Exercising during pregnancy: An experimental study of its effects on cognitive development in early infancy

Active lifestyle during pregnancy will have a constant impact on mother and Infant. The research aimed to investigate the effects of maternal activity during pregnancy on the child's cognitive development during the three months after birth. In this experimental study, 40 mother-child pairs were selected and randomly divided into two experimental group and control group. The experimental group benefited from 16 sessions of 50 minutes of physical intervention and control group did not have regular physical activity. Finally, the infants of two groups were evaluated by Ages-Stage questionnaire (ASQ 3) in two periods of one and three months. In order to examine the hypothesis, they were used repeated measure analysis of variance and independent t test for the investigation of differences between the two groups. All statistical analysis was conducted with SPSS-22 software. The results showed that maternal physical exercise in the experimental group improved the problem solving skills and the main effect of time (F=27.55, P=0.001) and group (F=78.13, P=0.001) was significant. The obtained results confirmed that physical activity during pregnancy can increase the infant's cognitive development.