BONUS Episode: CESP conference day 1 take aways

Imagine your daily choices in pregnancy quietly shaping your child’s metabolism, stress responses, and emotional regulation for years. That’s the compelling throughline from our time at the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology pre-conference, where leading researchers shared how movement and food quality during pregnancy build health that lasts well beyond birth.

We break down what the latest studies suggest about prenatal exercise, resistance training, and reducing ultra-processed foods. You’ll hear how even simple interventions—like pairing grocery support with a pedometer goal—can improve early childhood outcomes up to 36 months. We also talk candidly about the barriers that make “just exercise and eat well” feel unrealistic: long commutes, childcare, nausea, finances, or medical restrictions. Our aim is to cut the fear and guilt, and replace them with doable wins grounded in the 24-hour movement guideline, where any shift toward more activity and less sitting moves the needle.

Whether you’re an experienced lifter cruising through classes or taking your first steps into movement, you’ll find a flexible framework that respects context and celebrates small gains. We explore the nature–nurture blend and how epigenetics helps explain the long arc from prenatal habits to early development, without overselling certainty. The takeaway is warm and practical: choose what’s possible today, protect sleep where you can, keep stress in check, and let consistency do the heavy lifting for both you and your baby.

If this conversation helps, share it with a friend who needs encouragement, subscribe for more evidence-based guidance on pregnancy and postpartum performance, and leave a review to support the show. Your feedback shapes future episodes and helps more parents find their path.

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Transcript

Welcome And Scope Of The Show

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Enfant, farm, mamm, fall, fly, fratt, en half, fratit, free, extrait, faible, eleven, allow, flux, fine, c'est fine, c'est hotel, we talk about the reality, and love to exercise. Whether you're a creative exercise 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 gonna talk about fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual. Well, I am a public floor physical therapist. I am not your public 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 it. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast. Christina Previtt here, and I am currently actually in London, Ontario. So I am at the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology annual conference. Say that three times fast. Um, and I am so excited because I am at their pre-conference, and their pre-conference is all about exercise in pregnancy, health in pregnancy, and early childhood development, which has been a really incredible opportunity to be able to talk to world-renowned researchers, some researchers coming in from Madrid and Portugal and all over Europe have had incredible insights into some of the new areas of research. And so today for our episode, what I wanted to do was kind of go through and have some of my main takeaways that we I kind of had for day one. Tomorrow the conference goes until about three o'clock. Today we were not done until eight o'clock. So I'm recording this super late. Um, but while all these ideas were fresh in my mind, I wanted to share them with you all. Kind of where we're at here in 2025 with exercise in pregnancy and postpartum is that we are pretty unanimous that exercise is good for you. That if you are pregnant, that prioritizing eating well, sleeping, keeping your stress down, and being physically active are things that are going to be good for you and good for your pregnancy. A lot of what we've talked about in this podcast has been around higher intensity exercises and how we feel very comfortable in low to moderate intensity, but we feel a little bit less comfortable as we get into higher intensities. But today's speakers, well, of course, we brought in the high intensity stuff, like that was our lab for sure. What they were talking a lot about was how much health can be created in pregnancy. So, what do I mean by that? They talked a lot about the diet dohad they talked about is determinants of health around development, or I'm getting that that acronym wrong, but they were talking about this growing amount of evidence that is looking at how what you do during pregnancy can have really intense implications in very cool ways for baby's development, and that extends beyond you know, fetal outcomes when baby is just coming out and extends into childhood. A couple of weeks ago, I had posted about a new study that came out that looked at metabolic rate and metabolism for babies that's moms were doing resistance exercise. And I was kind of making a tongue-in-cheek argument about making jacked babies and how, you know, I see a lot of babies that are on the leaner side when I'm working with um individuals who do CrossFit and other high-intensity exercises. And so people were saying, Well, I had a really big baby and I did exercise, and the intention was obviously to be a little bit funny and tongue-in-cheek, but it was really not talking so much about the size of the baby, but how your exercise in pregnancy creates positive changes to your baby's metabolism, even months or years after baby's been born. And today there was a lot of reinforcement of that messaging, things like reducing ultra-processed foods and how it influences your baby's liver. It they were talking about, you know, different nutritional uh exercise. It was a program that was looking at nutritional guidance, including giving nutrition in terms of like providing groceries in combination with a pedometer and how the nutritional intervention plus the exercise intervention had positive changes to babies' emotional regulation scores and their ability to regulate their emotions as high upward as 36 months postpartum. And, you know, there was just kind of this over and over and over again talk about how there's a lot of circuitry, whether that is in the brain or in the body, that creates really positive adaptation when we fill up our health buckets in pregnancy. Now you all know I am such a huge proponent like of exercise and eating well in pregnancy. All of like a lot of these things are mirroring our recommendations across the lifespan of we should be moving more and sitting less, we should be sleeping well and stressing less, and ideally we should be eating, um, connecting with our social networks. Like these are all things that are kind of these health bucket principles that are going to have a positive influence on your health, whether you are three or 93. In pregnancy, there's this extra layer where you are not only, you know, kind of creating some circuitry for your health, but you're also creating some circuitry for your kiddo's health. And, you know, I asked a question of the panel after they had presented all this amazing research. And, you know, I said, in this room, we're kind of preaching to the converted, right? Like we have a group of researchers who believe very strongly in the power of movement, in the power of nutrition, and the power of preventative healthcare measures on our outcomes. The hard part is, right? I when we we put this into practice, I talk a lot about how we have this knowledge translation gap. And this knowledge translation gap is so important to be trying to shrink, right? We want to know that new research is coming out. We want that to come down to the grassroots level. But the thing that I also kind of complain about, and why I am so passionate about being a clinician researcher is this contextual gap that happens in the other direction. And I do not, this is not a slide at all, but rather, how do we take all of this research and apply it to a real person? And so I asked and I said, you know, I am super on board, right? I am a person who believes very strongly in the power of prevention. And I am a person who loves exercise. I've had two pregnancies, I have exercised in those pregnancies. But when we are creating these recommendations, and I would love to know your all's thoughts so often, how this can be interpreted. And in my research and my messaging, I'm always very cautious and I don't always get it right because this can happen with me as well. Is that it seems like something else that we're blaming mom for. And I don't mean this in a negative way, but I more mean this in a real life way. That the messaging that you should eat well and exercise in pregnancy, I don't think there is a single pregnant person who would disagree with that statement. Right. I don't think there's a single person who would say, you know what's actually gonna be better for me? Not doing anything and having McDonald's three days a week or three times a day a week. And people acknowledge those things to be true. The hard part is in the behavior change part because when we are working with humans, we are working with really complex individuals who all have their own personal set of circumstances that creates a barrier or creates a facilitator to being able to be active, right? And so I've had clients who, you know, will say to me, I had some easy, it was her third pregnancy, and she was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and she's like, you know what? This is just another thing that the medical field is just gonna say that all my problems are because I'm fat. And there's this, you know, we have moms who are single parents who have a really hard time exercising. We have individuals who don't have the financial means to eat really healthy food and ultra-processed food is often cheaper. We have individuals who are commuting to and from work, their kids are in aftercare, and the thought of taking more time away from them to be able to exercise is really hard, or they don't want to get up really early to exercise because their kids don't sleep through the night. Like there's just so many situations and circumstances that can make exercise and eating well really difficult, right? I have so much nausea, the only thing I can eat is salty and crackers and things that are processed. And so there's, you know, all this research that is saying that exercise is really good and nutrition should be a priority. We have moms who are now having this magnifying glass on their health because they are so motivated to be this positive influence or to try the best they can to be healthy in pregnancy. And also, there are some very real barriers. There's complications that come up that put people on pelvic rest that make this not possible. And so I asked the question of how do we get all this information out to mom without placing shame or blame on mom when it can't happen. And I don't think we have the best answers for that because it is such an individual, it depends. And I felt like the panel had a hard time with that as well. Where the important thing is that we are starting to have conversations about how important it is that we are empowering in our messaging that I am not creating unnecessary barriers because I'm afraid that I'm doing exercise wrong, which is why I push back often when we are saying that there are these reasons to stop or modify exercise when we don't have evidence to back it up, because it can create a barrier because it can feel confusing or conflicting with respect to where individuals are getting their information from or where women feel supported from to get information from. Or, well, I messed my baby up, or you know, whatever the internal dialogue and internal narrative can be. And so while I was thinking about this conference and I was sitting in this conference room and I was just bathing in all of the collective knowledge that was being shared and just being so excited to be there, I also started to think about, you know, this conversation. And when I am thinking about where our evidence is, it is a very cool place to be in 2025, where when it is possible and when we are able to do it, being physically active and eating well and bringing your stress down is going to help your baby for literally years. Plus, it's a huge responsibility. Um, and so when we are thinking about how to get individuals who aren't prioritizing exercise or do not have established habits, what can we do? And I think that where we need to make sure we are, and when I'm talking to people, it probably I am able to communicate this better probably than people's perception of me sometimes when they look at my stuff online, is in Canada, we have started to really shift away from thinking about our exercise guidelines is like hitting 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity, et cetera, like these kind of checklists of physical activity. And we've moved towards a 24-hour movement guideline. What this means is that we are looking at the composition of your day and acknowledging that any change that increases physical activity and therefore subsequently decreases the amount of time that you are spent spending sitting is going to have a positive health benefit. In general, of course, the more exercise we're doing, the better. But I think when we are approaching somebody who has not been doing exercise, this idea of going from zero minutes to 150 minutes seems like this insurmountable bridge. And therefore, we're not going to do it. When we are able to be empowering to talk about this research and say, hey, even 10 minutes of exercise in a day can reduce your risk of pre-eclampsia. And every five minutes that rate can decrease even more. I love the examples of the athletes who are pushing boundaries and the individuals who are just smashing those numbers and they're not doing 150 minutes, they're doing 500 minutes. And I truly believe that when we have these individuals who are really blowing past these guidelines, it creates a lot of freedom across the spectrum from individuals who are doing high intensity to individuals who are doing low intensity. I really do believe that. What that means is that we are going to be creating this instead of using a blanket protocol, this framework of trying to move the needle. And when we're starting to see how much positive benefit there is to physical activity and nutrition, I think we are in a state now in 2025, almost 2026, where this is not being contested, right? We're not in this place where people are arguing about is physical activity something that's good for you if you're pregnant. Now, what we have to get to is this place where we can meet the needs of a person who is doing 300 minutes of CrossFit because they're at six classes or five classes for 60 minutes every week. We can also meet the demand of the person who really has no idea about exercise, but because they're pregnant, they really do want to help their baby and be as healthy as they can and they're gonna start an exercise program. What I was really kind of sitting and reflecting on is that in the room today, we saw the whole spectrum from individuals who were coming into these studies who had not been doing any previous physical activity to individuals in some of our studies who one of I was presenting a poster on high load resistance training in the first trimester, pelvic floor dysfunction and around exercise modification, is it necessary? Stay tuned on that poster presentation. But what was very cool was, you know, my average number of years for the participants, and some of them maybe you that were doing our study was eight to nine years of strength training. So felt really comfortable. Some of the work by Dr. Ruben Bearcat, who is from Spain, had individuals who weren't being previously active and coming into this exercise program. It is so cool to think that in 2025 we have an entire two-day pre-conference before the full conference that wants to focus on pregnancy postpartum and early childhood health, and that there is still gonna be even more pregnancy stuff in the CCEP uh presentations and conference for the remainder of the week. I think that in the next couple of years, we're gonna see this huge abundance of research that is looking at how in pregnancy, because we are developing so much of our circuitry in our organ systems and our in our brains, that these positive lifestyle changes are really going to have some really cool results around what this looks like for baby upon delivery, but also in the years of early development. But what we also need to acknowledge is that you're probably sitting here and thinking, yeah, but Christina, don't the people who are active in pregnancy, they're more likely to be active postpartum, they're probably more likely likely to have an increase in health behaviors compared to moms who weren't in that category in pregnancy. And you'd be absolutely right. There's a nature versus nurturer type of debate that's always going to be there, and we're never gonna be firmly in one camp or the other. When we are making health decisions, and I've said this a lot in a variety of different podcasts, we are always trying to stack the deck in our favor. What we do and the decisions we make and the collection of behaviors over months and years are going to stack the deck in favor of our health or kind of be a distractor from our health. And that is okay. When we are looking at this metabolism research, what we try and do is control for different things that may influence baby's metabolism or influence whatever health outcome we're looking at. What do I mean by this? When researchers were looking, for example, at some of the changes to the liver or emotional regulation, they would also take outcome measures on physical activity postpartum or uh mental health issues in the parents that could incur more stress in the home or just kind of stress indices, things that maybe would influence in one direction or the other the health outcome that we were looking at in baby. What that does when you can when you control for those things is you try and see how much of the outcome of interest is based on those things that we know influence the outcome. And then the remainder we could say is maybe because of physical activity in pregnancy or nutrition in pregnancy. We have this whole area of like epigenetic expression and changes to DNA with exercise and positive health outcomes and or health behaviors. And it's just a really cool time to be in science. And the answer is always gonna be both, right? There's gonna be a little bit of nature where, you know, as your DNA is being created, these health activities are going to have a positive influence. And then you're gonna have nurture once baby is out that, you know, how your environment interacts with your body is going to create these changes in your genes that are going to, you know, promote health or distract from health. It's just such a cool time. I am still excited for the upcoming days. If you guys have any questions about the conference today or any of our findings, uh, just let me know. I'm gonna be posting more and more about some of my manuscripts that are coming out, which are gonna be really exciting. I cannot wait to share them with you all. It's getting really late. This girl is going to bed, but I am gonna be bright eyed and mushy tail tomorrow to learn more from some incredible researchers. Have a wonderful week, everyone, and we will see you all next time.