1. Strength training can help reduce pregnancy-related low back pain. Your body goes through significant anatomical changes during pregnancy, including an increased curve in your lower back, which can lead to discomfort or pain. Strengthening your muscles, especially in your legs and glutes,4 plays a key role in supporting your spine and reducing the common aches and pains that many moms experience during pregnancy.

2. Strength training helps you meet the physical demands of caring for a child. Caring for a child involves repetitive lifting, bending, and carrying throughout the day, for years. By improving your strength, you’ll make these tasks easier and enhance your overall quality of life.

3. Resistance training naturally engages and strengthens your pelvic floor muscles through core activation. Stabilizing during strength exercises increases intra-abdominal pressure, triggering a coordinated response from your core. Studies show that in healthy women, pelvic floor muscles contract alongside 23 abdominal muscles, meaning your strength workouts support your pelvic health.

1. Manage IAP with breath: Intra-abdominal pressure is not inherently a bad thing. This pressure is necessary to stabilize your body during movements and is created during everyday actions like sneezing, coughing, lifting, and bending. As you’ve already learned, breathing helps you manage IAP. With DRA, if you exhale on exertion rather than holding your breath, you’ll manage the pressure to protect the linea alba. Breathing correctly also activates your deeper abdominal muscles, which aids in stability as you regain function.

2. Progression: When it comes to rebuilding core strength and function, a progressive approach ensures that exercises are appropriately challenging without overstressing tissues. A gradual progression in exercise allows you to build a solid foundation before moving on to more advanced exercises, ensuring your body can handle each new challenge effectively. An example of this might be you starting to train your core with heel slides, moving on to heel drops, and eventually working your way up to the more challenging dead bug. Signs like bulging, doming, sinking at the midline, or excessive back arching indicate that an exercise may be too challenging for you at this moment.

If you’re wondering if exercise will interfere with your milk supply, fortunately, it does not. If you’re enjoying moderate intensity exercise, your body is capable of producing the same amount of milk, with the same nutrients, as non-exercising moms. Babies of moms who exercise gain weight appropriately and haven’t experienced adverse effects on feeding. During high-intensity workouts, the taste of your breastmilk might alter slightly, but it’s not harmful to your baby and seems to only last about an hour.

Now, just because science says exercise doesn’t impact breastfeeding, that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges practically, during the early months, especially when your schedule revolves around your baby’s feeding schedule. It may take a little more strategy, like breastfeeding right before a workout so that exercise is more comfortable, and you buy yourself some time or choose home workouts to lessen the time away from your baby (that way you’re not spending your precious fitness time away worrying if the baby is hungry).