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
Busting Myths about LIFTING during Pregnancy
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The loudest voices on the internet say “don’t lift heavy when you’re pregnant.” We say: let’s look at what the body does, what the research shows, and how to train with confidence. Christina Previtt, pelvic floor physical therapist, researcher, and mom of two, unpacks three persistent myths—weight caps, benching on your back, and never holding your breath—and replaces them with clear, symptom-led guidance that respects both performance and pregnancy.
We start by clarifying the landscape: strength training is not one thing. Powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, strongman, and CrossFit all stress the body differently, and pregnancy asks you to meet those demands with smart adjustments. Christina walks through new data from hundreds of recreational lifters training above 85% of their one-rep max and explains why the old 20 to 30 pound rule came from a lack of data, not evidence of harm. She also breaks down supine hypotensive syndrome, how to spot symptoms like dizziness or nausea, and simple fixes like using an incline for pressing so you can keep the bar moving safely.
Breath is the other lightning rod. The valsalva maneuver increases stability and load capacity, and recent studies show no adverse fetal effects during short efforts. Christina shares when exhaling on exertion can reduce pelvic floor strain, how to decide between strategies based on symptoms and goals, and why birth prep means practicing the opposite of max bracing. If you’re great at holding tension, you’ll benefit from learning to let go—especially in late-stage labor when pelvic floor relaxation matters most.
This conversation is built for lifters, coaches, clinicians, and curious partners who want evidence, not fear. You’ll leave with practical benchmarks to scale effort, scripts to collaborate with your provider, and a mindset shift: adjust your strategy, not your identity. Subscribe, share with a training partner, and leave a review to help more strong parents find real guidance. What myth should we tackle next?
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While 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. Alright, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together at a campaign. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Barbell Mamas podcast. My name is Christina Previtt, public floor physical therapist, mom of two, and lover of all things exercise, and in particular resistance training. At the Barbell Mamas, we have exercise programs for individuals who are pregnant who love and want to continue powerlifting, weightlifting, and Crossfitting. And one of the things that we get asked a lot from our members, and something that the social media space really loves to hate on, is heavy lifting during pregnancy. I am a researcher and I am currently working on research studies that are evaluating heavy lifting during pregnancy. And myself and a group of collaborators have published the only known current study, current being the appropriate word, on heavy lifting over 85% of your water at max during pregnancies and looking at health-related outcomes. And so today I wanted to break down a lot of myths and misconceptions that we can get told when we are pregnant and wanting to continue strength training. And in order to really have the right ground to be starting this conversation, I thought we would do a just a little preamble about what heavy lifting or strength training means. Firstly, when we're thinking about lifting during pregnancy, there are different ways for us to be lifting and there are different sports that are important for us to consider. If you are lifting weights or participating in strength training, I would consider this a person who is going to a commercial gym or has a set of dumbbells or bands in their basement or in their garage at home and are exercising with the purpose of trying to get their muscles a little bit stronger. They're taking rest breaks in between. When we are participating in powerlifting, that is the aim of getting stronger in three lifts: the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. And in the sport of powerlifting, you are broken up by weight class, and then you get three attempts to lift the most amount possible in each of these movements. When we're talking about weightlifting, and a lot of people will get lifting weights and weightlifting confused or mixed up, but when we are talking about the sport of weightlifting, we are talking about the clean and jerk and the snatch. And these are two speed strength-focused movements. You are for the snatch going from the ground to overhead in one movement. For the clean and jerk, you're going from the ground to shoulder, shoulder to overhead in two movements. Yes, strength focused, but these are the component of speed makes it so that it is slightly different. For the sport of weightlifting, similar to powerlifting, you are broken up by weight class and you are given three attempts to lift the most amount possible in these two movements. Then we have strongman, and I'm I'm not an expert in strongman sport, but these are this is a strength-focused sport that has an odd object component to it. So you are trying to lift the most amount of weight, but it can be Atlas Stones. You can have a power strength portion where you're trying to lift a heavy object as high up in the air or over a certain target. You can be carrying a really heavy object as fast as you can over a certain amount of distance. It is a very cool sport, but another one that kind of comes under the strength sport umbrella and is becoming a lot more popular. And then finally, we have the sport of CrossFit where we kind of mix all of those things together and then add conditioning that does this at an intensity. And in CrossFit, we are trying to get strong at all of these different movements. So clean and jerk, snatch, squat, bench, deadlift, overhead squat, strict press, all these things can come up. We can get strongman components where we're doing heavy carries and odd object movements. And then we can also put these loads into conditioning circuits where we are trying to move as fast as possible with a weight and doing that for time or for repetitions. And when we are talking about lifting during pregnancy, it really doesn't matter which one we're talking about, but it is important to recognize that each of these sports is going to put different demands on our body, and the pregnant person's body needs to be ready for those demands. And that's kind of where we make a lot of our recommendations from. It is important that if you have any questions about your specific circumstance, that you reach out to your pelvic floor physical therapist or birth provider team, whomever that may be, to give you specific context to your situation. Okay. There are a couple of myths that we were gonna talk about. And our research study that we looked at heavy resistance training, we really did try to navigate questions in our survey to try and bust these myths like once and for all. When it comes to a female's life, in terms of where the outcomes, potential bad outcomes, carry a very high price tag is during pregnancy. And because of that, in general, most of our recommendations are extremely conservative unless we have research to tell us otherwise. And in the research space, it takes time and we need to inch in slowly. And it has not been that long, really, that we have seen this huge explosion in strength-focused sports in order for us to have a big push to do research in these areas. And therefore, the don't lift more than 20 pounds came from the fact that for a very long time and up to only the last couple of years, we did not have any resistance training studies in pregnant people that went over that 20 to 30 pound threshold. And so it wasn't that lifting more than 20 to 30 pounds was unsafe. We just had zero data above that threshold. So because we didn't know if there was any safety concerns over a certain amount of weight, we had data under this threshold, and that is how this really started don't lift more than 20 or 30 pounds. You can imagine that this really doesn't make sense for a variety of reasons. Number one, I have another kid at home, and that kid weighs 35 pounds. Are you telling me that I shouldn't lift my child my entire pregnancy? And I wish I was joking when I've told you that I've had clients who their provider has legitimately said yes, but most of the time, individuals are not going to give that type of advice and they're gonna say, Well, you can lift your child. And that's where a lot of pushback has come, right? Because, you know, as a parent, you know, if you have multiple children, like if your child's 50 or 60 pounds, well, you're gonna have to lift them up potentially, depending on just the circumstance of your day. And now with our study, we had individuals who were lifting over 85% of their one rep max, and their pre-pregnancy numbers in the squat, these were almost 700 recreational level um athletes. So individuals who went to the gym because they liked going to the gym, not because they were trying to compete in a sport. And you know, they could squat approaching 200 pounds and deadlift over 200 pounds, so these were strong individuals, and we didn't see any increase in risk for mom with respect to her delivery outcomes, and we didn't see any bad um bad outcomes for baby, and so we've kind of pushed back against this a little bit, which is wonderful. The other thing is is when we have these blanket statements, I said in general I don't really like blanket statements, and it's because everybody's strength going into pregnancy is going to be different, and so the amount of effort that a person is using when they're lifting 20 or 30 pounds is gonna be different. If I am lifting 20 pounds off the ground and my max deadlift is 300, then I am lifting about 7% of my one rep max. If I am lifting 20 pounds off the ground and my one rep max is 25 pounds, then I am working at 80% effort. And the amount that I am exerting myself when I have a capacity of 300 pounds versus 25 pounds is very different. And so one pregnant person's amount of exertion with that limit is going to be very different than another pregnant person's level of exertion. And this kind of leads me to my next point. What do you do if your provider gives you that recommendation? Because you don't want to be off on the wrong foot with your birth provider, you want to be able to trust them. You know, you're putting a lot of faith in their hands, you're putting your care and your baby's care into their hands. And so, what do you do? I ask very gentle questions to try and give clarification to what my client's personal capacity is and where the provider feels comfortable. Example. You say, Okay, well, my daughter is 30 pounds, I can still lift her, yes. And they'll say, Well, that's totally fine. I CrossFit and I can currently lift 275 pounds off the ground. Is that restriction still applicable to me, or is that for somebody who really doesn't do a lot of strength training? And usually what happens the majority of the time is the provider starts telling you the nuance that you really need to hear, right? And they're like, Well, you know, if your body is used to it, we don't have any reason why you shouldn't be like kind of just you can do a lot of the things that your body is already used to doing, is kind of where the conversation goes. If you are still getting pushback from your provider, then I try and bring information and say, you know, I was just listening to this podcast with a researcher who did a resistance training study. I actually have the study with me. Can we go through this together and just try and come to a consensus that we both feel comfortable with in order for me to feel good about what I'm doing during my pregnancy, but also for you to feel good. And what I have learned working in this space is that for our physicians and our midwives, you know, liability goes on them for making informed decisions about recommendations that they are making through your pregnancy. And when you come at these conversations collaboratively instead of combatively, oftentimes we have much better outcomes. And then honestly, if you are in a position where you do not feel like your provider is listening to you, you can definitely look for a second opinion if that's possible. You know, sometimes we are a little bit confined in our spheres to, you know, weight lists and what midwifery groups are nearby, all those types of things. But you always have the right to trying to get a second opinion. So myth number one is don't lift more than 20 pounds. Myth number two is never lift on your back after about 20 weeks of pregnancy. And this recommendation comes because of the pressure that baby and growing uterus has on some of our blood vessels in our lower body. Let me explain. When we progress through pregnancy, at first our uterus and little babe is kind of nestled nice and cute in our pelvis, and then as baby grows, baby needs more room, and the uterus and baby expands into our bellies. And so when that happens, the baby and uterus is going to be taking up more space between our rib cage and our pelvis, and our organs are gonna be moved out of the way, and baby is going to gain weight. When we are on our back, baby has the potential to put pressure on a big blood vessel called our inferior vena cava, and what that can do is potentially bring down the amount of blood supply to the uterus and the placenta and just impact mom's blood flow in general. This is called supine hypotensive syndrome. This sounds really scary, but this happens in a very small percentage of individuals. And individuals who have supine hypotensive syndrome, if they're awake, will have symptoms that this is going on. I had a client who, as soon as she tried to do glue bridges on her back, instantly became dizzy, unwell, kind of felt a little bit nauseous. And those are the symptoms that you are looking out for that may show that based on your body and the way that your baby is sitting, that they are putting pressure on that blood vessel. Symptoms usually come up within three to seven minutes of exercising on your back. And if that is you, then we're gonna prop your head up slightly in order for you to relieve pressure on that blood vessel. That is not going to be everyone, and we do not have any research to back up the recommendation that we need to avoid all exercise on our back. The real recommendation is that we need to avoid exercising on our back if we are symptomatic or feeling unwell with exercise on our back. And when it comes to even bench press, if we are a person in the sport of powerlifting, we're not actually really flat on our backs when we are deadlifting. Because we are gonna have a bit of that arch that likely will put pressure off of that artery. And because of that, I do not make a Blanket statement that we have to avoid lifting on your back. I made the slight point about if you are awake, you will become symptomatic. This is where the recommendation of don't sleep on your back comes in. If you wake up on your back, it's like you kind of just suddenly jar awake. That is usually your body telling you that, oh, something's wrong, you're on your back, and it's time to turn on to your side. If there are moments, pardon me, where you wake up on your back. I tell my clients not to worry. You know, you do not need to worry about the health of your little one. Your body is going to wake you up. In general, though, it is best practice to try and sleep on your side. And that's just to try and optimize the chance that you don't go into supine hypotensive syndrome. And it's just kind of a safety consideration. So we don't need to worry about it. We just want to be kind of mindful of it. All right, that is myth number two. So myth number one, don't lift more than 20 pounds. Myth number two is don't lift on your back. The third one that we're gonna talk about, and this one's gonna be a little bit nuancy, is to never hold your breath when you're lifting during pregnancy. Background. When we are bracing during pregnancy, this is a um a technique known as val salva. So we are going to inhale nice and big, close our throat, so close our glottis, and then we are going to tighten our abs as much as possible when we are trying to pick up something heavy. What that does is it increases pressure in our belly, which causes all of the muscles around our core and around our spine to kick up and turn on just a little bit more, and it helps our spine stay really rigid and it allows us to lift more weight. This is something that our bodies do in order to keep ourselves safe and reduce risk of injury when we are lifting heavy things, and it is a staple of many strength-focused sports. Traditionally, in pregnancy, and I will completely admit this is exactly the advice that I have given people for a long time, is that when we get out of the first trimester, as baby starts to grow, we're gonna start to exhale on exertion to put a little bit less stress on our bellies, and we're gonna keep bracing, but we're just not gonna increase that pressure in our bellies. Part of the reason for that is the previously that the recommendation was that was because when we hold our breath and balsalva really hard, we increase our blood pressure kind of transiently, so it'll boost up in order to lift the weight, and then when we finish lifting, it'll come back down. And it can boost up to about 200 millimeters of mercury systolic, so that top number. And in pregnancy, we're so mindful of our blood pressure because of things like gestational hypertension or preeclampsia. We don't have any evidence to support that that is bad, that transient increase in blood pressure for mom or for baby. We now have two studies that have been released that showed that there was no blips on baby radar, there was no change to blood flow to placenta to baby that would give us any evidence that balsalva was bad. Number one. So balsalva is from the studies that we have not going to be dangerous at all to baby. So you're not worrying if you accidentally hold your breath on a heavy squat when you are pregnant that you are doing something bad. That's number one. And number two, in our cross-sectional study, we actually did what's called a subgroup analysis. So we asked people, did you balsalva during your pregnancy? And then we looked at rates of pelvic floor issues postpartum. Because one of the things that we kind of thought or we had this idea might be happening is because during pregnancy our body is under so much more strain, especially our abs and our pelvic floor, that that might mean it's the time to just not put extra strain by doing the valsalva. And if we breathe out on exertion, then that might be the better option. Well, when we did that in our study, we actually didn't see any increased risk of pelvic floor issues for those that continued valving during their pregnancy and those that didn't. And that was a huge bias check for me because that was something that I had given that recommendation to as well. And so, really, now I think my phrasing is a bit more moderate than it was in the past. I have had clients who continue balsalving their entire pregnancy and are totally fine. I actually haven't seen anyone who's had really bad outcomes doing balsalva. But I kind of make it, I don't do a blanket statement, I kind of make it individual. So I will say if you exhale on exertion, you are still going to be bracing, but you're going to be putting a little bit less stress on your pelvic floor. If that is something that you think your body needs, then I encourage you to use that strategy. We still have a lot of work to do on pelvic floor outcomes with Valsalva. So it isn't a bad idea to switch your strategy so you're breathing out during the hardest part of the movement. But also know that if you valsalva, you are not going to do any permanent damage to your pelvic floor, and that is going to be an individual choice for you. We still have, again, like I said, a lot of work to do on this around what this does for pregnancy, for delivery, etc. etc. But right now we don't have any research that is showing us that balsalva during pregnancy is bad. And I have a lot of clients who choose to balsalva, or you know, we know that individuals will at least temporarily go into balsalva when we're over 80% of our one rep max. And that's because that's how our body allows us to lift that amount of weight, is by increasing all of the muscle activation in our bellies so that we can lift it. And so at least transiently, you will go into Valsalva at some point during your pregnancy, and that's okay. One thing that I do want to touch on, and we're gonna do a whole podcast episode on this around birth prep, is that for our athletes that keep valsalva in during their pregnancy, so holding their breath with lifting, we need to unlearn that during our birth. And so, what I mean by that is that when we are in the active pushing stages of a vaginal delivery, we want to consider that we need to learn to relax our pelvic floor. When we are bracing to lift a heavy weight, that is not when we want to be peeing, pooping, or birthing a baby. And we are therefore doing the exact opposite, where we are tightening up our pelvic floor in order for us to not pass gas, pass wind, or pee when we don't want to. During delivery, if we do not relax our pelvic floor, baby can't descend into the birth canal. And so when I am working with barbell athletes, individuals who do a lot of strength training, I will do a lot of work with them. And I sometimes put it into workouts. If you're on the barbell mama's programming, you're going to see birth prep workouts where we are focusing a lot on relaxing a person's pelvic floor or practicing that skill because it is an unlearning process, especially if you've been doing strength training for a really long time. You are very good at bracing, and it is very different when you are going into labor and delivery. But we're gonna do a whole podcast episode on that, so more to come on that in the future. All right, as I wrap this up, what I want to leave you all with is that every person's journey is going to be different. What they feel comfortable doing, what their home life looks like, what their previous level of fitness was, what their fitness goals are after baby, all of these things are going to be different and unique to the individual. There is way too much hate and fear and judgment that goes out, especially when we don't have the research to back it up. And people say that they're just trying to help, but they're being really mean about it online, and they are not experts, and they are not their friends and family, and they are not on their provider team. And so, really, we should not be casting judgment on individuals in their journeys online, in our friends and family circles. You know, we can if they are asking for our advice, we can give it, but we have to recognize that everybody's journey is going to be different, their comfort levels are gonna be different, and the idea of podcasts like this is to try and remove the fear and remove the stigma from lifting during pregnancy because we need to be strong. Momming requires so much fitness, and I always say to my clients and the clinicians that I teach, tell me a time in your life where you have said, I really wish I was weaker, going to into this big transformative health moment. And I'll wait because the answer is we never ever ever are going to see strength as a weakness. And we can unintentionally make moms and moms pers in particular moms to be feel like they need to weaken themselves during pregnancy in order to quote unquote protect or do pregnancy safe exercises, and those do not exist. And so I hope this has dispelled a lot of myths. I hope that you found this helpful. If you like this type of content, please subscribe to the podcast or leave us a review. We would love to make this podcast everything that you want it to be. And I hope that you reach out to us on social media at the Barbell Mamas. We have our audio podcast and our video podcast, and we just can't wait to connect with all of you. And I hope that you share your stories with us. All right, have a wonderful week, everyone, and we'll talk to you later.
