Mother and baby are doing just fine, thanks.
The baby’s a girl. Her name is Daniella. She has dark brown hair and eyes and made her debut at 7 pounds and 20 inches long.
Mother is Terri Goldfine, 41, the on-site chiropractor at the Kaiserman Jewish Community Center in Wynnewood, Pa., who trains folks there in aquatic rehab.
Goldfine is a big believer in aquatic exercise, and exercise in general, especially for pregnant women.
In fact, she was exercising until the day before she gave birth to Daniella on February 12. What’s more, when she was 7 months pregnant, she hiked for 3 hours in 15-degree cold on Mt. Rainier, climbing to 7,000 feet, or almost halfway up the mountain.
“I was amazed at myself,” says Goldfine.
Goldfine was born and raised in the Philadelphia area. She then went to Penn State University, dropped out, traveled, did the finding-yourself thing, lived on a kibbutz, then went to chiropractic school in Spartanburg, S.C.
Her chiro practice is based on a cardinal principle: recognizing the gravity of gravity. It weighs on us heavily, exerting tremendous oppressive and compressive forces.
Just how burdensome is gravity? It subjects us to 33 pounds of pressure per square inch.
That’s why we should all pat ourselves on the back for having the guts every morning to re-enact man’s primal act of impudence by standing up and defying the crushing weight of the universe.
But it comes at a price, as the bent bodies of many older people sadly illustrate. Worse, poor posture and sagging frames have been aggravated by the Computer Age.
“It’s destroying our backs,” says Goldfine of the computer. “We’re hunched over our keyboards all day, our shoulders and backs are inflected, and we’re hurting our muscles and joints because we’re repeating the same motion over and over or staying in the same position too long,”
For sure-fire relief, Goldfine prescribes water. It’s as elemental a part of life as gravity.
Yet, even though we all did laps in the amniotic fluid of our mother’s womb, many of us are afraid to go into the water. Some view pools and other bodies of water not as places of refuge but as places of peril that can swallow us up.
Goldfine was such a person. Traumatized as a tot when her father pushed her into the ocean, she was too scared to swim until she was 35. But then, when her joints began aching, she decided the time had come to exploit water’s therapeutic properties.
So she took lessons, learned to swim and conquered her phobia. Now, in addition to teaching aquatic rehab, she scuba-dives with her husband.
Her respect for water is unalloyed. `It’s one of the most healing, relaxing, soothing ways you can exercise your body,’ says Goldfine.
Unlike jogging or dry-land aerobics, which pound your joints and are compressive, exercising in a pool with a buoyancy belt is impact-free.
It also treats your body to a delicious break, a sensation akin to weightlessness– decompressing you, removing up to 90 percent of gravity’s freight, relieving your beleaguered muscles and skeleton of the incessant task of supporting and carrying you around.
By performing exercises that involve moving all four limbs and by pushing hard against water’s circumambient resistance (12 times denser than air), you can get a high-intensity, heart-pounding workout in a mere 20 minutes or so.
It’s especially valuable for pregnant women, says Goldfine. During pregnancy, a woman’s body undergoes both hormonal and biomechanical changes. Childbearing, by creating a huge load in the belly, throws a woman’s body off center. As a result, weight is shifted from the bones to the muscles, which can make them inflamed and sore.
In the buoyant medium of water, all these stresses and strains are neutralized, which is why a pool is such a salutary place for pregnant women to exercise.
And exercise they should, says Goldfine–to keep or build strength and stamina, for the health of mother and child.
“Pregnancy is extremely stressful for women,” says Goldfine. “Pregnant women feel so vulnerable, like they’ve been taken over by some force.” Staying fit enables them to retain some measure of power and control.
When it comes to exercise, Goldfine takes a firm stance. No matter how large you are with child, “there’s never an excuse,” she says, for not engaging in some form of physical activity. “You can walk around the dining room table 10 times. You can walk up and down the steps.”
Of course, women who haven’t been active, or who have special conditions, would be wise to check with a doctor before plunging into any fitness program.
Human beings have addictive personalities, says Goldfine. That being the case, why not pick a healthy addiction– such as exercise?
“What makes life?” asks Goldfine. “Health. We’re born and we die, and what we do in between is totally our responsibility. It’s not up to a doctor or a pill or a therapist.
“You can always get a new car or washing machine. You can even get a new husband. But you can’t get a new body. You’ve got only one chance, which is why you should treat your body like a temple.
“Women are nurturers, constantly giving of themselves, emptying themselves,” says Goldfine. “They need to fill themselves up by doing something good for themselves, besides eating and shopping.”
And what would that something be?
A regular massage, for starters. And plenty of regular exercise, preferably in the pool.
Declares Goldfine, to women young and old, pregnant or not: “If you have good posture and you exercise, you’ll be all right.”
