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You’ve just received the best news! You’re having a baby! Now, there is a long list of things that need to be figured out before the baby arrives, but at the top of your list is making sure that your baby remains safe and healthy. You’ve talked to your friends and other moms in your circle and most of them say the same thing: “Working out while pregnant is dangerous for the baby and it’s best to just take a break from exercise for a while.” This piece of advice is concerning because you love to work out and the thought of taking a break for 9+ months is giving you a slight bout of anxiety. Well, there’s good news! 

There are actually many positive benefits for mom and baby when it comes to exercising during pregnancy. In regards to the baby, exercising early in your pregnancy can help stimulate placenta growth and function as well as the organs and systems. Staying active through the later stages keeps the baby’s growth and development on track. All of these good things can happen with as little as 30 to 45 minutes of exercise each day. Unless you have serious complications, you should definitely exercise during pregnancy.

So what kind of exercise should you be doing during pregnancy and how does it change throughout each trimester? Well, let’s break it down a little bit.

First Trimester

For many women, the first trimester can feel like the worst because of fatigue, morning sickness, and shifts in your blood circulation can leave you feeling wiped out. However, restrictions on what you can do for exercise are very minimal.

• You are free to engage in your favorite types of cardio, as long as they don’t include excessive risks of crashing, falling, or seriously hurting yourself (running, cycling, other cardio machines, etc. are fine).
• This is the perfect time to focus on strength, stamina, and building muscle memory, which is very important when the baby is born. Building and maintaining core strength during this time is also extremely important. You want to choose exercises that strengthen your entire core so that it can remain strong and resilient as your belly continues to grow.

Second Trimester

Oftentimes at this stage of pregnancy, your energy levels return, your tummy starts to show and you can start to feel the baby moving. Your growing belly will start to change your posture, stability, and balance which will need to be taken into consideration when choosing a workout regimen. 

• When it comes to cardio, your growing belly will make it a lot more difficult. Keep it safe with swimming, spinning, and low-impact fitness classes. 
• While doing resistance training, focus on posture, core stability, and balance. You want to perform exercises that keep your spine in a proper neutral upright position. (It is during this trimester that your back and neck will start to feel the strain of all the extra weight you are carrying around in the front.) Core stretching and strengthening are very important because they will help reduce round ligament pain.

Third Trimester

This is it! You are almost there. These last few months are usually the hardest for physical activity because weight gain and the size of your belly have reduced your lung capacity. You will also probably feel general aches and pains, have the urge to pee more often, experience swelling, etc. All of these things can influence your ability and desire to work out.

• Most cardio movements that were fine early on in pregnancy are probably much harder now – running has probably turned more into shuffling or a brisk walk, and biking has presented its own set of challenges because your belly can get in the way of the bars.
• Resistance training is going to start looking a lot more like rehab rather than an actual workout. It is important to focus on flexibility, joint mobility, and other exercises that will prepare you for labor. Pelvic floor exercises are extremely important to work on at this time. These will help keep the pelvis, spine, and hips mobile, which will relieve some discomfort and help prepare you for labor. 

As you can see, just because you are pregnant, it doesn’t mean you have to stop working out. In fact, there are so many benefits for you and your baby that this should encourage you to continue being active for as long as you can. 

Source: Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life by Stacy T. Sims, PhD

Oftentimes, when you have lifted for a longer period of time, it gets more and more difficult to improve your strength numbers. Some athletes respond by doing that lift every single day and always at a heavy weight. Their hope is that the more they do it heavy, the more they’ll get comfortable lifting heavy, and then that will be the push they need to actually be able to lift even more weight. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work this way. In fact, if you feel yourself hitting a plateau on a certain lift, it can often be more beneficial to take a break from actually performing that lift and focusing more on the accessory work that will strengthen the muscles needed to perform the lift better. With that being said, here are 5 exercises that you can do to improve your deadlift without actually deadlifting: 

1. Hamstring Curls – these can be done a variety of different ways. You can do them lying on your stomach with a band tied to the rig post, you can do them with a medicine ball, with a physio ball, etc. It is best to do these with a deliberate, slow tempo. Try doing sets of 20-25 reps. 
2. Single-Leg Kettlebell RDLs – this movement is valuable for improving posterior-chain strength, for improving single-leg glute and hamstring strength and for ironing out any left v. right muscle imbalances that you might have. While performing this exercise, focus on keeping a neutral back and a long torso and keep your hips square. Try performing 3 sets of 8 reps per leg as heavy as possible while still maintaining good positioning and control.
3. Sled Pulls – heavy sled pulls are an effective way to spend a good amount of time under tension and build strength in your glutes, hamstrings, calves, lower back, and quads (basically your entire lower body). Try doing 3 sets of 30-meter sled pulls as heavy as possible while still maintaining constant movement.
4. Barbell Hip Thrusts – this movement is especially beneficial because they allow you to get used to lifting under a heavy load. In fact, some people can hip thrust more than they can deadlift, which goes a long way for preparing your nervous system and building your confidence for when you return to deadlifting a heavy barbell. Try doing 3 sets of 10 reps as heavy as possible.
5. Glute-Ham Raises – this is a more difficult movement to perform so it may be necessary to modify by using a band or pushing off a box at the bottom with your hands (more like a plyometric push-up). Try to keep a perfectly neutral spine and avoid breaking at the hips throughout the entire movement. Try doing 3 sets of 8-12 reps. 

It might be time to take a break from deadlifting for a while. Try adding these accessory movements for the next several weeks and then return to deadlifting and see where you’re at. 

Sources: https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/5-exercises-to-improve-your-deadlift 

The athlete who has progressed to the final stage of pacing awareness is appropriately named ‘The Master’. It is in this stage that the athlete has a “deep intuitive understanding of how to plan appropriately for different workouts and adjust plans on the fly based upon how things are going.” To get to this stage of pacing awareness takes time, lots of practice, and knowing one’s own abilities in a variety of modalities, combinations and time frames. 

At this stage, athletes don’t necessarily need to work on the exact dynamics of pacing, but actually start to become more intune with what their body can do and what situations can lead to failure or a total red line. In order to achieve this, they need to be exposed to a variety of different scenarios so they can develop the internal sense of how they feel with different combinations of movements. They can also get more specific on things they need to work on. For example, an athlete may be pretty good at bar muscle-ups, but when they do a workout that has bar muscle-ups paired with other grip-intensive movements then they completely fall apart. So instead of just working on bar muscle-ups alone, the athlete can focus on workouts that include rowing and bar muscle-ups, or bar muscle-ups and hang power cleans, etc. 

Becoming a ‘Master’ means that the athlete is able to learn and internalize lessons from every workout because they have already developed such a refined view of how they are feeling and how they are expected to feel. This creates a beneficial cycle where the athlete is able to do more training (since they are able to pace appropriately almost every time) which creates more learning (since they are getting more exposure) and also facilitates developing more capacity (since the athlete is now able to do more volume at a sustainable effort). At this point in their athletic journey, they can just get better simply by doing a lot of different movements in a variety of combinations. 

It is important to remember that every athlete is different and may not move through each of the four stages in a linear fashion. Athletes often have different “tendencies”. Some athletes may err on the side of caution and always overplan and other athletes tend to go out super hot and try to hang on. The first group of athletes would benefit from learning to cut loose and go off of feel and the second group of athletes would benefit from developing a bit more restraint and spending more time planning out their sessions. Ideally, the athlete is able to understand where they sit on the spectrum (if they are ‘The Wild Man/Woman’, ‘The Accountant’, ‘The Shrinking Violet’, or ‘The Master’) and therefore can make the adjustments that they need to.