Working Out After the Birth of Your Baby
What you Need to Know about Postpartum Recovery and your Return to Exercise
At Fitmama Strong Durham, we pride ourselves on our postpartum protocol that gets women back to their more advanced workouts without incident and injury free.
So, we’re sharing some of our best practices below!
Have a full assessment with a pelvic floor physiotherapist who will help support you towards reaching your personal goals and finding comfort and strength in your body
Focus on rehabilitation during the early weeks of your postpartum healing. Practice diaphragmatic breathing, gentle stretches and coordination for your pelvic floor with movement. Bridge Lifts and clam shells are two gentle exercises that can assist with mind/body connection between your core & pelvic floor (check out our FREE resource for more movements that you can do in the early postpartum days!)
Increase time over intensity. Start with short walks and gradually build up to walking 30 min. Increase speed after increasing the length of time spent walking.
When you feel ready, start with some gentle body weighted exercises
Be patient with your recovery and slowly progress to higher impact exercises over the course of around six months postpartum. One of the main reasons we recommend easing into high impact activity is that the pregnancy hormone relaxin, which is responsible for softening tendons and ligaments which make joints less stable, is still present for up to five months postpartum (and possibly longer for breastfeeding women). Resuming higher impact activities too soon can increase the risk of injury due to joint instability and can increase the pressure/stress on the pelvic floor and abdominal wall.
Build up to 2-3 strength training exercises a week. Curate a culture of consistency! Try for 6-8 weeks of consistent strength training before adding impact into your fitness routine.
It might be very easy to write off these recommendations and go full steam ahead if you’re not experiencing any negative symptoms. Many women actually begin to experience symptoms in the longer term that ultimately derail their recovery and reduce activity levels.
These guidelines are the minimum we recommend, but they don’t mean you can’t still have challenging workouts! Your workouts after having a baby should be tailored so that they take into consideration your well being and long term health. A postnatal fitness specialist is a great person to enlist to help you get back to exercising again after your baby is born.
Interested in joining us? Our community is a great way to meet other new parents. Fitmama Strong Durham has been operating in-person classes in the Durham Region since 2010 and we’ve been offering Online classes online from our virtual studio since 2020. Our community is a thriving and welcoming space for you and your littles.
We offer Prenatal Fitness and Prenatal Yoga classes, on-demand from our virtual studio through a special series. Our 30 minute live, online Express classes include a Prenatal friendly Yoga class.
If you’re new to Fitmama Strong Online, try one of our 3 Class Passes! You can use them at any of our Express classes on our live, online schedule. It doesn’t matter if you’re pregnant, your baby was born 6 weeks ago or 6 years ago, we have something for all of our members! Already been to Fitmama Strong classes? Attend and in-person series or grab a monthly membership and keep moving with us. Please note that our New to Fitmama Strong 3 Class Pass cannot be used at our in-person series of classes.
Finally, we offer in-person Stroller Fitness and Babywearing Fitness in the Durham Region and Ottawa locations. We can’t wait to have you join us!
We can’t wait for you to #startwithus and #growwithus. Join us Online or at one of our in-person classes!