The Barbell Mamas Podcast | Pregnancy, Postpartum, Pelvic Health
The times are changing and moms have athletic goals, want to exercise at high-intensity or lift heavy weights, and want to be able to continue with their exercise routines during pregnancy, after baby and with healthcare providers that support them along the way.
In this podcast, we are going to bring you up-to-date health and fitness information about all topics in women's health with a special lens of exercise. With standalone episodes and special guests, we hope to help you feel prepared and supported in your motherhood or pelvic health journey.
The Barbell Mamas Podcast | Pregnancy, Postpartum, Pelvic Health
Olympic Lifting Modifications for Pregnancy and Postpartum Athletes
When you're passionate about Olympic weightlifting, pregnancy doesn't mean you have to abandon the barbell—it means learning to adapt with intelligence and awareness. Christina Prevett breaks down the crucial modifications that keep both mom and baby safe while preserving hard-earned technique.
The conversation explores four key considerations every pregnant weightlifter needs to understand. First, contact points and bar path must adapt as your baby bump grows—not because contact is dangerous, but because forcing traditional positioning can develop technical habits that are difficult to break postpartum. Second, the speed and depth of squats require personalized modification based on how your changing body feels in these positions. Third, setup positions from the floor may need elevation or stance adjustments to accommodate your growing belly. Finally, breathing strategies can shift from traditional bracing to continuous exhales that maintain core stability while respecting pregnancy physiology.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is the practical postpartum guidance. Christina explains why technique, not strength, becomes the limiting factor after delivery. The dramatic shift from pregnant to non-pregnant happens rapidly, leaving many athletes feeling disconnected from their body awareness. Starting with empty barbell work becomes crucial for proprioceptive retraining before adding load.
Special attention is given to C-section recovery, with innovative modifications like the "no contact snatch" that respect surgical healing while maintaining training consistency. The guidance extends to belt use timelines and core rehabilitation approaches that transfer directly to barbell performance.
Whether you're planning a pregnancy, currently pregnant, or navigating postpartum return, this episode provides the blueprint for maintaining your weightlifting practice safely through all phases of motherhood. Ready to keep the barbell in your life through pregnancy and beyond? This is your roadmap.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast. My name is Christina Previtt. I'm a pelvic floor physical therapist, researcher in exercise and pregnancy, and a mom of two who has competed in CrossFit, powerlifting or weightlifting, pregnant postpartum or both. In this podcast, we want to talk about the realities of being a mom who loves to exercise, whether you're a recreational exerciser or an athlete. We want to talk about all of the things that we go through as females, going into this motherhood journey. We're going to talk about fertility, pregnancy and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual. While I am a pelvic floor physical therapist, I am not your pelvic floor physical therapist and know that this podcast does not substitute medical advice. All right, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together, and I can't wait to get started. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Barbell Mamas podcast, christina Previtt. Here and today, we are going to be talking about all things modifying exercise, modifying Olympic weightlifting, in particular, during pregnancy and postpartum.
Speaker 1:I am currently in Virginia teaching our geriatrics course. I travel on airplanes a lot. I was actually really lucky getting from Canada to Lynchburg, virginia. It was not the easiest track. I ended up having to jump onto three airplanes on Friday but thankfully, if you guys have traveled, you probably know that it has been dicey in terms of delays and certainties about getting to specific places on time. So the fact that I was able to make all of my connections and be able to be here teaching this course was kind of amazing. But that is why, if you're watching the video version, amazing. But that is why, if you're watching the video version, I'm currently in a hotel room, because that is where I currently am. I'm in a hotel room teaching our geriatric course to a bunch of wonderful clinicians in Virginia.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Olympic weightlifting First of all. The sport of Olympic weightlifting is the snatch and the clean and jerk, just like powerlifting we talked about last week. You get three attempts to do the most weight that you can in the snatch and then in the clean and jerk. It works a little bit differently in the competition of weightlifting than it does in powerlifting. So when you're competing in powerlifting, everybody is in what's called a flight. So, based on how much you are going to lift, what you declare as your first lift, you get put in an order and then, even if you make really big jumps, you kind of stay in that order. First, powerlifting In Olympic weightlifting it goes up by weight. So if you declare at 70, you're going to go in at 70. And then anybody that declared at 70 is going to go after you, and then next person who's 71 is going to go next, and then you're not going to go again until if you declare 74, everybody who's declared 70, 71, 72, 73 have gone by. That means that there are some times where you're going to have less than two minutes between attempts and there's going to be other times where you may have seven or eight minutes in between attempts, which is interesting. And if you're in the sport of weightlifting, you also know that during competitions, people will game it where they will declare at 70 and then last second they'll move up to 72 and push the person forward, trying to throw them off.
Speaker 1:There's kind of a lot of head games that go into Olympic weightlifting that a lot of people don't realize unless they've competed in the sport of it. I competed in weightlifting for several years and got the chance to compete at nationals in 2018 in Canada, just before I got pregnant with my daughter, so it was a really incredibly fun experience, incredibly stressful, probably one of the coolest things I've done, but, um, by no means was I winning. Maude Chiron was in my category and she won the Olympic gold medal in the last summer Olympics, so there was no way that I was even remotely touching her caliber, but it was cool to be in the same flight as her nonetheless. When we look at Olympic weightlifting, it is also a weight class sport, meaning that, similar to powerlifting, we have groups of individuals based on weight. There is always a two-hour weigh-in for Olympic weightlifting and you can use a weightlifting belt and weightlifting shoes in competition or when you're training.
Speaker 1:When you get pregnant, there is a lot more conversation I think that has happened in the last five years about the safety of Olympic weightlifting during pregnancy and returning to weightlifting postpartum. That, I think, is super important, and we're going to talk about some of those considerations. Before we do that, the first thing that I want to tell you all is that it is absolutely safe to continue Olympic weightlifting during your pregnancy. Number two that I'm also going to say is that every person's comfort level of when they continue doing weightlifting during their pregnancy is also going to be different. The decisions that you make about if you continue weightlifting or not are also dependent on what your goals in the sport are, and that is extremely relevant. If you are an Olympic weightlifter versus you are a CrossFitter, your goal with Olympic weightlifting is going to be different. When you're an Olympic weightlifter, your sole focus are these two movements and the way that you perform and execute these two movements under pressure. In CrossFit they are extremely important movements but they are two movements in a very big pot of movements that you're trying to have relative proficiency in, kind of different goals. And then if you're a recreational lifter versus a competitive lifter, again it's going to change some of your decision-making. So know that while I'm talking about constructs in general, everybody's timelines and things that they are going to be okay with, not okay with during pregnancy is going to be different.
Speaker 1:In today's episode I'm kind of going to pull them together because the clean and jerk and the snatch are both exercises done from standing where we pull a weight over our head quickly. With the snatch you pull the weight from the floor to overhead in one movement. The clean and jerk it's in two movements. So you go ground to shoulder, shoulder to overhead in the clean and jerk. Versus the snatch, you go ground to overhead in one movement, but the movement patterns, while different, have similar situations or similar considerations.
Speaker 1:When we are pregnant, the first thing that makes a decision or is a consideration for our people who are pregnant, who are thinking about Olympic weightlifting, is contact point. In the snatch the barbell makes contact with the pelvis just underneath the hip bones, above the pubic bone. And while we say contact, we are not talking like you are punching the barbell into your hip. We are talking that you are making contact by kind of brushing the barbell up your body. I used to have a coach that said like the worst cue is like pretend like you're having a baby with that barbell, but that is way too aggressive and it will pull the weight out in front of you. Like it is really supposed to be like a brushing contact that when you do it right, like you can hear it. But that contact point is pretty high and baby bump obviously starts to grow and can affect some things. For the clean and jerk, that contact point is lower, so it tends to be mid thigh ish. It's going to be a bit different based on what the thigh length is of the person and the arm diameter or span of the person. However, it is something that we're going to consider when we for the snatch, in particular as baby bump gets bigger, that contact point is safe.
Speaker 1:If your body is used to snatching, you have created the abdominal strength around your hip pelvis that is not considered like a contact sport and contact sports are contraindications to exercise during pregnancy. This is not that. But when we hit that contact point on the snatch, the idea is that our hit, our barbell, needs to come up very close to the body. In Olympic weightlifting really in kind of strength training in general, space is weakness but any forward movement of the barbell is going to make it less likely that you are going to successfully make that lift. When we are further along in our pregnancy, that baby bump is going to force you to have to bring that weight out in front of you or else you're just going to hit baby. So many women think that they may hit baby bump but that is so rare to happen. I'm not going to say it never has happened before, but most of the time our body is very instinctual to protect that, that part of our abdomen, like we are just evolutionarily hardwired to avoid that bump. But what happens is our bar path starts to come out really far in front. So from a performance perspective, we want to take that into consideration.
Speaker 1:A lot of weightlifters and a lot of CrossFitters put in a ton of technical work. In the Olympic lifts we work really hard to become good at the snatch and the clean and jerk, and the snatch in particular is an unbelievably technical movement. It takes a lot of time to become good at it and the question of if you are going to continue weightlifting or when you're going to start to move away from these movements is more around not wanting to get into bad habits from a performance perspective versus it being something bad for baby. So for me, for example, as soon as I hit 18, 19 weeks in both my pregnancies I started to notice that I was bringing the bar out in front of me because I was bigger, I was getting into, you know, midway point of my pregnancy and I have worked so hard on my snatch technique that I did not want to mess it up and so I could do other options in the snatch, and so I did not continue doing the snatch and, like, the snatch is my love language. It is my favorite movement of all of them because it looks so pretty when you hit love language. It is my favorite movement of all of them because it looks so pretty when you hit it right. It just looks so effortless. It is just a beautiful movement and I just didn't want to get into bad habits that were going to take me a long time to break. So that was my first consideration for For the clean and jerk.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes you can kind of hold on to that because of the contact point being a little bit lower, the way that the bar moves up, because you're kind of in this extension position, you can not have the same performance change until a little bit later and so some people will be really comfortable keeping the clean in right until you know some people will write until delivery and other people will wait a little bit longer, get rid of the snatch first and then move away from the clean and jerk a bit later, kind of in third trimester kind going towards towards delivery. That being said, other people I know have been totally fine with continuing to snatch lighter and clean and jerk lighter all the way up to delivery and just know that they're going to be working on getting that bar path back when they're in that postpartum period and there isn't a baby bump that they are navigating around. That being said, I did the CrossFit Open. I waspartum period and there isn't a baby bump that they are navigating around. That being said, I did the CrossFit open. I was 36 weeks pregnant and there was a ground overhead at 55 pounds, hit a bit lower, kind of did this hybrid clean and jerk snatch movement. I did it the entire time. It was nothing bad and I didn't, you know, one time I did a workout didn't create all these bad habits, but it was just something that, from a load perspective, I wasn't heavily relying on towards the end of my pregnancy so that I could get back to that technique. So that's kind of one thing to consider.
Speaker 1:The other thing for pregnancy is how you feel going into the bottom of the squat with speed. Again, this is not a. This is how everybody is going to feel. It's this is how some people feel and this is how other people feel, and you need to figure out what works for you. The Olympic lifting movements are speed strength movements, which means that we hit that contact point at the hip or at the thigh, go into that full extension and then, when the bar has this moment of weightlessness at the top of the pole. Then there's this aggressive pull under the bar and it is a pull it should be an active position into the bottom of the snatch and the clean and jerk. You go quickly into the bottom of the squat.
Speaker 1:During pregnancy we tend to have a bit of a change in our squat range of motion, our squat technique and how our body feels in the very rock bottom of a squat. Some people are going to feel completely fine with that increased range of motion and can full clean and full snatch all the way up until they start removing these movements or until they deliver. And other people that crash into the bottom and I shouldn't say crash because it should be an act of control, but that that quick drop down into the squat can make them feel vulnerable or it doesn't feel good on their body, especially as we get towards the end of second trimester and into the third trimester typically. And if that is the case, then we'll be modifying our exercises instead of going into that full squat which is kind of the standard when we are thinking in Olympic weightlifting. If you say snatch or clean and jerk, the assumption is that you are going to go into a full squat.
Speaker 1:In CrossFit we make the delineation of squat snatch or full snatch and power snatch, and if they say snatch, it could mean either or you could choose which option you use. When we have that happen during pregnancy, what we would do is that we would have individuals power clean or power snatch or modify their range appropriately. So some people that might be that they're going to catch the clean really high and then slowly go down into a squat because they want to continue with that front squat pattern. For other people it's going to be that they're just going to power clean and not go into the bottom of the squat when they're performing these movements during their pregnancy. And again, everybody is different and know that if you felt really vulnerable in those positions, that's not bad, or if you felt totally fine doing them, that's also not bad. Everyone's going to have their own kind of thoughts.
Speaker 1:The third and final consideration for the pregnant, the person who is pregnant actually we have two more, so three and four, so three is going to be the bottom position. In the snatch, hands are out wider, hips are lower. You're kind of in a low crouch squat position. Our chest is really high and in the clean we are in a modified deadlift. So while our hips are, our position is kind of similar to the way that a deadlift was set up our hips are lower, so our knees are slightly in front of the bar. So our knees are slightly in front of the bar Towards the end of pregnancy. For some that feels really uncomfortable or it's very hard because of size of baby and being so locked in that they have a hard time keeping their spine straight when they're in that bottom position. So if that is you, then we modify by either getting you up on risers or plates, making sure that we give you a little bit of room for baby bump. You can bring your feet out a little bit wider and do no feet variations or just kind of do a variation with your feet out a little bit more than you are accustomed to, so that you're able to give baby bumps some room. And the third option is to do a modified range of motion, so going from the hang position instead of going from the floor, if that feels better for you. So that's number three. Number four is our breath and our breathing. I talked about in last week's episode how I've changed my tune on Belselva and how before I would be adamantly against continuing it in pregnancy. And now I've kind of said these are these options that I will present to you for ways to breathe during pregnancy and you can choose whichever one works for you. I'm going to have a similar strategy for Olympic weightlifting.
Speaker 1:People talk about inhaling and exhaling at the concentric and eccentric portion of the lift. That is very easy for us to conceptualize in the powerlifting movements. It is a lot harder to do in a speed strength movement, like if you are exhaling off the floor and then inhaling on the pole at the top, and then you're exhaling or inhaling as you go down into the squat and then exhaling as you stand up, like I've seen people try and really break it down. That's too hard. It's so fast that if you were thinking about all that inhale, exhale during those lifts, you would not be focusing on your performance, unless you were really, really good at these movements and they were so second nature to you which for some they are. But even then it's not necessary.
Speaker 1:When I'm cueing, if a person is trying to move away from holding their breath while they brace to a different type of strategy, I am going to cue them to breathe out the entirety of the lift. So being inhale and then, as they pull off the floor, whether it's the snatch or the clean, it's a steady exhale the entire time. If you're doing a clean and jerk, that may be two breaths, so it may be a breath exhale on the clean and inhale with the barbell on your shoulder and then another steady exhale as the weight comes over your head for the jerk, and that tends to work really well for a lot of people and for our CrossFitters. That's a wonderful way to learn how to breathe while barbell cycling, because there's a lot of kind of repetitive cycling of moderate to pretty heavy clean and jerks and snatches in CrossFit and so if you can learn how to not have to hold your breath and exhale during the clean so that it keeps your heart rate under control, that's money from a performance perspective and pregnancy is a wonderful way to be able to practice those types of movements. So those are the four considerations that we are going to think about or talk about with respect to Olympic lifting during pregnancy. So we have, you know, the performance piece of it the feelings in the bottom of a squat with an increase in range of motion, the feeling at the bottom of this setup with respect to baby bump, hitting the thighs and then breathing, considerations for the setup or throughout the lifts. Rather, switching over to the postpartum period.
Speaker 1:A lot of the steps that we take to get back to these Olympic movements are starting at where we scale to the most at the end of our pregnancy and gradually adding weight. So once you are cleared for exercise, once you feel comfortable exercising, I really encourage people to take a workout or two and don't go above a PVC pipe or an empty barbell. There is a lot of fitness to be gained with reinforcing technique with an empty bar. I had a coach once who did not let me touch a single weight outside of a barbell and we spent an entire session drilling technique and positions and rep after rep and honestly I was sweating. I never been so tired, I was so sore the next day and so drilling in that technique and just moving the barbell around in the first, you know, even if you want to do it for several weeks first, you know, even if you want to do it for several weeks, coming back postpartum can do wonders for trying to reinforce that close bar path in that postpartum period. We're going to be doing very similar kind of progressions when it comes to the snatch and the clean and jerk In these considerations, there's a variety of ways for us to be able to modify these movements depending on if a person is leaking or what way they are leaking.
Speaker 1:We've done a lot of YouTube videos on different modifications if a person is leaking at different parts of the movement and where that can happen. We'll kind of leave that for another episode. But for us for today, the postpartum considerations I want to do are around considerations for a vaginal birth versus considerations for a cesarean delivery. When it comes to a vaginal delivery, it's going to be how comfortable you feel and what was like the amount of tearing that you had. How about, what was the consideration for, um, how many deliveries you had, what your fitness was during your pregnancy, about how confident you're going to feel.
Speaker 1:Going back into these full clean, full snatch movements during pregnancy, we have a big shift to the way that our body is, is moving around the world right. We have a bigger arch of our low back, we have a um, beautiful stretching that happens of our abdominals and then, after a vaginal birth, we have a pelvic floor injury. In a cesarean birth, we have a surgical scar, a surgery that we have gone through. If you had an unplanned or emergent cesarean, you may have some of the healing of a vaginal birth as well as a cesarean delivery and when you go into a movement like the snatch after that delivery you're going to feel a little bit like a deer, a baby deer, right Kind of feeling like Bambi, where you're trying to hit that contact point and you kind of don't know where your body is in space and your center of mass or where your body is is foreign to you, and so recognize that it will feel very challenging to be able to know where your body is in space because you've had a very quick and sudden shift to where you are and what your body is moving like.
Speaker 1:Pregnancy happens relatively slowly. Postpartum happens really fast Again, relatively. It doesn't feel very fast in the moment, but 10 months versus two days is a very quick timeline to have your body, the way that your body moves and going from pregnant to being a postpartum individual or mama is definitely different. It's going to take time to reinforce those positions. When it comes to coming back to the snatch and the clean and jerk, it's not going to be the same because usually we are not snatching at our top end strength. We're snatching at our top end technique right. So you are going to be able to overhead squat or front squat, usually more than you can snatch or clean and jerk. You're going to have some people me being one of them where my clean is very close to my front squat, but you're going to have some people who there's a big difference.
Speaker 1:But in the postpartum period our limiting factor is almost always our technique and knowing where our body is in space, rather than a strength deficit that we are seeing, and it's the technique stuff that we need to work on. So taking time with that empty bar and then gradually adding load to both the snatch and the clean and piece can be important. So one of the exercises I love, and it's in our postpartum Olympic weightlifting program. A ton is a pale off press in your split jerk position, because you need to be able to keep that rib cage stacked over your pelvis and arms locked out overhead, which requires a ton of core, and so reinforcing and having some of that strength of those rotation muscles, those obliques, can be really helpful for reestablishing your strength overhead with some of the movements like the snatch and the jerk.
Speaker 1:If you have had a cesarean delivery. One of the important things is coming back to the snatch and your scar sensitivity. When you are making contact at the hip, that is essentially right on that surgical scar, we can start going back. If your body is not ready yet to make contact because of point sensitivity, we can start working on the snatch by doing different accessory modifications to it, like a no contact snatch. So what that means is that you are keeping the bar super close but you are avoiding that contact point. It's a drill that we use in Olympic weightlifting to help athletes who tend to kind of throw the bar out in front with that contact to try and keep the barbell close to your body. That is something that's going to reinforce that, away from that swooping around a baby bump. But it's also going to respect the healing process of working through some of that scar mobilization and that scar sensitivity that can occur when trying to return to the snatch Doesn't happen as often with the clean and jerk and then also kind of specific to cesarean delivery.
Speaker 1:In the snatch the extension and the range of motion requirements can cause some tightness at the top of the pole. It is important to work through that range so that you can extend back and not feel some of that tightness From a performance perspective. Why that is important is because if you are worried at the top of your pole when you have to extend as much as possible to not feel that pulling, what you're going to do is you're going to cut your pull short and when you cut that pull short you don't get the same height on the bar and you either will fail the lift forward because you won't have that close bar path that we need because it'll start to come in front, or else you will have to try and sneak underneath it, and that is a bad habit to get into when you're trying to return postpartum. So taking the time so that you feel comfortable in those positions can be unbelievably helpful. Ways to try and see if your body is going to feel good in those positions is to start with a PVC pipe and then with an empty bar to start with a limited range of motion. So starting with something like a hip snatch where you're kind of just putting the barbell into the pocket of your hip and then going from the pocket of your hip to extending into either a power snatch, where you're catching above parallel, or down into the bottom of the snatch can give you just an idea of. Is there going to be any tightness that I still need to work through? And then some of that early rehab can be okay. Let's do some c-section scar massage in between sets and see if, as my heart rate gets up, as I start to warm up, as I start to do some of that massage, does that bring that sensitivity down and enable me to continue working through some of those movement patterns? And when it comes to our C-section recovery, making sure that we lengthen our scar and then strengthen it isometrically so like planks and paleo press variations and then strengthen it with loading, are going to be kind of the three main pillars of that recovery. And for my athletes who are barbell athletes, I want that to look like the sport that you are trying to get your body back to. So those are things to consider from the postpartum point of view when we are thinking about getting back to load.
Speaker 1:The timelines for things like balsalva and weightlifting belts are going to be similar between the Olympic weightlifting movements and the powerlifting movements. So in general, we didn't differentiate in our research study about did you get back to holding your breath for powerlifting movements versus weightlifting movements. We just kind of said in general, when did you start returning to that breath hold brace versus where are, as well as rather where, when did you return to using a weightlifting belt? So that timeline of you know, four and a half to five months and five and a half to six months on average, with some people above and below, is going to definitely be the about the same for Olympic weightlifting. What I have noticed too you know I kind of mentioned this in the power lifting lecture, but our lecture gosh, I'm in course mode power lifting podcast was that I have seen people use weightlifting belts, particularly on the snatch in that postpartum period, probably a lot more than they did pre-pregnancy.
Speaker 1:In general, we see that people don't use the Olympic weightlifting belt as often during the snatch in general because the weight is less and so it's again not a load consideration that they can't deadlift the weight or they can't squat the weight is less and so it's again not a load consideration that they can't deadlift the weight or they can't squat the weight. It's that it's a technical issue where they're hitting the cap of their technical skill. But postpartum, when you don't feel very strong and you don't have a very coordinated brace. Yet it can feel better to have a weightlifting belt. And again, I do not recommend not doing the fundamentals and using a weightlifting belt because it gives you that external support If you're going for a max snatch or you're in those really high percentages and it feels better for you. Absolutely it's a performance aid. Just make sure that you are doing kind of your due diligence when it comes to your rehab and, trust me, it'll be so worth it.
Speaker 1:Because using a weightlifting belt early to give you some external support instead of working on your internal core control in the end will oftentimes just lead to compensations or issues with technique that down the road you're going to be trying to fix anyway.
Speaker 1:And so you know, I always try and get my athletes to hold the line on using a weight lifting belt or trying to avoid it with the snatch, especially if they didn't use it before their pregnancy, to try and make sure that technically they're feeling you know really good and that they're feeling strong in their brace, because it is something that takes time to reestablish and kind of figure out where you are in space, especially with some of the these technical movements like the snatch and the clean and jerk. All right, I kind of talked very broadly about the postpartum period. I hope you found that helpful. Again, if you have any other questions, thoughts, please let us know. If you're interested, we have a pregnant Olympic lifting program as well as a postpartum Olympic lifting program within our Barbell Mamas offerings so you can try out a free seven-day trial to either of those programs, should you be interested, over on thebarbamamascom. All right, have a wonderful week everyone and we will see you all next week.
