Getting Back To Exercise After Having A Baby

After having a baby I was surprised how much strength it felt like I had lost. I had worked out through most of my pregnancy. I walked. I rode the stationary bike. I did strength training.

Why did I feel like everything was so much harder when I worked out after having a baby?

I know part of it was sleep.

That's the easy answer.

I was trying to do the normal online streaming workouts I had done even during pregnancy. But they were hard.

I even tried plyometrics because I wanted a good intense workout. The kind I craved when pregnant, yet I couldn't get that same mental relief when pregnant.

It is crazy the expectations society gives us as moms.

Lose the weight in 8 weeks.

Look "like you never had a baby"

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I've seen those social posts too and felt ashamed when I didn't meet the same time window as others.

Were they starving themselves? Maybe. I'm not sure. I was starving enough as a breastfeeding mom, right? Goodness the amount of food I ate and hunger from making milk.

What I discovered was my body wasn't ready to do the big hard workouts yet.

It wasn't that it was me.

It was that I needed to recover from pregnancy first.

My organs needed to go back in places they were supposed to be.

My pelvic floor muscles needed to wake up a bit.

I needed to learn how to activate my core again.

To use those muscles that had been so stretched out for 9 months and now I was asking them to work hard and look good for me.

Grace.

I needed to give myself grace.

And a Plan.

I needed a plan.

I recognized there were not many plans out there that were focused on recovering from pregnancy and specific to runners. How did runners get back to running? How did moms get back to working out and feeling like themselves?

Well, I put my struggles into working on a solution.

I used my background in exercise science to create the exact plan that I used not once, not twice, but three times to overcome the changes that happen during pregnancy and help my body.

I helped my body be strong again.

To feel like my own.

Don't give in to the pressure to feel like "yourself" right after.

Your body has gone through a lot.

Give it grace.

And when you're ready...

A plan.

Want the plan I used? 

I share it in the Mama Essentials Mission. I wanted you to have someone be right along side you as you work through it. So while I did it after my third baby, I filmed each session. Catch the step-by-step program for childbirth recovery that I used myself and so have dozens of others.