Double the Power

Double the Power
November 3, 2017 Nicola

 Elin and Jakobina are identical twin sisters who run their own CrossFit box in Iceland.  They share their story and why they are proud to support our ‘Pregnant Not Powerless’ campaign.

Identical twin sisters, Elin and Jakobina have always been keenly involved in sports and their commitment to staying active and a healthy lifestyle remained undiminished throughout their first pregnancies (yes, they were both pregnant at the same time) and continued throughout their second pregnancies (yes, both pregnant at the same time again!).
Together with their husbands, Elin and Jakobina recently opened a new CrossFit box in Iceland called Grandi101 (CrossFit Grandi). Amongst all the regular CrossFit classes and GrandaFit – their own cardio based classes – they have developed courses especially for pregnant women and new mums. The ‘’MömmuFit’’ classes are proving to be a huge success, with every course sold out since they were launched in April.
Elin says, ‘’We are both going through our second pregnancy and we both trained up until our due date when we were expecting our first sons. For us training and pregnancy fit perfectly together provided the training is smart and the main focus is on feeling good, both during the training and afterwards.
If we need to scale down our exercises we find an appropriate alternative.  Instead of push-ups we do push-ups on a box, instead of running we do cycling or rowing and so on. The feeling and energy we get after a good workout is especially important during pregnancy, both for our body and soul.
Our motto is – Happy and healthy mom equals happy and healthy baby.”

Jakobina continues, ‘We believe that it’s good for every pregnant woman to do some kind of exercise, but the preferred style depends on how we trained pre-pregnancy. While taking a long walk is enough for some women, others can do heavy lifting and more intensive cardio training. We are all so different – while some women will never manage heavy lunges or box-jumps, other have no problem doing them regularly.
Women who do more intensive training during pregnancy often receive a lot of criticism from people who simply don’t know any better. We firmly believe it’s important to recognise that the woman herself is the one to judge how hard she can train, what feels good for her and when she should scale back.  We don’t know any women who wouldn’t put their baby’s health first, of course baby is always the priority.’
We really hope that we can inspire other women to exercise while pregnant – it will make the pregnancy much easier and ensure faster recovery after birth.’’

At the time of writing, Elín and Jakobina both had three year old sons with another one on the way. Since writing this, Elin and Jakobina have both given birth to healthy baby boys.

You can find Jakobina and Elin on Instagram.