Melanie Raposo: Hi everybody, I am Melanie Raposo and welcome to the Pregnancy Show. Today Andrea Page personal trainer and founder Fitmom Canada talked about how pregnant women who live active lifestyles through activities such as exercise can actually have easier shorter labors.

Andrea Page: Exercise itself does not shorten labor. What exercise does is and it don't only shorten labor because what it can help a pregnant women do in labor is have more energy and endurance. Women need to understand that going into labor one of the key components to managing and having an effective proactive progressive labor is being able to have the endurance required to be active and a woman who is exhausted and tired and walks into labor with no energy and can barely walk up the stairs is going to be the women at 2 cm dilated say knock over the head, give me an epidural and while an epidural maybe a part of your birth plan, research does show that if a women gets an epidural earlier in labor that it will slow down her labor because she will be on her back and she will not have gravity to assist in bringing the baby and moving the baby down into the birth canal.

An active women of course will be able to be active should be able to walk stares, should be able to lie, should be able to squat, she should be able to do all the things that will help her make her labor progress. So it is a quite antidotal, it is that if a woman is energetic which she can get from exercise that will shorten her labor. But it is not that exercise itself automatically means you have a shorten labor.