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 Exercise Feels Hard
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Your workout routine doesn’t fall apart because you’re weak, it falls apart because your life changed. I’m Christina Prevett, a strength coach, pelvic floor physical therapist, and mom, and I’m sharing a more personal look at what training has felt like through an 18 month stretch of grief, pregnancy, miscarriages, parenting demands, and big professional growth. When your stress is high and your capacity is low, “just push harder” is not a plan. A realistic mindset is.
We dig into five reflections that help active women and athletes stay connected to movement during hard seasons. We talk about the stories we tell ourselves about what a “real” workout is, why all-or-nothing thinking leads to skipping sessions, and how a 10 to 30 minute training block can still build strength and resilience. We also unpack goal pressure, especially around postpartum fitness and recreational competitions, and why changing your timeline is not failure. Your goals should support your recovery, not trap you.
From there, we zoom out to the reality that time and energy are finite. Not every area of life can be in growth mode at once, and choosing a season of maintenance can be the smartest way to protect your mental health and your long-term consistency. I also share a simple tactic that works when motivation is gone: promise yourself you will do one thing, then let yourself leave. Finally, we talk about permission to stop doing workouts you hate and to choose the kind of exercise that brings joy back, whether that’s strength training, walking, or trying a class.
If you’re navigating pregnancy fatigue, postpartum recovery, stress, or a life curveball, this conversation will help you reset your expectations and keep moving in a way that fits. Subscribe to Barbell Mamas, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review with what “one thing” you’re doing this week.
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Welcome And Big Life Context
Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mamas Podcast. My name is Christina Prevett. I'm a public school physical therapist, researcher in exercise and pregnancy, and a mom of two who has competed in prostitutes, 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 gonna 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. Alright, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together. And I can't wait to get excited. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast. Christina Previtt here, and today I want to be talking about times in your life, seasons in your life, experiences in your life where exercise and sticking with an exercise routine feels really difficult. As many of you have been following kind of my personal journey, as I I've talked a lot about it on the podcast, you all know that 2025 was a really tough year for me. My mom got diagnosed with stage four cancer and passed away nine months later. I lost two little babies. I had two miscarriages and I lost my dog. Plus, I was in a big season of growth professionally. I'd taken on an adjunct professorship. Like there was just a lot that was going on. And I was talking with Nick, my husband, today, and I was just saying, like, I just feel like I have not had my mojo around exercise for a year. And then 2026, I was like trying to get that mojo back. And then I got pregnant, and my first trimester was hard and I was thrown up and it was really fatiguing. And so I have just been in a big season, you know, and not like I haven't been wanting to work out for the last couple of weeks. Like this has been honestly the last 18 months of my life where exercise just hasn't been my main priority. And I've had a lot of emotions about that. I am somebody who has done a PhD in strength training, right, around older adults and aging. My postdoc work is in exercise. I am a very firm believer in the power, the importance, the need to prioritize movement at every life phase. But it's a different belief system now, as somebody who is not in her big athletic career. Big is an understatement, but I'm not in my athlete reign. And so I wanted to go through five different reflections, questions, thoughts if you are in a time where
Resetting Your Exercise Story
kind of sticking to your exercise routine feels harder than it should. So, number one, explore your thoughts, feelings, belief about exercise, and if they're realistic for the space that you are in now, right? If you are kind of in your motherhood journey, this is a really easy example of this. When you were in undergrad, I always laugh because like you think you're busy in the season you're in, and then you layer in something else, and you realize now you're really busy and you wish you wouldn't go back to the level of busyness you were before. But when you're in your early 20s and you're single and you're in school and you don't have a ton of obligations and you don't have kiddos that are not sleeping through the night, it is a lot easier to be doing 90 to 120 minutes of exercise. And you may have had seasons of your life where that was your day in the gym, right? What can happen if that has been your life maybe for several years or maybe for many years is that you have this relationship that exercise means 60 to 90 minutes of high intensity exercise. Where I got myself stuck, and where I've talked to a lot of clients about that is this kind of all or none thinking when you only have 30 minutes, or when you only have 15 minutes, where we end up opting out of exercise that day because we don't have a full hour, we don't have a full 90 minutes, we think that it's not going to be productive. But when you are in really tough seasons of your life, or when your exercise routine is not your first priority, or even your top five, um doing something is always better than doing nothing. And that switch in thought process can be so unbelievably challenging to do, but so helpful in the long run because realistically, even if you have never been in that place now and you're still able to engage with exercise as much as you were before, life has a lot of ups and downs. And there's a lot of things that happen where unfortunately, you know, exercise has to come on the back burner. And I'm not saying don't do it. Maybe for some times you are taking months where you aren't. But the idea is like our expectations around what a meaningful exercise session is, have to adapt and change when you're in different seasons of your life. So, number one is around exploring your own thoughts and feelings, like what realistically is the narrative that you are telling yourself about exercise. And then to really see if there's a dissonance, if you are a coach, if you are a family member, if you work in the pre-postnatal space, would you say that to one of your patients? Like, would you, if they said the exact same thing, the same narrative that you were putting on in your head, if it was a close loved one, would you say, yep, you're completely right about that? If you don't have 60 minutes, no, why bother? And when you take that thought exploration and then project it into a conversation that you would have with somebody that is close to you, or that you are trying to guide, or that is someone that you love, oftentimes we realize that we are much harsher in our thoughts and feelings and the standards that we hold ourselves to than we would ever have on someone who is close to us or somebody that we are counseling. So that's kind of number one is exploring those thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
Goals That Hold You Accountable
Number two is doing a realistic audit of what your current goals are, what your current capacity is, and see if you are putting too much pressure on the timelines of things that in the grand scheme of life don't matter. Here's what I mean. I have had clients that are early postpartum and they're like, I'm gonna sign up for a high rox at five months. They get into postpartum. Postpartum rocks their socks off, doesn't go the way that they want. And now their high rox is coming up and they're getting stressed and more stressed because they don't feel ready. They may be having pelvic symptoms, et cetera. And they have this high rox. As many of us are recreational athletes, our buoys and timelines are allowed to change, right? It is not life or death. It is not I'm gonna lose my sponsorship. It is not I, if I do this, I sucked at my recovery, which can be the narrative that we are unintentionally or maybe unknowingly telling ourselves. But when it comes to recreational competitions, it comes to things like that, those goals are meant to hold us accountable, not hold us in a chokehold. Where if we have to move and do a different high rocks, or you know, we don't strive for a time and we just strive for participation and we change the buoy. That is not a sign of failure. When we are in the recreational space, we can sometimes put a lot of pressure on ourselves for different, you know, PRs and recovery timelines, et cetera. But in reality, those goals are meant to be fun goals. And often, especially, you know, when we have a lot of expectation on ourselves, that can really distract from the fun and joy that those competitions are supposed to give us. Right. In the running space, there's very few people who are being paid to run. And yet, if they don't PR in their runs or they don't get close to their previous PRs early postpartum, there can be a lot of disappointment. And I'm not saying don't have goals, and I'm not saying that those things aren't important to strive for. But life is also very unpredictable, and nobody is gonna think less of you. Nobody is gonna think that you have failed your recovery. And the only person who is putting a ton of pressure on themselves is probably you to have these certain, you know, buoys or criterion for your recovery or maintaining your physical capacity for years into motherhood or whatever postpartum. And so I feel like for many people who are listening to this podcast, they're in that recreational, fun, competitive athlete space. And sometimes we have to zoom out and see the forest for the trees, that moving one competition or giving yourself that breather if you feel like you aren't really ready for the endeavor that you had self-selected as a goal is not always the end of the world. And taking that pressure off can be really helpful in times of your life where there's already a lot of pressure in other areas, right? Like I see a lot of very hyper productive, and like honestly, admittedly, I am this person as well who is juggling a lot of things, juggling motherhood, trying to stay as a competitive athlete, trying to do a lot of these things all at the same time. And we're gonna we're gonna talk about this in a little bit, is there are going to be seasons where you cannot be progressing in every area of your life because time and energy are finite resources.
Growth Versus Maintenance Seasons
And so that kind of leads me to number three when it comes to these types of things, is that when you have your hand in a lot of different buckets or you're balancing different things, not every area of your life can be in a constant state of growth. So that's gonna be my number three. I have people ask me all the time, I don't know how you do everything, right? Because I'm in the clinic, I have these podcasts, I, you know, I'm doing all of these things. I have two littles at home. And my joke is usually that I have a stay-at-home parent, right? Nick is a stay-at-home parent predominantly. Uh, he does some stuff with us with the barba mamas, but he does some coaching, but it's very part-time. One, I would be nowhere without that support system at home. Um, but what I have to have had to learn, and sometimes painfully, is that I cannot be growing my business, growing my education company, becoming fitter, being present at home, all of these things, they cannot grow at the same time. Because with growth usually comes more obligation, more expectation, and more time devoted, right? And if you have four or five things that are all trying to grow at the same time, you run out of time and and you burn out and become upset and bitter or overstimulated or touched out. Like those are all like we just get there so often, right? And they're they're kind of joking right now about the millennial career crisis around how, like, you know, you've mombassed too too much that you can't ever feel like you can stop or slow down. And so I have had times where my education career has been in a maintenance mode, and my my activity and my goals for fitness have been forward. I have had times where education and parenthood have been my top two priorities, and my fitness has been a lower priority. All of that is okay, and life is long, and they always say, you know, you overestimate what you can do in a day, but you underestimate what you can do in a year. And it's that steady, consistent effort of either maintaining your fitness while going for a career goal or maintaining your fitness while your kids are in a really intense parenting phase. That is okay. That is how we survive trying to be all of the things when we are only one person. And so if you are in a season of maintenance for your fitness, that is okay. When you are just going in, doing your thing and getting out. That's okay. Like I did 25 minutes of resistance training today. I did three sets of five squats and I did three sets of lunges and ring rows. That was all I had time for today because I had back-to-back meetings. I still did the thing because my fitness right now is in maintenance mode because I am trying to get some projects done and work on revamping some educational material before this baby comes. And then I have a timeline on this baby coming, right? And so, kind of understanding if you are in a season of growth in one area, that sometimes we have to take the gas off of other arenas of our life or areas of our occupation in order for us to allow that growth to happen. And this too can be in your family's life. Like maybe your partner is in a season of growth. And that means that both of you can't be in a season of growth because of the parenting and home-related needs, right? So that's just not even only within yourself, but within your family unit, that there are times, like for example, Nick has very graciously stepped back on his career development side in order to allow me to launch forward. And if he was not willing and able to do that, then my growth trajectory would have changed tremendously. Right. And so that kind of balancing of all the different things within yourself and then within your family unit is so important. And then how exercise kind of fits into that is important. If you feel like you are in this point or in this place where trying to exercise is hard, right? And you've kind of gone through these reflections, you've tried to let those things
The Power Of One Thing
go. But I think one of the best things you can do, and I I talk about this a lot with my pregnant clients who are having a hard time with fatigue, is go into the gym and and promise yourself you're gonna do one thing. One thing. So that for me could have been the squats today. If I I said, if all I do is warm up and do my three sets of five squats and I walk out, good job for me. If I promise myself I'm just gonna do a 10-minute walk outside, you start with doing one thing, right? Because as soon as you say, okay, I need to do squats, I need to do four accessory exercises, I need to do a MECON, it can be too much, and then you can overwhelm yourself, and then you you don't end up doing it or you talk yourself out of it. This was tremendously helpful for me, especially after my second miscarriage when my mom was was sick. I I hated exercise. I didn't want to. All I wanted to do was be in the fetal position and try and show up as a parent when my world was crashing. Like, you know, between the emotional crash, my I had a lot of blood loss, the hormone dump, the constant follow-up of arm is my HGG down at zero, the trying to be a helpful child while you're not really close to your mom. My mom was three and a half hours away. Like exercising was so low on my priority list, even though I knew that it would make me feel better, that removing fitness would not help my mental health. It has been a buffer to keep me resilient for many years. But if I went in with this expectation that I had to do a full session, I just didn't have the headspace or the capacity or the resilience in that moment to do it. But I could do a 15-minute walk or I could go out for a run and do one kilometer. And if I turned around and walked back, that was fine. It wasn't like my one thing wasn't even run 5K. It was, can you run a kilometer? And then if you decide that you're gonna walk after that, cool. And I did. Like I had times where, especially on the blood loss side of things, like I just my heart rate was at 165 after a kilometer, going slow. And so letting go of that I need to do everything. And if you know, we're we're talking that mindset, the the action item there is can you start with doing one?
Only Do What You Enjoy
The last thing is if you're in a season where you are finding it really difficult to engage in exercise, stop feeling like you have to do exercises you hate. I have to be very real with you right now. I do not do a ton of high-intensity work right now. I am still in a place, and it has nothing to do with my pregnancy and everything to do with where my life is right now. And I and I'm starting to come out of it. I'm starting to actually want to do metabolic conditioning and sprints and higher uh intensity exercise. But there was a long freaking time where I just could not make myself do anything high intensity. My stress was already so high. I, you know, was just trying to get through the day. I didn't want to just have my heart rate at 185 and keep it there for 15 minutes. Like it was just, it was just too, I just hated it. And I knew that wasn't me. I love high-intensity exercise, but the thought of doing it was like would make me not go into the gym. And so I just committed myself to only doing exercises I loved. And so I've not done a Belgarian split squat because who likes them, right? Like I have just done a lot of like bodybuilding type of accessory work. I've kept up my main lifts around my uh power clean, my squat, my deadlift, and my bench, my press. Um, because again, I like those movements. And I just did exercise for the joy of it. And that allowed me to, you know, take a spinning class. I've tried Peloton classes. I had looked at like dance classes in my local area. My husband tried swimming, and we kind of like got rid of any expectation of what exercise had to look like and got to explore what it could look like. And that's a really powerful thing when you're in a season where, you know, kind of engaging in exercise is difficult. So those are my five, right? One and two are really around your relationship with exercise and exploring those thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, trying to get rid of that all or done thinking, looking at your current goals and say, are they really set in stone? Am I putting too much pressure on myself? Am I taking the joy out of this? Um, and pushing myself needlessly, then kind of thinking about and truly kind of looking at where your life is right now and seeing, are you in a season of growth or maintenance when it comes to your fitness? Or are you in a season of growth in other areas, which is making a lot of sense of why engaging in exercise is so difficult. If you are in that stage, start with one thing, right? If you're walking into the gym, promise yourself you're only gonna do one thing. And then if that is all you do that day, that is absolutely okay. You are not gonna beat yourself up because you did the one thing you said you were gonna do. Oftentimes you end up doing a little bit more, but if you don't, totally fine. And then commit to when you are having a hard time exercising, that you are not going to do exercises that you hate, whether that's intensity of work or movement patterns that are just really stinking hard. When you are already having a hard time getting into the gym, knowing that you have to do stuff that you don't like doing is going to make that an even tougher barrier to get through.
Final Recap And Listener Prompt
All right. I hope you all found that helpful. A little bit more on the softer kind of clinical side versus some of the exercise deep dives we've been doing. Let me know if you have any other uh suggestions that you would add or that helped you when you were in a season of low motivation. And we will see you all next week.
