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
When Experience Replaces Expertise: The Influencer Problem in Pregnancy & Fitness
Have you ever wondered why certain pregnancy myths refuse to die despite lacking scientific evidence? The answer lies in how our digital ecosystem perpetuates misinformation through well-meaning but often unqualified influencers.
The motherhood space on platforms like TikTok has become a breeding ground for myths around labor induction and postpartum recovery. When desperate moms-to-be try curb walking or special teas before spontaneously going into labor, they create powerful mental associations between these activities and their outcomes. This saliency effect—attributing results to the most recent notable action—creates the illusion that these methods work, when in reality, baby was simply ready to arrive.
Even more concerning is the postpartum recovery space, where influencers showcase remarkable physical transformations while marketing simple programs as the secret to their success. What's conveniently omitted is the foundation that made their recovery possible: years of prior training, home gyms, supportive partners who prioritize fitness, favorable genetics, and fewer responsibilities (particularly with first babies). These privileged circumstances create the perfect environment for rapid recovery that most women simply don't have access to.
The fundamental problem is the conflation of personal experience with expertise. As fitness professional Claire from Barbell Medicine perfectly states, "Your experience does not equal your expertise." Without proper education and diverse client experience, these influencers create underdosed, one-size-fits-all programs that fail to deliver promised results for most followers. The consequence? Women blame themselves when they can't achieve influencer-like outcomes, despite diligently following recommendations.
This isn't about vilifying well-intentioned creators but encouraging transparency about scope of practice, program limitations, and the many factors beyond exercise that contribute to outcomes. We deserve nuanced conversations about pregnancy and postpartum fitness that acknowledge the complex interplay of genetics, training history, and life circumstances—something impossible to deliver in 15-second sound bites designed to sell programs.
Have you encountered fitness myths that seemed too good to be true in your motherhood journey? Share your experience or join us on TikTok @thebarbellmama for evidence-based information that respects the uniqueness of your path.
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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 to the Barbell Mamas podcast. Today we are going to talk about how myths in motherhood get started.
Speaker 1:I have been kind of in this TikTok exploration phase for my professional life. I am a massive book talk person. I love getting book recommendations on TikTok and I've kind of just put TikTok in that bucket. But lately I've been kind of thinking about exploring TikTok because I kind of like that. It's pretty off the cuff sometimes and while, yes, there's people that are very curated and very, you know, it's very scripted and structured and high video quality and all that kind of stuff, there's also this side of TikTok that's very off the cuff and I really love that. But as I've been exploring TikTok, I have realized that I don't know if I can say for sure maybe it's just the way that my algorithm is is that it feels like it's even worse in terms of the pregnant and postpartum influencer and them having this huge page and perpetuating a lot of really negative beliefs or a lot of just false information. And there's a couple of instances that I want to go over because I think they're really relevant and kind of are going to get at my point around how these myths get created. So the first one is around induction, like trying to induce labor, and the other one is around induction, like trying to induce labor, and the other one is around recovery, and so I kind of went down, obviously the pregnancy influencer, fyp, and I'm engaging with a lot of this, so it's coming up on my For you page and there was just so many people who were posting about teas exercises that you can do.
Speaker 1:You know, spinning babies is a big one curb walking, all of these things that moms try to do when they're getting towards the end of their labor and they just want baby out because they're super uncomfortable and super grouchy. Been there, done that and I think this is a really good example of what can happen in these spaces. Number one you're getting this group of people and I've been there that are desperate for a solution. You're feeling super uncomfortable, you maybe have lightning crotch, you're overdue, so you're desperately looking for solutions and there's this really predominant saliency effect that happens when you start implementing a lot of these things and then you go into labor. Right, where our evidence is is that dates exercises, spinning babies like we have no research on any of these things inducing labor and most likely the thing that happens is that your baby was going to go and start kickstart your labor, your delivery anyway, but you happen to be having that date or you happen to be walking on the curb or you happen to be doing that squat and what most likely happened was baby was ready. But what we can see is we make a really strong association, the saliency effect of I was doing this thing and all of a sudden my labor kickstarted. I don't know if I should say this online, but whatever I'm going to. For me it was sexual activity, like with Quinn. It started like two hours later and you know I could say, babe, like way to go, like you kickstarted my labor, but more likely, I was 39 plus four and Quinn was ready to come out, and Quinn was ready to come out. But you get enough people who listen to a person say, hey, this brought me into labor. They do it, they go into labor and all of a sudden there's this pregnant expert that gets developed in the process.
Speaker 1:And then the second one, where we see this saliency effect or we see this kind of myth of motherhood really come in, is in these pregnant influencers who recover incredibly quickly. And then they say, hey, here's all of the things I did to recover. You can do it too. Let's talk about this. Okay, when it comes to recovery, postpartum, there is no secret sauce, right?
Speaker 1:There is nothing that we can do that's going to guarantee that you're not going to get stretch marks or that your skin isn't going to be looser, that we can avoid a cesarean section. There are things that we can do to stack the deck in our favor, particularly around staying strong in pregnancy. But we can't predict, we can't guarantee, we cannot make promises saying do this program and you will have this outcome, and people who do say that it's a huge red flag, like we just cannot possibly say that. But if you start exercising postpartum any exercise program, postpartum one your healing is going to be pretty drastic at the very beginning, right, because your uterus is flushing all of that lining. You're going to stop bleeding, your milk is going to come in, which is, if you're choosing to breastfeed, then you're going to be burning more calories with that, though that's not a guarantee to lose any weight or anything. But there's going to be a lot of these changes that happen that are going to change your body composition, and then what happens after that is very person dependent, right.
Speaker 1:A lot of these pregnant and postpartum influencers and I don't mean this negatively, it's just true are in the exercise space already. So some of these really key barriers to exercise and movement have already been removed from this, and I am a person who also has some of these benefits. For example, they work in a gym or have a gym at home that is already decked out and set up. That is me. I have a home gym is me, I have a home gym. They have partners or they have individuals where exercise is a very big part of their life and day already, and so they have that set in place, that social support in place.
Speaker 1:Early postpartum Many individuals and this isn't always true, but first babies it can sometimes be a little bit easier to return to exercise, not only from a recovery perspective, because it's very difficult to get back to your baseline level of fitness before you get pregnant again, but also you only have the one baby, and that's not to say that being early postpartum with your first isn't difficult. My goodness, I look back on the haze that I was in when Maya was born. But you do not have another human that you are taking care of, so that when the baby sleeps you can sleep, or you can try and eat, or you can try and just get yourself together a little bit to do it all over again, or you can exercise and you can move. So many of these influencers use their own pregnancy as a proof of concept for their programs. You can do what I did. You can look like me and do my program.
Speaker 1:The problem is what those individuals are doing are. They are making a critical error, which is thinking that their experience equals their expertise. I stole that line from Claire from Barbell Medicine and she was talking about this with respect to athletes who become coaches and how your experience with your own athletic journey doesn't give you always the expertise to be a good coach. Totally agree. Love her for that sentiment. But I am seeing this super pervasively in the pregnant postpartum space. I was an athlete, or I was into bodybuilding, or I was doing something. I got pregnant. Now I'm giving you a pregnant program, not because I have fine-tuned this methodology, working with lots of different people, or I have the credentials on top of that in order to create a program based on these things, but I am using my experience in lieu of expertise and creating this blanket program.
Speaker 1:I have seen TikTok influencers who haven't even given birth the first time and their pregnancy program has already launched and what ends up happening is, when this is really relevant in their life, when they're in that pregnant to postpartum transition for the first time, if they choose to have other kiddos the second time, they're posting a lot about it because they're posting about their own exercise, and then they get out of that space and they don't talk about those programs as much because it's not as relevant to them. And then they start a perimenopausal program because they're going through that transition and so this kind of becomes this influencer program pipeline and again there's a lot of space in motherhood. But what can happen is it creates this false idea around what is necessary for want to look like me, do these things, or to get rid of mom pooch do these things. And it was like pelvic tilts and these very low level exercises, which may be okay at the very beginning, but in general, you need progressive overload, lots of time You're thinking about nutrition, sleep, all these other health promoting factors like your genetics are going to play a huge role in that, and anytime somebody says genetics, a lot of these individuals online get really upset about it, when you should just acknowledge that like heck, yeah, I won the DNA lottery, right, I don't have stretch marks for my two kids, and that was just my DNA and my genetics. My mom does have stretch marks, but that doesn't mean that I didn't get her genetics. She had twins and so she was bigger than I was in both of my pregnancies, and so what it does is it creates this problem.
Speaker 1:I remember there was a really famous CrossFitter too Her name is Carrie Pierce and she said she posted all these pictures of her with a six pack and said here's the 10 minutes you need for these abs and didn't talk. She posted all these pictures of her with a six pack and said here's the 10 minutes you need for these abs and didn't talk about the fact that she'd been resistance training and building up her abs and core wall for like 15 years using heavy lifting and high intensity exercise and then accessory movements with these ab things and said here you need to do these 10 minute programs. Did people improve their core tone by doing a program that specifically targeted that muscle group? Probably, but it's not really genuine marketing when you're using pictures of yourself having done all of these other things that also influenced what you look like and marketed that it was this 10-minute program that gave you the abs that you do. And so when you kind of have this really high amount of influencers some with the education around pregnancy and postpartum exercise, a lot that don't.
Speaker 1:When these programs come out, they end up being very blanket programs and because they don't have the expertise of working with a lot of individuals and modifying and manipulating variables for each person, these blanket programs end up having a lot of fear-focused messages and they tend to be pretty underdosed in nature. Right, because if it has to apply to everyone, you're going to cater it for the person with the lowest level of fitness, and that is not a bad thing. That is just a requirement so that you aren't selling these programs to half the people that aren't going to be able to do it because your dosage is too high. The way that we work around that with our Barbell Mamas programs is that we have a skeleton program and then, based on your situations and circumstances, we have modifications on how and when to change up or scale or modify the exercise based on your specific scenarios. Is that even perfect? No, right, it's not perfect, but it was our way of trying to create a catered experience for individuals who are looking for a way to get back into exercise, especially like barbell-related training, in their pregnant postpartum journeys. Right, and that's where I get online and get really upset because people say try these five core safe exercises. They're in my program and they're very underdose and very conservative and oftentimes they're not enough for us to derive the change in strength that we're really looking for. And then where I kind of get upset right, is that a lot of these myths around or a lot of these programs, these influencer things that come up? Is that they make it seem like the formula is so easy to look like they do, and I am a person who got very lean postpartum.
Speaker 1:But it was not easy and I can absolutely acknowledge that there were scenarios around my life Like, for example, my gym had childcare at six months and before six months the gym allowed me to bring my baby. I have a husband who is hugely into fitness as well, and so it mattered a lot to us. My genetics I tend to be a leaner person. It is harder for me to put on muscle. It is easier for me to drop weight, if that is something that I am trying to do. I had a huge base in fitness. I had been strength training for 10 years prior to my pregnancies.
Speaker 1:I had the knowledge around pelvic floor dysfunction that helped me in my pregnancy and postpartum journey. And I had the genetics and I didn't have any. I wasn't double jointed. I didn't have any mobility issues that would maybe predispose me to other pelvic floor issues or persistent core issues postpartum. All of those things were working in my favor.
Speaker 1:I can totally acknowledge that privilege and I don't think that takes away from my effort, but it acknowledges that that is not going to be everybody's scenario. And so where I also just want to highlight and acknowledge is that what often happens in these spaces is that by breaking things down and making it think like it's the easiest thing in the world to get the outcome of the person that is selling that program, what it isn't acknowledging is those nuances, and what happens is you have so many individuals who are listening to these messages and they're feeling a lot of shame and blame because what isn't acknowledged is that you can do all of those things. You can do all of the things quote, unquote right and it can still feel like it went wrong for you, or you can still feel like your body isn't the way you want it to look, or you can still have a scenario where you are grieving what your body looked like before babies and having to learn to love this new version of your body after babies, and then, with age and everything like that, like just so many things, come into it. And that's why I love this podcast, because you can hear me ramble on, for, you know, 20, 30, 40 minutes, because that nuance matters, and in 15 minute or 15 second sound bites it's almost impossible. And all this to say like it is not a bad thing, that pregnancy, postpartum, motherhood, they're just such transformative time in a woman's life that of course they want to share that journey. If they're into fitness and are going through pregnancy, of course there's going to be this natural desire to talk about that experience, gain education about that experience, put that into practice and then think that that is sufficient to be able to educate the masses.
Speaker 1:And so often the message starts here's what I'm doing in pregnancy, and with more reels, with more engagement, it becomes here's what you should do in your pregnancy. And that flip is when it becomes problematic and it's when we need to pause and make sure we're getting the messaging right. Was I always an expert in pregnancy? No, was I always as well-informed posting online as I am today? No, like there is a learning process, that happens. But I think there needs to be an acknowledgement of what they know, what they don't know, what they can provide and what they can't, an acknowledgement of scope of practice and experience and what that needs to accumulate to in order to become expertise, and that's just not happening right now.
Speaker 1:And so this is when I am combating so many of these myths that refuse to die, like when I'm looking at joint mobility in pregnancy, I was getting into a back and forth about that and why maybe that's why we shouldn't do a full clean at the end of their pregnancy. Where did that come from? No idea Based on theory, based on a thought, and then perpetuated on right Around not doing sit-ups, having to roll to the side in order to get up when you're pregnant, like all these things to try and avoid pelvic floor dysfunction. Core issues like all of this has been perpetuated in this influencer pipeline in an attempt to be helpful. But then, as a researcher, I acknowledge why this is harmful because I can't get through an ethics board for something that has no evidence to back us up, because it's perpetuated online and it's frustrating, and so I don't know what to do about it other than to continue trying to be very vocal online.
Speaker 1:I am not trying to call out the influencer. I'm trying to call them in and speak to the method and not the person, and acknowledge that I know that many of these individuals are trying to be helpful. It's something that they're very passionate about. I am not against either. Somebody making money online in an exercise space Like Wellness is such a huge industry I'm not even against that. I just think that it has to be done in a way that is very mindful of the words that you use and what you say and how that can be interpreted when you are wrong, acknowledging that, not doubling down with this environment of being able to have conversations, and when call-out culture is so pervasive as it is, I can also understand why people want to double down because people are mean online, and I think there's a way to do it well, and there's a way that is, overall, just you trying to get attention now for calling somebody else out, but that is a whole other discussion for another day.
Speaker 1:All right, I hope you all found that helpful. If you want to follow us on TikTok, I am at thebarbellmama. I'm going to try and be more present online. I'm not going to make any promises. I'm just having fun on the TikTok platform. I'm just trying to think about how I can help more, and so if you have any ideas, if you have any thoughts, please let me know. Otherwise I will talk to you all very, very soon and see you all next.
