Lila Sabbaghian Rad and Ashraf Jahanshiri
Scientific advancements, especially in medicine, have minimized pregnancy discomforts and delivery risks. However, pregnant women are always concerned with delivery and associated discomforts. This may be one of the reasons for the large number of Caesarean section in Iran. One of the methods for making delivery easier is to prepare the mother through exercises. Due to the importance of delivery, the present research is carried out to examine the effect of a period of physical exercise on certain delivery parameter such as the duration of the first (active) and second stages of labor, type of delivery, instrumental vaginal delivery, and birth weight. This study was ex post facto or causal-comparative. The subjects were 55 healthy, primiparous women who were randomly assigned to an experimental group ( = 25) and a control group ( = 30). The training protocol involved aerobic, strengthening, and stretching exercises for 30-60 minutes, 2 days per week, and 22 weeks, beginning from the 14thweek of pregnancy. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Shapiro's test were applied to examine the normal distribution of the data. Also t-test for independent samples, Mann-Whitney U test, and chi-square test were applied for data analysis at the 0.05 significance level. The results showed that the first stage of labor was significantly shorter in the experimental group than the control group. Moreover, frequency of Caesarean section significantly decreased in the experimental group. However, there were no significant differences between these groups in duration of the second stage of labor, frequency of instrumental vaginal delivery, and birth weight. Based on the results, performing a set of exercises during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy decreases the duration of the first stage of labor and the frequency of Caesarean section. It is thus recommended that medical centers invest on training courses with the proposed protocol to reduce some of the problems associated with childbirth.
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