and third trimester, your belly’s getting bigger, the pregnancy’s growing.

You want to avoid things that are going to block off the blood flow to the pregnancy. So that’s excessively lying on your back in supine position. You don’t want to be doing lifts with being on your back for too long. You want to make sure that you’re doing a side lie modification and you also don’t necessarily want to be pushing yourself to the max limit. I’ll give one caveat with that. And then resistant training is really important in pregnancy too. So if you’re someone that does cardio all the time, that’s great, but adding resistance since training is very helpful in pregnancy as well because it helps with building your muscle mass and helps you get ready for labor and delivery. The one couple of things that I want to say though is that this is all for the general population. That woman that was running that you mentioned, I think that is a really great example of that probably wasn’t her first run.

She probably had been exercising.

Lorne Brown 

But she looked like a runner. She was having a great time. I was breathing a little heavy walking. She was like, you could tell she could do this all day long just little bit

Hannah Ryles 

Right. And so that’s a really important point in that if you’re someone who’s already fit, you can continue your fitness journey and you can continue to do the level of exercise that is generally your level of exercise. So it’s not that all vigorous activity is not recommended. It kind of depends on your fitness level. But if you’re someone who’s sedentary, you don’t want to go too vigorous immediately. You want to gradually build up to that. But if you’re someone who’s a marathon runner, within reason, there are times where you can continue that level of exercise and that is okay. So the big thing in pregnancy is really listening to your body. So I bring it back to how I remember before being pregnant and I would go to these spin classes and they’re just pushing you, or I would go to these fitness classes and they’re like, harder, harder.

And they just push you to your limit. With pregnancy, you want to really take a step back and listen to your body. So if you’re feeling kind of exhausted, you need to give yourself a break. You don’t want to push past pain. You don’t want to push past any sense of pelvic heaviness. If you’re feeling cramping, you don’t want to push past that, which is why on OB/GYN approved programs like Expect, they really remind you of that because it’s easy to get lost in a workout and just think, okay, I need to push harder. I need to keep going. But you want to really have your exercise be mindful. You want to be mindful during your pregnancy and listen to your body and not push past any of those warning signs.

Lorne Brown

And now I want to compare this in Chinese medicine and I want to go into the postpartum aspect. So in Chinese medicine, I think it’s around 30 days postpartum, they call it mattress time.

They want you to rest. And in the West, we’re like a movement. And even for fertility and pregnancy, the Schwei, the blood that is nourished in the baby, the Shui that becomes breast milk and Chinese medicine, if you have a lot of excessive sweating or overexercising, you’re consuming that. And they’re like, well, movement, but save for the baby. So I’m curious about what you think from a medical doctor trained about postpartum exercise. I do know movement and all that stuff’s important in Chinese medicine. There is a time period where that first 30 days, they kind of want you to be warm and nurtured and fed those good stews and soups. And then after those 30 days, you get more active. Curious what you guys are saying in the Expect app and yourself personally.

Hannah Ryles 

I love that because that aligns with so many different things that I believe as well. So first, within a lot of East Asian cultures, there’s kind of this confinement where you’re supposed to just let your body recover. And that’s really important because you need to recover before you can just jump back into an exercise program. The way that Expect treats it, their postpartum exercises are mostly focused on the pelvic floor. And I think the important part of that is that you don’t want to just jump into that either. You need to give your body time to relax and heal. And the reason medically is just very important because your uterus is the size of a baby by the time you deliver. It needs to go back to its normal size, which is about the size of a pair or so. And during that time, it’s really important to not push yourself too hard because your ligaments are readjusting.

Your ligaments are still softened from pregnancy because of all the different hormonal shifts and different changes. And if you exercise too vigorously, you could impact those ligaments for the long term. I’m not familiar with the exact data behind that or the exact science behind that.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. And sometimes it’s just common sense. So the Chinese medicine, and I’m glad you’re highlighting this as well about that rest period because people are like, “Oh, I got to exercise. I got to get back into shape. I got to look like I was before I was pregnant now.” And there’s some wisdom of like, “Hey, you just gave birth. You’re sharing that the uterus is large and it’s got to shrink back down to that size of a pair. The relaxation and all those hormones have affected the ligaments.” So a little bit of what they call in Chinese medicine translates into English mattress time, meaning rest.

Hannah Ryles

Absolutely.

Lorne Brown

There is a time period of what type of exercise you’re doing in the first 30 days versus post 30 days.

Hannah Ryles 

Yes, exactly. And it’s really, I think a lot of what I like about Expect too is that a lot of the instructors, they know they’ve gone through pregnancy themselves or they’ve worked with patients who’ve gone through pregnancies and they know how to talk to women in this pretty fragile time period. I actually am just postpartum for my second child as well, and they have a lot of encouragement and any type of movement that you’re doing in that postpartum period, you should be congratulated on. It’s about restoring your mental health as well and feeling like a human again. And so a lot of it is a little bit more … Again, the postpartum program is a lot more tailored to their pelvic floor to help reduce stress, urinary incontinence, which is a common problem in patients who’ve had deliveries, whether vaginal or C-section, but a lot of the programming is kind of tailored towards restrengthening those muscles.

But with the caveat that you don’t want to go too hard too quickly.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for that. Again, again, too little is too little, too much, is too much, and there’s some timing as well. So be kind to yourself, especially

Hannah Ryles 

In that period.

Lorne Brown 

So what we’ve learned and discussed is movement and exercise can support fertility, but knowing your body weight and where you are physically, you don’t want to go from zero to a hundred. There’s a strategy for that and the app talks about this, and this could help with your fertility and getting pregnant. We talked about auditory disorders helping with that. Then we shared exercise and through pregnancy. As you said, you’ve seen positive births like nice labors and good pregnancy outcomes. I thought as part of a wrap up, I’m always curious, if you could go back in time, either talk to yourself before pregnancy or because of what you do, what do you tell women then before they’re trying to conceive or while they’re trying to conceive and in pregnancy about movement and exercise?

Hannah Ryles

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is something you had mentioned earlier, just being kind to yourself, being kind to yourself and giving yourself grace. So during the fertility journey, I’ve treated many patients with this and not from a reproductive endocrinology standpoint, but just patients who are coming to me who are going through this in the early stages before I refer them out. But it’s a really tough journey and pregnancy is really tough and postpartum’s really tough and it’s all hard. And I like the phrase ” choose your hard” . Everything’s hard. Exercise can be hard, but it’s going to be three steps forwards and possibly two steps backwards, but you’re still making forward progress. So I think the biggest message I can give is to be kind to yourself. And to me, exercise is part of that whole holistic picture of being kind to yourself. It’s taking time out of your day for yourself.

And so if you are a parent or you’re wanting to become a parent, there’s so many different pulls on your time and you want to be able to just give that time to yourself. And exercise has so many more benefits just other than the physical. I think it’s a huge, huge, huge benefit. I used to joke that I exercise for my mental health rather than my physical health.

The mental health aspects of exercise are huge. And that’s really important, I think, especially for the fertility patient because that’s a really tough journey to go on. And so I think I always remind patients to make sure that you are taking care of yourself. And exercise can be one tool in that toolkit of just making sure that you are living a healthy lifestyle, not just with fertility as a goal, but as that could be your goal, but if your journey towards there makes you a healthier person, that’s great. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

And that mental health, I’m aligned with that. I do once, sometimes twice a day, almost an hour brisk walk. I live in the water and that is how I like to start my day. It gives me that reset for the day and just being out there, not working yet and just moving my body, fresh air, some early morning sunlight, I find a difference. I can tell when I get busy and I skip it. And then I often like, that’s my end of day, like, okay, after dinner, let’s just move the body. And that’s not me jogging or doing lots of exercise. That’s my mental health, which-

Hannah Ryles 

Absolutely. Exactly. Your body

Lorne Brown

As we talked about, it impacts your inflammation, it’s resisting the health issues. I’m really glad we got together to chat and learn about the app that you talk about, Except. I really think this is a great resource. And in our clinic, we’re always looking for good resources because when they come, we have naturopathic doctors, Chinese medicine doctors. So we’re really trained and good at talking about diet and lifestyle. And we use other things to support what we talked about, inflammation, mitochondrial health, metabolic health. And we talk about exercise, and now we have a resource that’s OBGYN approved to help them as well. So I really, I’m glad we got to connect. Anything you want to share and summarize, my take is that exercise is not about just fitness, it’s about supporting your health on a mind, body level, but anything you want, any last words that you want to share with the listeners that are trying to conceive or are in their pregnancy or postpartum.

Hannah Ryles 

Yeah, I think it’s kind of almost just parroting what you just said, but exercise is just one tool in this powerful toolbox of broader health. And so it is not a magic bullet. You can’t just exercise your weight into a pregnancy or into a healthy pregnancy or labor and delivery or postpartum, but it’s part of a holistic picture of making sure that you’re living your healthiest lifestyle. And it’s going to be beneficial from, to parrot your words too, the mind-body approach is that it’s not just exercising for physical health. So I think that that’s an added incentive is that if you can incorporate an exercise program that you’re going to be consistent with, it’s not just going to help you physically, but it’s also going to help your mental health. It’s also going to improve your stress levels. It’s also going to improve your metabolic conditions.

And so it’s just really important to think of it as one part that you have full control over that you can incorporate into your lifestyle to just be a healthier version of yourself.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you. That’s excellent. And Dr. Ryles, where do we find you? Are you on LinkedIn, Instagram? Do you have a little socials happening or

Hannah Ryles 

I Have an X account. It’s H. Ryles. I actually am not that much on social media. I should-

Lorne Brown 

That’s why you’re healthy. That’s another health problem. That’s another thing we should add to our list of diet, sleep, rest, movement, off social media.

Hannah Ryles 

And avoiding social media. Yeah, that’s actually true. I actually don’t spend much time. I did get sucked into it a little bit with Instagram seven. I’ve actually, just a random caveat, deleted Instagram a couple years ago and I felt so much happier. I have since reinstalled it, but it can definitely impact your mental health.

Lorne Brown 

Absolutely. So you’re on X and are you on LinkedIn as well?

Hannah Ryles 

I am on LinkedIn as well. Yeah. Perfect. Hannah Ryles.

Lorne Brown 

And then we’ll put the link for the app in the show notes as well. And you guys can search as well under expect. Anna, thank you very much for making time to talk with us today. I really appreciate it.

Hannah Ryles 

Thank you so much, Dr. Brown.

Lorne Brown 

So before I jump off, Hannahh just jumped off. I also want to remind you, we talked about the pillars of health, diet being one of them. We offer for free on our website at accubalance.ca, the longevity and fertility diet, which is basically a low glycemic index diet and anti-inflammatory diet. So there’s that metabolic health that we talked about, about inflammation and insulin issues. So that’s free on acubalance.ca that’s acubalance.ca. And you can download that. And it has about, I think, three weeks of recipes as well. So tasty food as well that will support you in your fertility journey as well as your pregnancy journey as well and postpartum. So do check that out for a download and then that holistic approach. And so again, at our clinic, we’re usually always talking about diet and lifestyle. And then we bring in our acupuncture, nutritional IVs, herbs, low level laser therapy to support metabolic health, blood flow, mitochondria health, inflammation.

And so exercise is a big part of it, movement. And so now hopefully this will help you on your journeys and check out that app called Expect. Thank you for tuning in.

Speaker 3 

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acunalance Wellness Center. At Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca, that’s Acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne_Brown_official. That’s Instagram Lorne_Brown_Official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and accubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.