A Western Kentucky University professor is helping pregnant and postpartum women stay healthy through fitness.
WKU exercise science professor Rachel Tinius is the creator and CEO of BumptUp Labs, which is behind a mobile maternal health app. BumptUp features fitness programs, dietary support, and resources to help women stay active during and after childbirth. The effort has received a $295,883 dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to support continued research for the app.
Physical inactivity during pregnancy can cause maternal obesity and poses risks to newborns and mothers. Women with obesity are at increased risk of miscarriage, gestational diabetes, induced labor. Babies of obese mothers are also at unique risk of stillbirth, congenital anomalies and metabolic disorders in childhood, according to a study from the National Institutes of Health.
Tinius said there is a commonly held belief that pregnant women should not exert themselves for fear of health risk, but she said exercising during pregnancy can be beneficial for mothers and their baby.
“I think a lot of women would prefer to use a pregnancy as an excuse to be less active, when in reality it's quite the opposite,” Tinius said. “All the research collectively suggests that exercise during pregnancy is so incredibly healthy for the mom and, on the same note, healthy for the baby and so we really need to change that narrative.”
Tinius, a graduate of WKU and mother of four children, has spent a majority of her career working with pregnant and postpartum women. Her experience assessing women from a disadvantaged socioeconomic population in St. Louis, Missouri drew her to the field.
According to Tinius, those experiences motivated her to continue impacting pregnant women and infants.
“I started doing all these body composition and fitness assessments on pregnant women and kind of fell in love with it from there", Tinus said. “So that was 13, 14 years from there, and it's been no turning back since then. I love the idea that what you do during pregnancy has implications for the baby for the rest of their life, that's such an incredible phenomenon for me.”
BumptUp can be found in all major app stores.
