Why Pregnancy Exercise?

My journey into pregnancy exercise

I get asked all the time, “Why and how did you get into pregnancy exercise?” I suppose the extreme amount of curiosity exists because I don’t yet have children and I haven’t experienced life as a pregnant woman.

I always pause, never knowing how to truly answer this question. That’s probably because there isn’t just one answer. It started with recognizing a need — a need to create a change in the way women birthed babies.

I saw FEAR, fear was prevalent everywhere…. When women would talk about giving birth, the conversations almost always started with “I’m so scared of the pain” or “I just don’t know how anyone gives birth naturally”. This frightened me, it made me sad and quite frankly I knew that something could be done to change the way women saw their births.

I have always been active, for as long as I can remember. Physical activity has been a huge part of my everyday life. In fact, one of the reasons I moved to Colorado was to play and climb on mountain tops. When I was younger, I thought about becoming a personal trainer at my local gym but the thought drifted because it wasn’t driven by a deep-rooted passion.

I worked as a nanny throughout college and got to see women through the different stages of pregnancy. How they coped during each trimester, the waves of good days and bad days, and even how they healed post-birth. What I didn’t see was any type of preparation for the time spent in labor (other than a few books here & there).

I started thinking WHY are these women not training for this sometimes 12+ hour event where they will ultimately push a human being out of their vagina. I started researching, trying to find someone out there that felt the same as I did. Someone who was tapped into this extreme need.

After months of searching here and there, I found him, yes I said him: James Goodlatte, the founder of Fit for Birth, a training course that focused on preparing women for birth. I was stunned and happy to know that I wasn’t alone, I immediately enrolled in his training and couldn’t wait to begin soaking up everything that he knew, everything that he wanted to share. Little did I know at the time, but his training would catapult me into a complete career change, something that would take over my life in the most beautiful way, something that would fuel a passion of mine that began with a simple question:

Why aren’t women training for birth?

So here I sit, years later with more passion running through my body than I ever expected. I’m on a mission, a mission to change the way we live out our pregnancies, starting with the preconception stage and ending once the core has healed from this ever-changing, soul experience called pregnancy.

I believe with every ounce of me that if we as women want to change the way we are currently birthing our children into this world, then something has to happen, to change. My gift to this cause is movement and exercise, body awareness, and ultimately a method that prepares women all over the world to step into their pregnancies and births more prepared and empowered on a level they never expected.

Trusting the experience and their strength to dig deep, breathe, push through and sometimes just be. In the end, feeling stronger and more able to birth their children without the need for medical interventions. We were made to do this, and we don’t need the help of anyone other than the human life that’s been living inside of us for 9 months.