Pre-Pregnancy Exercises to Build Endurance and Prevent Core Dysfunction
There’s a big mindset shift that happens when you start preparing to conceive. Ideally, you’re preparing your body and home to create space for your future baby. But you’re also preparing your mind for the new life ahead.
During this time, you may examine your habits, lifestyle, and even friendships from a new lens. And we encourage you to let these changes happen. They’re sacred, and a small part of the growth that will continue as you become a parent.
There are a few ways you can support your preconception health from a mind, body, and soul perspective. One of them is with pre-pregnancy exercises. Intentional movement can help you process the changes going on in your life. It should also prepare your core and pelvic floor for the changes ahead.
The Benefits of Pre-Pregnancy Exercises
In the same way that a prenatal vitamin helps prepare your nutrient stores for pregnancy, pre-pregnancy exercises help you build a connection with your core. This connection is vital to pregnancy health, labor, and postpartum healing.
- Better Fertility. With pre-pregnancy exercises, you want to find a middle ground between high-intensity exercises and a sedentary lifestyle. Too much physical stress on the body can impact your nervous system and result in poor fertility. At the same time, a sedentary lifestyle can promote the same issues. A pre-pregnancy fitness plan should help you strike an intentional balance between the two — staying active with exercises that calm and support your nervous system.
- Better Pregnancy Outcomes. Women who are active during pregnancy tend to experience better pregnancy outcomes. A pre-pregnancy fitness plan can help you establish intentional habits you’ll use to stay active, even when you’re nine months along.
- Fewer Pregnancy Injuries. Pregnancy injuries are extremely common, but they don’t have to be. With the right foundational movements, we’ve seen women dramatically decrease their risk of injury (and even heal diastasis recti during pregnancy).
- Confidence in Pregnancy Exercise. There’s a lot of conflicting information about how to best exercise during pregnancy. A pre-pregnancy fitness plan allows you to build muscle and see results before you conceive — meaning you’ll enter pregnancy with confidence, information, and clarity.
- Less Back Pain. This is one of the most common issues for pregnant women, and it often stems from a misaligned core. By strengthening and lengthening the right muscles in preconception, you’re less likely to experience back pain in pregnancy. And more likely to stay comfortably active throughout your pregnancy experience.
- Build Healthy Habits. Women who are active before and during pregnancy are less likely to experience gestational diabetes. By building your fitness routine in preconception, you can support your body against various complications.
Your Pre-Pregnancy Fitness Plan
There are a few essential elements for any pre-pregnancy fitness plan. Here’s how we build the ideal fitness routine:
Gentle and Low-Impact Movement
When we talk about limiting stress during the preconception period, this includes exercise. Stress can impact your hormones, egg quality, and overall reproductive health. Not to mention, it can put you in the wrong headspace for conception.
If you typically do HIIT, heavy weight lifting, or running, you don’t have to stop these entirely. Just change out a few high-intensity sessions for something more low-key. Expand your workout options with swimming, yoga, and long walks in the park.
Foundational Techniques
At Studio Bloom, we use a handful of exercises called the “foundational techniques.” These help you build strength and balance within your core and pelvic floor. They’re all about harnessing your breath and creating protective movements to ensure your core is properly stabilized. While these exercises aren’t hard (you can do them from bed), you will need to practice them.
Preconception is the best time to master the foundational techniques. You’ll walk into pregnancy with all the tools and movements you need to protect your core and keep up with your favorite fitness activities.
Use Intention to Build Trust in Your Body
Even in preconception, you’ll notice an influx of information about how to “best” support your future baby. This information overload only gets worse when pregnancy begins.
Pre-pregnancy fitness will help you build confidence and trust in your own body. This way, you won’t be constantly Googling “which ab exercises are safe for pregnancy?” Instead, you’ll intuitively know how to make an exercise safe and effective.
Learn to Activate Different Muscle Groups
If you’re familiar with fitness, you know that activating specific muscle groups has a learning curve. Even if you’re doing the right movement with the correct form, you could still be missing the mark for muscle activation.
It’s the same way with pregnancy exercises. You need time and intentionality to activate the right muscles, especially those in the pelvic floor. The right pre-pregnancy fitness plan will help you learn and practice muscle activation — so you can begin your pregnancy workouts ahead of the game.
3 Ways to Harness Pre-Pregnancy Exercise
These three pillars of pre-pregnancy exercise can help you reduce back pain and maintain core function throughout motherhood. Learning these techniques before conception puts you one step ahead — by helping you build muscle memory that you’ll use for late-trimester pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.
1. Core Strengthening Exercises
An exercise plan full of crunches and planks isn’t necessarily the best way to strengthen your core for pregnancy. Sure, these exercises help build muscle. But you want to achieve strength, length, and functionality in your core.
We recommend mixing up your core strengthening exercises with exercises that lengthen, stabilize, and build stamina within your muscle groups. Try a half knee-lean adductor extension (weighted), a chest press from the tabletop position, and bridges.
2. Pelvic Floor Exercises
The right pelvic floor exercises are so much more than Kegels. The idea behind Kegels is to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles. But during the pushing phase of labor, you’ll actually need these muscles to stretch and get out of the way. For this reason, we always recommend finding the distinction between strengthening and lengthening these pelvic floor muscles. To lengthen, try a happy baby yoga pose, seated hip rotations, and child’s pose (all accompanied by diaphragmatic breathing).
3. Endurance-Based Exercises
Building endurance in your muscles isn’t just important for labor and delivery. It will also help you retain balance and wellness throughout your entire pregnancy (as your belly and baby grow).
Endurance can be difficult to build during the early stages of pregnancy, though. Especially if you struggle with morning sickness, you need space for relaxed and low-impact exercises. This is why we recommend endurance exercises as part of your pre-pregnancy exercise plan. It puts you one step ahead and gives you some wiggle room for first-trimester nausea.
If you’re working out at the gym, try doing more reps with lighter weights. Or, practice Pilates and pelvic floor exercises, like clam shells, downward dog, and pelvic tilts.
The Bottom Line: Pre-Pregnancy Workouts Are More Than Kegels and Crunches
If you know about early trimester exercises, you know that Kegels, crunches, and Pilates are common recommendations for moms-to-be. These exercises are supposed to prepare your core for pregnancy and strengthen your pelvic floor. But by themselves, they underestimate what women are truly capable of. And they miss key components (like muscle lengthening) that balance the core.
The right pre-pregnancy fitness plan should focus on balancing your core, building awareness in specific muscle groups, and empowering you to do your favorite exercises with protective techniques. Not to mention, your pre-pregnancy exercises should be full of positive energy and low-impact movement for optimal conception.
At Studio Bloom, we empower mamas-to-be with functional movement, challenging exercises, and foundational techniques you’ll use before, during, and after pregnancy.
