Guest Essay: ‘What Pregnancy Taught Me About Inclusive Keiko’ by Caroline Lindholm (Sweden).

Women’s voices and achievements are under-represented across budo-related media and literary channels. Guest essays published on this website share personal experiences, perspectives, and reflections on budo that are written by women.

Caroline Lindholm (Photo credit: Mikael Persson Hill)

What Pregnancy Taught Me About Inclusive Keiko by Caroline Lindholm.

When I started iaido at age 18, there were actually a fair number of female participants both in my dojo and at seminars. I quickly noticed however, that these women could be divided into two main categories: those who didn’t have children or those who started iaido when their kids were already grown enough to not need constant adult supervision. I heard about a few exceptions, but these women were practicing in other dojos and not attending seminars so seemed somewhat mythical to me. As someone who fell head-over-heels in love with iaido at first glance, but also knew I wanted to start a family at some point, I found this to be quite troubling and it remained at the back of my mind for many years. I kept hoping for that beacon of hope, the one who would demonstrate that it actually was possible to keep practicing and improving in budo even as a mother. Finally, I had to reluctantly accept that the best I could do was to attempt to be that example for others.

Three pregnancies and two kids later, let me start by saying I’m not someone who goes through pregnancy gracefully. Those women you see scaling playground equipment or running 5k’s (even marathons!) despite carrying around another person in their bellies? Not me. I was the pregnant woman who missed the bus while standing next to it simply because I couldn’t walk fast enough for the bus driver to realize I wanted to get on. As you can expect, my training during pregnancy was quite limited as pelvic pain limited my mobility quite severely. Or rather, I could move (slowly) but would pay with intense sciatica-type pain for days afterwards.

Instead, I tried to come back to the dojo as soon as possible after giving birth. Now, this is the point where a lot of new mothers give up on their previous hobbies and I think it’s important that we accept that many people will reprioritize their lives at this point. Even as someone who really wanted to get back to the dojo, I struggled for a long time with intense guilt and anxiety over leaving my babies (with their fully competent and very supportive dad) for a couple of hours. What I’m getting at is, even when someone is motivated to come back after childbirth, it can be incredibly hard, and we need to be sympathetic to this too. Like many babies, mine were often especially fussy in the evening when I needed to leave for practice, and I tried to find ways around it. One way was starting an iaido training group for people on parental leave… it was not a great success in terms of turnout, but it did provide me with some extra time and incentive to think about how to get back into training in a thoughtful and paced manner.

The way back to the dojo was not only challenging because of crying babies and feelings of guilt, however. The physical challenge was in many ways bigger than I had expected. I struggled a lot with posture, something I had felt quite confident about before. I struggled with pains and aches that remained for longer than I had been told to expect, and generally felt like I had to relearn a lot from the ground up. As annoying as the limitations were, this relearning did come with positive side effects too, as usual when we leave our comfort zones.  But what made it worse, was the loneliness of it all. While this can be expected in a small sport with even fewer female practitioners, even a quick look around suggests it not quite that simple. A recent interview study with top-level female cross-country skiers from Norway and Sweden, countries where these are big and well-funded sports, also revealed problems getting adequate information, support and knowledge on how to handle pregnancy and family planning in parallel with their athletic careers[i]. It was actually surprising to me to see how similar these women’s responses were to my own informal talks with other women in iaido who have had children during their active training “career”, and I think it’s important that we talk about these issues within the budo community and aim to be as supportive as possible to lose as few as possible of the pregnant women and new mothers who are motivated but also struggle to stay in the dojo.

Now, we are all doing this in our limited spare time, and for those of us in teaching positions, we are already juggling the balance between the teaching time needed to keep our dojos up and running and our own need to practice and develop our skills further. How much time and effort is it actually worth making our dojos more pregnancy-friendly, considering how few practitioners this concerns in the end? Well, what I learned was, it’s actually not just about a few practitioners. As I’ve had to adapt my own practice to various physical limitations (first pregnancy, then all the post-partum issues, then injuries due to lack of strength as the previous round of issues got better) I have also become much more aware of the physical limitations of my dojo mates. Because in parallel with me having to teach by saying “ideally do A, but if, like me, you cannot today, then do B” my dojo mates have also opened up more about their own physical issues. And when you think about it, if we want budo to be about life-long learning we also have to find ways to accommodate learning budo through all of life’s phases and setbacks. While I can’t offer you any kind of scientific data on the effects on participation in my dojo, my gut feeling is that the atmosphere has changed for the better in the sense that people are now more comfortable showing up and modifying the practice to match their current ability instead of planning to stay home until they’re fully fit again. (Of course I’m not talking about infectious diseases here!) The current age range among active iaidoka in my dojo is 11 to 79-years-of-age, which suggests to me that we are at least doing something right in creating an inclusive environment where everyone can strive to be their best. But the real goal of course, should be that the 11-year-old keeps having a welcoming dojo to come to until the age of 79 or more, throughout all of life’s challenges.

To summarize, my own conclusion from trying to figure out keiko during and after pregnancy, is that if we can improve the situation in the dojo for pregnant women and new mothers, we would also be improving the situation for a lot of other people. Making sure people can participate in training even when not at their best physically will make our dojos more inclusive and welcoming to join, with fewer reasons to leave. And that, I think, is a sure way to really promote life-long learning in budo. From my own experience, it would also help show young women joining the dojo that this is something that they can keep doing even if they decide to start a family in the future.

But if even professional athletes struggle with lack of accessible knowledge, how can we make a difference in our own small amateur world? While I think a bigger change would probably require support from higher up (i.e. within our federations), I’ll try to get the ball rolling with my own small list of what I think all dojo leaders need to know about pregnancy and its effects on women’s health. Feel free to add more in the comments section!

1. A pregnancy weighs more than a baby. Now, thankfully kendo and iaido are not very concerned with body weight, but I have come across the misunderstanding that being pregnant means you should only gain the baby’s weight. While the average full-term baby weighs around 3.5 kg, a full-term pregnancy in total weighs at least 9 kg. In addition to the baby that also includes an increased blood volume, the placenta, amniotic fluid and breast tissue. That’s quite a bit of weight added to your workouts!
2. Pregnant bodies have wobbly joints. This is because of a hormone called relaxin, which serves to make the pelvic joints more flexible to facilitate birth. Unfortunately, this affects all joints in the body from very early in pregnancy. For some women this is barely noticeable, for others it’s associated with major pain issues. The wobblier joints are also most likely a contributing reason to why many pregnant women experience balance problems. In the dojo, I would suggest we should be aware that exercises that are hard on the joints may have to be reduced in frequency or altered for pregnant participants.
3. Pregnancy can completely reset a good posture. Many new mothers have looked at themselves in the mirror and wondered why they suddenly don’t seem to have a butt. This is because pregnancy adds a lot of weight to the front of the body, which tends to distort posture to a point where the glutes are basically on a long vacation… What does this mean after pregnancy? Well, the heavy front load may be gone but the muscles needed for good posture are no longer there. Expect post-pregnant women to need more help on their posture again while they figure this out and build back the muscle. The good news is improving posture usually means less hip and back pain both during and after pregnancy.
4. Pregnancy confuses your neuromuscular “map”. As beginners we all struggled with getting our brains to engage the right muscles, but it was all so mixed up with everything else we had to learn we may not have noticed it much. With practice, our motor control neurons figure out details like how to use the correct muscles to lift your sword without tensing your shoulders at the same time. The problem after pregnancy, however, is that the muscles have moved a lot in a short period of time. While you would think that should be fine because the neural connections are still the same, this can actually confuse your brain! There are a lot of good exercises out there for new mothers to regain full control of e.g. abdominal and pelvic muscles, but one good trick is to use touch as an input. Of course, this has to be approached respectfully, but the idea here is that if the brain is struggling to find the right neural connection to control a muscle, we can essentially highlight it by activating a neural connection from the other end. Say that a post-partum practitioner is struggling with activating muscles in her back properly (quite likely when posture is off), having someone lightly brush their hand across the muscle in question at the right time makes it a lot easier. Of course, this is one of those tricks we can use to help a lot of people struggling with muscle control, regardless of reason.
5. Post-pregnant joints can feel like they’re 90… Of course, all pregnant bodies react slightly differently, but it’s very common for new mothers to suffer from stiff and aching joints. Post-partum joint pain commonly lingers for many months after birth but will usually disappear over time. There’s no easy fix for this one, but if you’re a dojo leader I would argue you should already have solutions such as alternative warmup exercises in place for participants with joint issues as these are incredibly common for a variety of reasons across gender and age groups.

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[i] https://www.idrottsforskning.se/mamma-och-bast-i-varlden-en-omojlig-ekvation/

About Caroline Lindholm

Caroline Lindholm is a practitioner of ZNKR and Muso Shinden Ryu iaido. She first started iai in 2003 and is currently graded ZNKR 5 dan. She has been teaching iaido since 2005 at the grade of 1 kyu when she took on challenge of resurrecting the iaido group within Linköpings budoklubb, which she still leads together with her husband and senior students. She is the mother of two little boys, holds a PhD in physiology and a day job in academia. She will never say no to melon pan or a decent matcha latte.