The Barbell Mamas Podcast | Pregnancy, Postpartum, Pelvic Health

Behind the Highlight Reel: The Truth About Pregnancy and Postpartum Journeys

• Christina Prevett

Share episode

The comparison trap is real, and it's especially potent in the pregnancy and postpartum space. As someone who's been both celebrated and criticized for weightlifting through pregnancy and competing just months after giving birth, I've witnessed firsthand how social media creates unrealistic expectations.

When that ultramarathon runner went viral for nursing her baby throughout a 100-mile race, I saw the same pattern unfold again: celebration quickly followed by a wave of women feeling inadequate about their different journeys. While I'll always celebrate these extraordinary athletic feats, there's something critical we're missing in these conversations.

Nobody's sharing the full picture online. That runner who makes postpartum recovery look effortless? She might be managing prolapse symptoms. The CrossFit athlete back at the gym three weeks after birth? She might be there because exercise is keeping severe postpartum depression at bay. I know because that was my story – competing while managing hypertension, incontinence, and painful intercourse. The highlight reel never shows these struggles.

The beautiful paradox is that these extreme cases have actually expanded possibilities for all mothers. Five years ago, I was told lifting weights would harm my baby. Today, because boundary-pushers documented their journeys, medical professionals can offer personalized approaches rather than one-size-fits-all restrictions. When we normalize various exercise intensities during pregnancy and postpartum, everyone benefits – from the yoga enthusiast to the competitive weightlifter.

What looks like symptom-free recovery is often strategic movement as rehabilitation. Current research increasingly supports earlier return to activity for both physical healing and mental health benefits, particularly in preventing postpartum depression and anxiety. Instead of assuming exercise indicates a "perfect" recovery, consider that it might be someone's medicine.

If you've felt the sting of comparison when your journey hasn't matched those perfect Instagram posts, you're not alone. Your timeline is valid whether it's three weeks or three years. Mute accounts that trigger you, find guidance that meets you where you are, and remember – behind every social media success story is a complex reality we're never fully seeing.

___________________________________________________________________________
Don't miss out on any of the TEA coming out of the Barbell Mamas by subscribing to our newsletter

You can also follow us on Instagram and YouTube for all the up-to-date information you need about pelvic health and female athletes.

Interested in our programs? Check us out here!

Speaker 1:

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 to the Barbell Mamas podcast, christina Previtt.

Speaker 1:

Here and today, I'm going to be talking about the comparison game. Right, the comparison game in pregnancy and postpartum is super real. I have the biggest love-hate relationship with social media. I love it in that it has allowed us to be more connected. It has been a vehicle for me to talk about our research, for us to see changes in practice. But it's got a nasty side. It's got a misinformation highway that is rampant, especially in the pregnancy and postpartum space, and it also is this breeding ground for comparison. Over the last couple of months I've had a couple of really great conversations that have been talking about my content online with the Barbell Mamas podcast, where I get to get a little bit more into the nuance, but also on my personal social media account of people saying Christina, you're always talking about these people who are able to continue lifting in pregnancy and come back to sport postpartum, and I feel like you're not acknowledging those people or me that did not have that story, that did have complications, that did have timelines that were not what they were hoping for going into pregnancy and postpartum. And what brought this up for me for today's podcast episode was over the weekend there was a mom who was an ultramarathon runner and she ran an ultramarathon pretty early postpartum and was nursing along her hundred mile race, which is a crazy long distance, but every stop she was kind of nursing along the way and the story broke online. There was a lot of people who were saying you know how incredible moms are to be able to nurse and inevitably there was also a side conversation of how there are a lot of people who that is not their story.

Speaker 1:

And I feel like you know, there's a lot of situations and circumstances where some of these mom success stories there's a feeling like there always has to be an asterisk sign. We've seen this with a lot of athletes, right Paige Powers, andrea Nessler, tia Claire Toomey, amy Thoris' daughter those are all kind of in the CrossFit space, but there's always this conversation and this comparison that when we are celebrating a mom and her accomplishments, there's a underlying conversation of people that are feeling shame, blame or discomfort that their story was not the same. And I guess the first thing that I want to say and this might be a hot take is that I don't think it's very fair to these athletes for us to always have to put a asterisk sign on their success story, right? We don't see that in a lot of other areas. Like if you hurt your knee and you had an ACL and you came back six months and you did really well in that season of your athleticism, nobody would say well if your ACL reconstruction wasn't that successful. You know, like having to dim the light of the person that we are trying to celebrate the light of the person that we are trying to celebrate, and I can also acknowledge how motherhood is such a visceral feeling that just takes over so much of your life that it's hard not to make those comparisons when you are intaking these stories online. When I see these stories, I just root for them. Right, I think that it's so great. I am going to keep highlighting these stories and acknowledging that social media is a highlight reel. Right, a person being able to compete in sport, and even compete in sport at a high level, does not mean that they had a super smooth pregnancy or super smooth postpartum recovery or that they're even competing symptom free. Right, social media is a highlight reel.

Speaker 1:

Nobody understands the sweat, like, all of the things that happen behind the scenes. Even when people are saying that they're being authentic and taking people along the journey, they're not really right. It's all angles and all of the celebrating, all of the wins, and even when we're acknowledging the losses, we're doing it in a way that still kind of makes us look good. Right, like nobody wants to say I didn't shower for five days and I yelled at my kids because I'm overstimulated and I looked like a dragon lady. Like, nobody wants to say those types of things and nobody wants to put that online where it can get traced back to them and all these types of things. So there's always some sort of posturing. That happens, right. That happens right. And when I think about these success stories and acknowledge that you know there is. These are the 1%. Where I always come back to is the fact that when I look at our medical space and I look at the obstetrical space as a whole, celebrating those people who are able to have, you know, pregnancies where they're competing in the Olympics and getting back to ultra marathon runners, when we have those stories at the extreme it normalizes a lot of different exercise or it allows our obstetrical team to feel very good coming alongside people who have different preferences for exercise.

Speaker 1:

Let me explain. Five years ago, when I started talking about lifting in pregnancy and I started talking about my journey right, I was a national level weightlifter before I got pregnant with my daughter. I kept weightlifting through all my pregnancy. I returned and competed in a powerlifting meet three months postpartum and then a weightlifting meet at five months postpartum. I had people tell me that my baby was going to die, and don't come crying to the internet. I had very well-meaning pelvic floor physiotherapists tell me that my organs were going to fall out and that I was going to prolapse because I was doing exercise early postpartum. And they didn't know that the reason why I was exercising at three to four weeks postpartum had nothing to do with me trying to get back to powerlifting. It had everything to do with the fact that my mom had really significant mental health issues postpartum and almost the severity of them impacted my childhood and was almost a reason why I was not going to have children at all. Right, and so for me, the thought of potentially having a pelvic injury versus having the severity of mental health issues postpartum, I knew that exercise was a positive coping strategy for me from a mental health perspective. I was going to be exercising regardless.

Speaker 1:

And again the highlight reel people see me lifting online. They don't know me, right. You don't know me Like, really like. You see me online but we don't have that type of intimacy. They wouldn't know that. But to make me be afraid of my own body in that postpartum period, frankly, it's mean right, because you don't understand people's, their reason for things and those types of things.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, when we have those types of stories right now. Fast forward five or six years because we've had the Tia Claire Toomeys, because we've had the ultra marathon runner that allowed us to do a case report for her, so that we have published data on people who are still doing very high mileages during their pregnancy and return to them postpartum. What that has done from a medical space is that we have allowed, or we are starting to be able to allow, our obstetrical team to take a very personalized and individualized approach to exercise prescription in the pregnant postpartum period. By highlighting those success stories, we take the breaker off of our recommendations and we allow the person who loves doing yoga and swimming to keep doing yoga and swimming and allow the person who wants to compete in nationals for powerlifting three months postpartum the capacity to continue lifting heavy during her pregnancy, giving her the navigational buoys, creating individualized approaches to her exercise. And so because of that, I do tend to highlight these really positive stories and the intention isn't to make other people feel bad, but it's to open up the doors for everybody to have an individualized and personalized approach to their exercise.

Speaker 1:

But I can also acknowledge that there are a lot of people who go into their pregnancies with a high amount of fitness. They want to have a very fit pregnancy, and then there are situations and circumstances that make it that they do not have the story that they want and that can be mirrored in postpartum right. We can have individuals who are thinking that they're going to start moving again at two weeks postpartum and they have a bigger perennial tear or they have you know something that happens or a complication postpartum preeclampsia. They end up with an emergency cesarean section. That did not go as well postpartum whatever, whatever complication, family stress comes up early postpartum, their partner has to go back to work earlier than expected. So many different things come in that can allow individuals to have a different postpartum experience than they wanted or their mood, their mental health.

Speaker 1:

There are so many reasons why a person may delay their return to exercise postpartum and that is totally fine, right? Just like I'm going to come alongside for you if you're coming back at 12 weeks or 12 months postpartum, I'm going to come alongside somebody who is like me, who the mental health part of their postpartum recovery means that they're in the gym at five days postpartum and they're doing light, low intensity exercise. All of those things are going to be okay. Exercise. All of those things are going to be okay when you see people's success stories. The other thing that I really want to talk about is that you see the end product, but that doesn't mean that things are symptom free or that people are having a smooth recovery and have never had any hiccups.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that somebody said to me, right, like they were coming at me pretty strongly about the fact that I only published that they thought that I wasn't acknowledging enough, like the buoys or the asterisk signs of people who have shorter or have longer recoveries. Right, they can't get back early, was they said to me. Well, you didn't have any of these problems. It's nice that you didn't have any of these pregnancy or postpartum complications, right, and that, I thought, was also interesting because I have been open about my own journey. But you know it gets lost in the shuffle and I don't know when people were following me, right, I'm a little bit further postpartum now.

Speaker 1:

But so, first of all one I had postpartum gestational hypertension. They were monitoring me super closely. It was really stressful. They were always worried I was going to have preeclampsia, right, and I'm going to come back. They thought so I had to get induced atampsia, right, and I true I'm going to come back. They thought so. I had to get induced at 38 weeks, right? I had symptoms of prolapse early postpartum with my second, probably because I got sensitized online let's not talk about it Right Of prolapse postpartum.

Speaker 1:

I have struggled with stress, urinary incontinence on and off, with different levels of conditioning. With my son, I did not have gestational hypertension, thankfully, but I was having a baby during the pandemic. I had dyspareunia and I had pain with sexual activity for six months postpartum with my son, and so I have had postpartum and pregnancy related complications, issues and things that I was managing. And, in light of that, the other thing is a lot of times my exercise, I feel like, contributed to my recovery, right? I truly believe that my level of activity allowed me to stay pregnant for longer and not flip to preeclampsia, because I had a lot of stuff going on when I had my first pregnancy. From a life perspective, I was a business owner from a stress perspective, so the things that I'm talking about in terms of enabling physical activity was true for me in light of potential complications of pregnancy right, which is another area, in light of potential complications of pregnancy right, which is another area and my strength and my reconditioning in the postpartum period helped me minimize and desensitize my symptoms of prolapse, helped me with my pressure, core management for stress, urinary incontinence and helped me with my dyspareunia.

Speaker 1:

And so when you're seeing individuals exercising postpartum, they may be exercising, pushing or edging into their symptoms as a form of rehab right. So people are thinking that they're seeing these people who are returning to running and returning to lifting and there's this assumption that people are doing it symptom-free or that they don't have to worry about these buoys. But where my area now wants to go, especially as we start to remove some of these barriers for returning to exercise, is to leverage these exercise as things to prioritize, to recondition our body and desensitize and help with the healing of our pelvic floor postpartum right. Our new guidelines say you know you can start exercising before six weeks. Our new systematic reviews say that those who get back to exercise early postpartum it's a very potent antidepressant, anxiolytic anti-anxiolytic or anxiolytic where it can help reduce the incidence of postpartum depression and anxiety.

Speaker 1:

And so not only is that social media comparison game sometimes hard to struggle with, but I think the other layer of this that sometimes we need to acknowledge is that seeing a person exercise online does not mean that they are not kind of struggling with or trying to edge into intensities and exercise thresholds of some of their pelvic floor symptoms, postpartum. And the third thing and I don't know if I'm going to be able to say this correctly, so I am meaning this, I'm trying to frame this up very positively is that sometimes there is such a hyper-awareness of the pelvis that some of those early experiences can be very sensitizing for people online and or people in their postpartum recovery. Okay, I do not expect any person that comes to see me, pregnant or postpartum, to go through that period of life and not experience a single pelvic symptom right, and I don't mean that as a, we're just going to ignore pelvic symptoms. But I think we need to move away from this idea, especially postpartum, that experiencing any pelvic symptoms is bad. Right, I do a two-week postpartum check, right, and I take a look at how the external genitalia is doing and we oftentimes, if we can do it, we can start working on some early recovery. And in that right, I am going to see swollen tissue around the inside of the vagina and tissue that is resting lower than where it was before your vaginal delivery right. That is a normal consequence of pushing a baby out, right? We know in our normal physiology research in vaginal deliveries that there is going to be a lowering of the cervix and some of the vaginal change in the vaginal walls early postpartum. That is going to recover not to 100%, right, we know there's an increase in range of motion of the vaginal walls after a vaginal delivery, right, and that is a consequence of the physiology of giving birth.

Speaker 1:

And having those conversations, hey, like you're looking exactly the way that I should, knowing that there's obviously going to be a subset of individuals who have a bigger injury that is going to take longer, that is going to be more cumbersome to rehab. But I think having those conversations of utilizing exercise, right not just I'm not just talking about therapeutic exercise, I'm not just talking about TA activations and Kegels but like talking about squats and lunges and bringing the strength of the pelvis, even for our more intense injuries in the postpartum space I think has a very positive, could be something that's very, very positive for postpartum recovery, right? This is where I want to see postpartum research go. How do we move outside the pelvis and think about postpartum recovery as reconditioning, right, and with our higher grades of perennial tearing right, the rate of that is going to be smaller or slower, rather, and those who don't have as much perennial trauma will be able to come back a little bit faster. But it's similar to what we're thinking about with any other injury right, like if you have a tendinopathy, like you have a swollen tendon versus a torn tendon. I'm going to still work on your recovery by trying to strengthen the muscles around your shoulder and get you back to pressing and pulling. The same is true postpartum right. And so you may see my clients who you wouldn't think that they had grade three or grade four tears, who are doing squats and lunges in the gym because I'm trying to strengthen up their hips to help support that recovery system or that perennial tear from recovering.

Speaker 1:

And so you know, sometimes too, when we look at individuals doing things, we can make that assumption that they are symptom free or complication free, and that's not true. But they're leveraging their exercise as part of their rehabilitation plan. And sometimes it's hard, because if I was going to give an asterisk sign for every nuanced detail that could affect the trajectory of recovery, people would swipe past my stuff online, right? Because of course, everything is nuanced and of course, everything is. It depends but where I am hoping that we go in a couple of years and what I'm always going to be framing up when I'm posting about things online is that we want to leverage exercise and movement and allow for exercise within our clinical buoys as a way to help with mental health and help with postpartum recovery help with postpartum recovery and know that the celebration of success stories is in no way trying to make individuals whose recovery was not the same, even if they had the same level of fitness as these individuals, but rather to open up a door to allow individuals a personalized individuals, a personalized, individualized approach to pregnancy and postpartum.

Speaker 1:

If you are a person that has had a pregnancy or postpartum journey that did not go the way you wanted, right that it was harder to get back, you were symptomatic for longer. You had life stuff happen where you thought you were going to be able to get back into the gym and you couldn't. Financially, you weren't able to keep up your membership where you were, how you were before, because of medical bills or, you know, being off work or whatever. Whatever it may be, know that I see you and I truly it is not my intention with sharing success stories to make other people feel bad, like that's not, that's not my goal at all and I'm sorry that if those, those stories are very triggering, like I've had people who have said to me, you know, sometimes I can't watch your stuff on social media or I've had to mute you on social media for a little while because it just it doesn't sit with me in that moment and that's okay, right.

Speaker 1:

You have to show up for yourself and surround yourself with what you need in that moment, and if that is you, then I hope that you also have somebody who is in your corner, who's going to be able to help guide you and allow you to take that personalized approach and be the voice that you need to help you get to the goal that you want, or as close to it as as we can get in the season of life that we are. So I thought I would just go into a little bit more of that nuanced approach, talk about that comparison game and then also, you know, acknowledge that everybody's journey, their own, and what we're seeing on the highlight reel is maybe 0.01% of a person's reality, and that's okay, that's all right. Social media we got to love to hate it, right, or hate to love it, whatever. Whichever one, it is All right. I hope you all have a wonderful week. Let me know what your thoughts are when we're talking about that comparison game and, yeah, I'll talk to you all next week.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Christina Prevett

Host