One of the easiest traps to fall into in life is all-or-nothing thinking; the belief that if you can’t do something all out – with maximum effort – you might as well not do it at all.

I know I’ve fallen into this trap a number of times, especially when it comes to exercise. Work for me gets in the way of my regular exercise sessions, but instead of getting in a mile or two of jogging - which is less than what I normally do – I’ll blow the whole thing off, thinking that somehow a little won’t do me much good. This is the precise wrong way of approaching exercise.

I have a feeling that many women who become pregnant go through the same thing. Obviously, when a woman becomes pregnant, she can no longer exercise as strenuously or for as long as she did previously due to the stress strenuous exercise puts on the body and a growing fetus. But moderate exercise can do a world of good for both the mother and the baby, as a recent study has indicated what prior studies haven’t – to wit, that the benefits of exercise extend beyond those of the mother and the baby’s birth weight.

Prior studies have indicated what we already know: that the best aspect of exercise for a pregnant woman is that she remains at a healthy weight throughout her nine months of pregnancy, translating to a healthy birth weight for her baby. But this study, conducted by researchers from Kansas University’s School of Medicine, says that exercise also improves the heart health and nervous system function of their soon-to-be-born bundles of joy as well.

They determined this by regularly measuring the heart rates of mothers’ fetuses in four-week intervals, starting in their second trimester. Half of the participating moms were assigned moderate exercise regimens of 30 minutes three times a week, while the other moms had no such exercise regimens. To test the fetuses’ heart rates, the researchers used what’s called a magnetocardiogram, which is a highly sensitive tool that measures the variability of heart rates (It’s often used in tandem with the electrocardiogram, which measures the electrical activity of the heart). The greater variability and the lower the heart rate of a fetus, the healthier that heart is believed to be.

Throughout the testing period, the researchers found a clear correlation between exercising moms and healthy hearts of their fetuses, as the heart rates were lower and had greater variability compared to the fetuses of moms who did not exercise.

The researchers’ data was presented at the 121st Annual Meeting of the American Physiological Society in April 2008.

This is perhaps the best example of how a little bit of exercise can make a world of difference. It’s an example of how a person is forced to scale back her exercise because of the dangerousness it poses to herself and her baby, yet the benefits don’t go away. Scaling exercise sessions back – whether one is pregnant or not, and when time won’t permit a full session – is what ought to be done regularly. The benefits of an exercise session will not dry up just because the intensity level isn’t there. Again, I think the aforementioned example is perhaps the best illustration of this fact.