For thirty years, Branford resident Ann Cowlin has been researching and exploring the benefits of exercising during and after pregnancy. Her start down this path began in 1979 when some people still thought pregnant women should rest, rest, rest. The truth is, shared Cowlin from her office overlooking her in-home dance studio, both mother and child are better off for having exercised. For pregnant women, research has shown that exercise guards against preeclampsia and gestational diabetes.

In 1979, Cowlin was a young dancer working as an artist in residence at a community art center in West Virginia when she was approached by West Virginia University to try something new. Using her background in dance as well as her master’s degree and knowledge of kinesiology and sports medicine, Cowlin was asked to work with pregnant coal miners’ wives to improve their health conditions.

"Thirty years working on one thing is quite amazing,” she said, adding, “Being the right person with the right knowledge in the right place at the right time” jump-started the rest of her career.

New to the practice of helping pregnant women become fit and stay healthy, Cowlin said she went straight to the library and began researching; thirty years later, she hasn’t stopped questing for knowledge.

In 1981, Cowlin came to New Haven to teach dance at Yale University. She continued to explore the benefits of dance and exercise for pregnant and postpartum women. The class and concept Dancing Thru Pregnancy was born and Cowlin hunkered down exploring best practices and statistical data to find how DTP would best serve her population.

Initial studies, shared Cowlin included a lot of observation of students. Demonstrating by laying on the floor, side push-ups, she said, were invented through this observation to make the move more comfortable for women with growing bellies.  

“Sometimes,” said Cowlin, “I took things away because they were not safe.” Cowlin noted that exercise on the back can cause some women to become lightheaded as blood flow is reduced; something that can also be dangerous for the mother and the growing child. “There is no single exercise that on one can do and there is no single exercise that everyone can do,” she said.

By the end of the 1980s, Cowlin said the sentiment in the health field was that exercise was good for pregnant women and those who did exercise had “better outcomes.”

Labor, said Cowlin, “is exercise.” Better prepared women, she shared, statistically had better deliveries and quicker recovery times. A fit woman who exercised during pregnancy might recover in 24 hours after labor where a woman who has not exercised, might need as many as four days to rebound.

“We hear from the doctors and the midwives,” said Cowlin, “’Your women really know how to push.’”

In addition to helping women work towards a good pregnancy and delivery, Cowlin’s DTP also focuses on getting women into their “third body” after delivery. A woman, said Cowlin, never looks exactly the same after pregnancy. She has recently blogged about the "third body” (she keeps a blog regularly) and emphasizes that not only does postpartum exercise help women get fit, it also helps with mental wellbeing. A new DTP Mom-Baby dance class led by Branford Patch writer Alana Joli Abbott will begin June 20 (click here for more).

Over the years, after turning over her New Haven-area classes to Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, Cowlin has taken DTP across America and trained hundreds of teachers.

As times change and fitness becomes popular, Cowlin said more and more programs have cropped up. Prenatal yoga, she said, “just went crazy and that drives me crazy.” Prenatal yoga, she said, can be dangerous for pregnant women. The pose downward dog, she said, has been proven to cause death in pregnant women as a result of participants sustaining air embolisms. Additionally she said, in order to become a prenatal yoga instructor, a person can be trained in a weekend. To become a DTP instructor, teachers must go through a six-week training.

Though she’s proud of the program she has developed, Cowlin said she continues to research and explore best methods to ensure mom and baby are getting the best health care and exercise. “I am running a business but I am also running a laboratory,” she said.

In between growing her company and teaching modern dance at Yale, Cowlin also worked for more than 12 years in New Haven Public School's Polly T. McCabe Center (high school for pregnant teens) teaching health and fitness classes. During her tenure, Cowlin stated that she was able to eliminate low birth weight and premature deliveries in the group. This accomplishment, she said, is one of her proudest.

Looking to the future and overcoming the challenges of a newer prenatal fitness programs, Cowlin said this time period has been the most interesting in her career. There is so much to learn and the advent of technology has allowed for fast research, she said. The new learning curve is steep she said, and adjusting her program for shortened attention spans and a new generation of moms has also presented different challenges. Creating a Twitter handle (@anncowlin) is one way she keeps up with her newer community but said she only tweets fact-based evidence and well-founded ideas.

Of the foundations of DTP, which have not changed in 30 years, Cowlin said, “If the content gives us healthy moms, healthy babies, good deliveries, fast recoveries and healthy long-term outcomes, what’s not to like?”

Ann's Tips for Moms-to-Be

1. Try to work with someone who knows what they are doing: A certified prenatal or postnatal fitness instructor or someone from a major organization like Dancing Thru Pregnancy will be able to get you off to the best start.
2. Aerobics: If you are not inclined to do anything else, get out and walk two, 15-minute miles (or walk for 30 minutes), three times a week. If you aren’t doing that much, you are just entertaining yourself.
3. Practice relaxation: For about 10 minutes a day, you should take some time to relax. Check out Herbert Benson, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School’s website. He say’s the relaxation is the “opposite of fight or flight.”
4. Make sure you have a community during labor: Labor is a long endurance event; you should have understanding people there for you during it.
5. Eat whole foods: Get plenty of protein and water.

Ann's Tips for Postpartum Moms

1. Body scan: Within a day of giving birth, take a few minutes to scan over your total body and assess everything. First “exercise” you should start is to work the kegel muscles.
2. Abdomen: Start compressing abdominal muscles while blowing out. The only way to get the muscles back is to pull them back.
3. Take short walks: Make a point to take short walks without holding the baby. You need to teach your body what is upright without the weight of the bay attached to it.
4. By four weeks, increase your walks: You should be walking 30 minutes at a time with the baby in a stroller.
5. Create your third body: Six weeks after giving birth, a woman should be doing some vigorous activity like taking a fitness class. The goal is not to work to get back to the body before the pregnancy but into a new body.