Introduction: Physical exercise has an important role in pregnant women’s health. It is obvious that medical staff, especially midwives have the most persuasive role to do physical exercise by pregnant women. Hence, this study was done with the aim of determining midwives’ practice and its related factors toward exercise training during pregnancy.
Methods: This correlative descriptive study was conducted on 40 occupied midwives in health centers of Isfahan city in year 2011. Subjects were selected by census method and were analyzed through three times of observations. Data were collected by a check- list and two questionnaires and analyzed by using SPSS software version 15, independent t-test, ANOVA and correlation coefficients tests. P value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: most of participants (57.5%) indicated weak practice (100%) about exercise training during pregnancy and mostly (35%) stated the shortage of training and time as obstructions for exercise training during pregnancy. Moreover, most of the participants had intermediate knowledge (50%) and neutral viewpoint (62.5%) in exercise training during pregnancy, and a significant relation only exist between practice and demographic variables (experience of physical exercise and experience of participating in training courses related to physical exercise) (p=0.04, p=0.01). Also, the midwives who expressed the shortage of time as an obstacle in exercise training had weaker performance compared to others who stated other obstructions that this difference was statistically significant (p=0.002).
Conclusion: All participants had weak performance and most midwives had intermediate knowledge towards exercise training during pregnancy.