 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health and entertainment podcast, we talk about pregnancy. We talk about how to train before, during and after pregnancy to maintain strength, health, help you have a healthy delivery and get your body to feel good and fit and strong again after you have your baby. In fact, we go through all three trimesters of what exercises are probably best during each trimester, what things to look out for, how to listen to your body. We also give nutrition tips in this. In this episode, by the way, I mentioned a fit mom bundle. This is where we have three maps, programs combined, really put together well for women who are working out before pregnancy or after pregnancy includes maps anywhere, maps hit and maps anabolic. So I talk about that. If you wanna check that out, you can find that at mapsfitnessproducts.com. But besides that, listen to the episode. We think you're gonna find it very valuable to get you feeling strong and healthy before, during and after pregnancy. Also, this episode is brought to you by Legion, the maker of high performance supplements. These are supplements designed for those of you who are super serious about your workouts, people who wanna build muscle, get stronger, burn body fat. You want stuff that really, really works. And here's some of the reasons why we like working with Legion. Their products are not artificially sweetened. Everything that's on the label is transparent and third party tested. A lot of supplements say they have stuff in the bottle and when they get tested, they actually don't. Or they have lower doses or sometimes they have toxic products like heavy metals. No joke, look it up yourself. This actually happens quite a bit. Not so with Legion. They're clean, effective and natural. They're our favorite high performance supplement company. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get hooked up. Here's what you do, go to bylegion.com that's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash Mind Pump. You'll get 20% off your first order. And if you're a returning customer, you'll get double rewards points, go do it. You know, when Katrina was pregnant, I remember I was trying to get us to do stuff around this. And ironically, we are now coming here now that your wife is pregnant. You are more interested in this conversation because it must be something you guys talk about on a regular basis now. And you're probably remembering, because it's been quite a while for you. I mean, it's been what, over 10 years for you, right? Yeah. 10 years since going through this. And I'm sure a lot is resurfacing now that you are a much more wiser trainer today than what you probably were a decade ago. Well, you know, the first time I really, so here's the thing, I think it's, of course it's important for all populations, for all people, regardless of their situation of the context of their life to have appropriate activity. We just, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the benefits are tremendous and they way outweigh the time that's spent exercising, right, for everything from health to mobility to function, mental health. I mean, it's just obviously proper activity is extremely important for everyone. But I remember as an early trainer, noticing just the remarkable contrast in the female trainers that I worked alongside with because this was early on and some of the instructors that we had, like group X instructors, when they would get pregnant and they'd have a baby and how they looked and felt afterwards versus a lot of the other times I'd experienced being around pregnant women like my aunts or cousins. And I remember it taking them so long to feel like they were getting back to normal. It took them a long time to feel like they were, and they would complain about it all the time or at least talk about it and say, oh my gosh, my body's not the same and it's tough for me to do these things and my back hurts and all these problems. Meanwhile, I would have these trainers I would work with or instructors that they would get pregnant and they would exercise all the way up until the day of giving birth. And even in my early days as a trainer, part of me was like, oh, are you supposed to work out? Oh, I know, I used to get nervous. Yeah, like is that what you're supposed to do? But then they'd have the baby and then they'd come back after their time off and it was just remarkable at their strength and mobility and how they felt. And I remember even early on, I was like, wow, there's a huge difference here that you see when you apply activity and exercise properly, beginning before pregnancy, during pregnancy, and then of course after pregnancy. Now it's not controversial to say that anymore. I think nowadays it's widely accepted, right? That you wanna have appropriate activity throughout that process and it makes a huge difference. I think it's so widely accepted that it's almost, the downfall and I think you guys have experienced the same thing is, you know, people understand that this is important, that we now get a lot of clients that would come to you and ask for training and they're starting and they're pregnant. They're trying to get in shape just because they found out they're pregnant. Right, and it reminds me of similar advice that I would give to competitors that would come to me and say, Adam, I wanna get ready for this show in October, you know, and whatever month it is doesn't even matter. And what I'd have to explain to them is that, okay, we can, I'm not saying you can't, right? We can definitely figure things out to try and get you in the best shape for this date. But the real work is done before. And so if you're somebody who's listening right now and maybe you're not pregnant but you're thinking about getting pregnant. This is when you start. This is when you start. I mean, this is when the real work is done now to set yourself up so you have a better pregnancy. If you're trying to make moves and you're just starting and you've been pregnant now already for a week or a month or whatever. It's possible, much more challenging. Right. It is. I've done, I've trained both. I've trained women who hired me who just got pregnant. And then of course I've had clients who have trained for a certain period of time who then after I've trained them for six months or a year then they got pregnant. And I've actually trained clients who hired me as part of their protocol to get pregnant. I've had women. I've had that too. Yeah, where they tell me me. Try to lose weight and get to a healthy position with their body so they're more likely to get pregnant. Absolutely. And I've seen remarkable results. I used to love doing this, especially when I had my studio. When I had my studio, it was a small facility. And of course I had the flexibility to run it however I wanted. And I trained several women before, during and after pregnancy. And I have very fond memories of it because I saw them, their body's changing. Then they had the baby. They took time off, got cleared by their doctor, came back. And then I would rock the baby. They'd bring the baby in a carriage and I'd rock the baby in the carriage. Or as the baby got a little older I actually would feed the baby sometimes while mom was working out and these little kids ended up growing up in my gym. But you could see just how remarkable of an impact it has on the body when you prepare it properly and you train it properly throughout that whole process. I mean, now of course the goal is with exercise and pregnancy, there's a couple goals. One of them of course is to maintain fitness, strength, mobility. Remember mobility is not flexibility. Mobility is control over your range of motion. This is really important for pregnancy because a woman's body will naturally become more flexible during the process. There's a chemical hormone that's released called relaxin that actually loosens things up. And if you don't have strength to go along with that extra flexibility you actually start to get instability. And so this is why you see pregnant women start to feel things like their hip pain which is very back pain. And it's because there's a lot of reasons but one of the reasons is they've got all this new mobility or excuse me, I should say flexibility, they're looser but they're not stronger. Strength is very important during pregnancy because strength, number one, we're maintaining or building. Yes, you can build during pregnancy. We'll get into that a little bit later in this episode but maintaining strength and muscle or even building a little bit of strength and muscle, you want that extra tissue, keeps your metabolism roaring, keeps it fast. Boy, does that make the post-pregnancy period a lot better. It also helps with balancing out hormones. It helps with insulin sensitivity. There's sometimes women can suffer from insulin issues during pregnancy, almost like diabetes during pregnancy. Muscle helps protect against that. Plus when you have muscle and strength, the birth process itself either during or even after the healing process. Muscle is very protective for pregnant women. So, and here's the other thing, strength training is so moldable that you can strength train all the way up until you have the baby because you can just change and modify the exercise. And there's considerations too with how to support your body through these changes where you're so much more front loaded now and how do we build and reinforce areas that will help benefit the way that you stabilize and provide strength to keep you in a good position posturally and really address the post to your chain. And so there's things to consider along the way as your body changes and you develop and get bigger with your stomach and the kid grows. So there's things to consider that along those lines. Talk a little bit more about the insulin sensitivity because this was something I thought was really interesting with Katrina because she was dialed. She was dialed heading into it. I thought we were set up perfectly. She stayed consistent with her training. Her diet was perfect. And yet she came up as a potential pre-diabetic. And I just, I couldn't wrap my brain around it until I found out how they take this test. Yeah, now, now with her, that was a special circumstance, right? Because she ate such little carbs and sugar to begin with. This was her normal diet. She found it very healthy. This is how she ate. Then the test is literally take 75 grams of dextrose and then see how your body responds. If you're really low carb all the time and you do that, you're gonna get a response that's gonna look like you might have. Well, I actually don't even think that that's that abnormal. Like Katrina probably eats about 100 in a day, you know? Which is not. I mean, for females that are consuming about 1500 to 1800 calories and that eat pretty healthy, typically have a moderately low carbohydrates. So how often does she have 75 grams of sugar? Never, never. I mean, and that's my point I'm trying to make right now for, cause I know there's gotta be some people that this will probably throw a curve ball from it. It did for me. I was like, wait a second. You can't tell me my wife is pre-diabetic. She's like so dialed nutritionally. And like I said, until I understood how they took the test. And so this is something you wanna think about. If you are someone who is healthy, you are doing the things that we're talking about heading into pregnancy and you get to this point where you have to take this. And I believe it's in the first trimester, right? This is first trimester. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. They take this test and they literally do, they give you 75 or 100 grams of like sugar right away and then they register how your body responds. Well, if you're somebody who never eats more than 50 grams in one sitting, which is a lot of carbohydrates and you're not a big sweet eater like Katrina is not, your body will really respond to something. They should do further testing in that case. I think they did with Katrina, right? No, they do some bullshit. They monitor after that. And then they want to check her every single. So I'll tell you what they did with Jessica. So Jessica also eats very low, not super low carbohydrates, but a little bit lower. She eats low sugar diet for the most part, leading up to the test. Now, so we're working with midwives and they're a little bit more privy to how bodies can respond. So what they told Jessica was they said, increase your carbs normally, healthy carbs that you could adjust well, leading up to the test because otherwise it's going to show a crazy response. So start to bump up your carb and take a little bit for a week before. And then the day of when you do the test, they said, instead of having this crazy sugar drink that you never do, just have some high, let's eat a high carb meal. So they gave her the option to do that instead. Oh wow, see Katrina didn't have that option. Oh yeah. And not only that, I think that, I believe they even coached her to not have carbohydrates in the morning before the test or anything like that because they wanted to see how it responds. It's because they're dealing with the average person who eats a lot more carbs, a lot more sugar and they don't, it's not as, think about it, how often do they get to work with someone who's that conscious about their diet and exercise? Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? That's a very, very good point. No, I wanted to bring it up because this was an area that we wrestled with back and forth with them because then after that they wanted to go, they wanted to monitor her constantly and they wanted her to change her diet radically. And I was like, no, your diet is good right now. I don't want you to go way different. And when I found out what they did so that's exactly what's happened is you, your body is used to never ingesting more than about 25 grams on the high end of carbs at one shot and they give you three X that at one time. And all in the form of this liquid sugar. Yeah, like that. I mean, Katrina is not at all a sweet eater. It's so strong that women get nauseous from drinking it because it's such a strong shock to the body. Yeah, no, it's important to be conscious of that but ultimately one of the best protections you have for insulin sensitivity and how your body utilizes sugar is muscle. This is true for anybody, not just pregnant women. This is true for men. This is true for people with diabetes. Muscle is excellent at, first off it stores a certain amount of carbohydrates. So it's nice to do that. It's also very responsive and it helps your body regulate that. And that's important during pregnancy. But again, you wanna have strength in muscle because it's gonna give you a buffer for when you can't move that much, when you just have the baby, you have more muscle to lose. So you're not in such a bad position when you come out and you go back to the gym. What you don't wanna do is go from very inactive to having a baby and then trying to work out. Oh, that is a, and I've trained women like that too where they did nothing. They didn't exercise before. They didn't exercise during. They had the baby. It's a year later and then they hire me and they're like, I don't know. My body is not my own anymore. I can't figure it out. Well, just think about that. We know that exercise is a stress, right? And that's what makes it great is the way the body adapts to that stress is where you get all the extra benefits. If you're somebody who has not practiced that stress, your body's gonna read that or hear that signal as a louder, more dangerous signal. What a terrible time to do that. You just get pregnant. You don't ever exercise and all of a sudden you get pregnant and then you decide, which by the way, the body is now having to take care of another human being. So it's more like concerned. And then all of a sudden you say, hey, I'm gonna add this new stress that I never do and I'm gonna go hard at it because I wanna try and make change. Well, as challenging as that can be and it can be done properly, but as challenging as that can be, it's what's even worse is doing nothing until after. That's when it gets really hard because now you're dealing with all the changes that happen during pregnancy, the inactivity, which you're supposed to do. Look, you're supposed to not move after you have a baby for a while. And so then training after that is very difficult. So exercise before, especially during and especially after properly can make the whole process so much better, so much easier. Oh, and they find that. By the way, women who exercise while pregnant, the babies are born leaner. This is not a bad thing. They actually are born prepared to be leaner and the children who are born to mothers who exercise, the babies themselves have lower rates of diabetes and obesity as they grow up, even when they control for lifestyle factors. So there may be an epigenetic thing going on where you're kind of preparing your baby for a more healthy life through the way that the genes are being expressed. And there's another theory that says that you may be preparing your baby, if you're lifting weights during pregnancy, you have genes that are set but the way they're expressed can change depending on your lifestyle. You may actually set your body, your baby up to have more responsive muscles to exercise when they go and they play sports and they're active. I hope that theory's right. Well, it's as if their bodies are preparing for a world in which they have to lift things. There's so much happening that we're still finding. So it's just, yeah, it just speaks back to trying to promote the healthiest practices through this process as possible. Yes, now, okay, so there's definitely things that we wanna consider through each trimester because each trimester is relatively unique in both how women feel and the demands on the body. I think though, before we get into any of this, there's individual variances, right? So we're gonna talk about generals but some women don't experience some of the stuff at all. And at the end of the day, no matter what we say in this podcast, the most important thing you do is learn how to listen to your body. So even if I give you advice and you say, God, this doesn't feel right, but Sal, Adam and Justin said this on Mind Pump, I'm gonna just force it, don't do that. Please don't. Don't do that, listen to your body. When I would train pregnant women, it was, I mean, I did this with every client. I would pay attention to the feedback they were giving me. I'd pay attention to how they moved. But when I trained pregnant women, it was like way more intense. It was very much like, how'd you feel after your last workout? How'd you feel this morning? Do you have any pain here? How's this exercise? I'm watching their form because their bodies are changing very, very rapidly. And so you gotta pay attention to this kind of stuff. So the first trimester, this was kind of interesting. Not a lot of physical, like you can't necessarily tell oftentimes, especially it was first time moms that they're pregnant, but they feel very different oftentimes. Fatigue can be pretty bad in the first trimester and nausea can be pretty bad in the first trimester. And that varies across the board, right? It does, but it can be pretty bad. Like Jessica was bad. Like she had, she was nauseous and it wasn't just in the morning. It was all day. Any food that smelled like anything caused her to get, wanna throw up. And she was really fatigued. And she's a fitness expert, right? She's a trainer. She was so fatigued all the time. So those two factors really, and again, at training lots of pregnant women, that one's common. You're dealing with the fatigue, you're dealing with the nausea. So that means you gotta modify the workout kind of around? Well, and this, again, this goes back to why it's so important to start before. Because Katrina went through the same thing, but because she had so much momentum going into it, there's less pressure to like, oh, you gotta get to the gym. It's like, hey, it's okay. Like you're tired today. Let's just go for a walk. Let's just stay active or let's just do a couple of exercises and be done for the day. Listen to your body and pay. And it's okay if she has a string of week or two where maybe she's not even in the gym whatsoever because she's so nauseous, fatigued. She's not behind the April. She's already ahead of the game by building the muscle, by getting into the routine and the habits that she can sacrifice a week or two of inconsistency in the gym because she put the working before. Where this is where I think, this is where it's make or break for a lot of women when they first get pregnant is they have this idea like, oh, I'm gonna start working out. And then first trimester, this shit hits. I remember Katrina falling asleep at like six o'clock on the couch and just being so tired and exhausted. And then if she wasn't eating every two hours, she would get nauseous. And so all of a sudden those things start compiling. And it's hard enough for a healthy, normal person not carrying a baby to get their ass up and go to the gym and go work out, try taking care of this thing that's growing inside of you, feeling nauseous, feeling fatigued and then also trying to be motivated. Again, the importance of setting the table before. You know, it's funny though, is that instinct tends to kick in, that mom instinct. And even though they're nauseous and fatigued, a lot of my clients are like, no, I'm gonna make this a priority because I'm taking care of my baby. So we often take care of our kids better than we do ourselves. And so I would see that. But here's the important thing to consider when you're working out in your first trimester. First of all, resistance training is the best form of exercise during pregnancy because you can mold it, modify it, strengthen your body individually, build that strength, get that muscle speed at that metabolism. In the first trimester, if this is you, like most women, you're feeling tired, nauseous, slow, controlled movements. And your intensity is low to moderate at best. What you're doing is you're going to the gym and you're practicing movements. You're literally getting under the bar and let's say normally you squat with 100 pounds. Just maintaining the signal. Yeah, exactly. Like, okay, like for example, Jessica, you know, let's say normal workout, she would squat anywhere between 100 to 130 pounds, right? During this period of time, she would squat with the bar, 45 pounds or body weight and just go through controlled movements, feel the muscles active, keep everything kind of moving. It was like to maintain that muscle building signal through the workout. And this is even before, in the first trimester, your body's not changing a whole lot. So what I like to do with tell women during this period of time is really make it a focus to work on core stability because later on in your pregnancy, that's gone. And so the more strength you can go into those, those, you know, second and third trimester when you're, the baby's growing and the core muscles are stretching and you're losing that connection, the better, because you're, yes, you're definitely going to decline but because you started at a better position, you don't decline so bad that you caused yourself problems. So lots of core stability focus. So I'll give you an example, right? Let's say normally you do a bench press. This is your normal exercise for chest. Now you're in your first trimester, you know, physical ball chest press would be a good exercise because now you're getting a little bit more core stability or maybe dumbbell chest press alternating with the dumbbells. And so basically what you're doing is you're incorporating some form of core stability along with all your other exercises as well as core exercises like your stable planks or counter rotation movements with your, you know, or your rotating movements. Those are all real good. You want, and also it works along well with what I said earlier, which was lighter, low intensity, you know, type of exercises, they work really well together. So I have a favorite exercise that I had Katrina do and we started it in her first trimester. Before that it would intermittently, she'd have a routine, but this became a staple movement that we carried on the entire pregnancy it started in the first trimester and that was Turkish getups. I love Turkish getups for the split stance benefits, the pelvic floor muscles, the core stability, and it's not something that you need to load really, really heavy and just perfecting that entire movement. That exercise is one that I would, I didn't until later start to incorporate that with clients and was a staple movement that we started in the first trimester and carried all the way through. Yes, and the other thing you want to think about is think to yourself, what exercises am I not going to be able to do? So later on, so I'm going to do them now. So at least I have some residual strength built, right? So like you said- Your workouts aren't going to look, you know, that much different in the first trimester, but it's really the energy management that you're going to have to consider the core strength like you're mentioning. So it, I mean, it's not going to look dramatically different at your workouts. It's just you got to really monitor your intensity and really listen to your body a bit more but trying to establish those foundational strength moves that you've been doing is probably a good idea. Well, I like to do split stance exercises for the lower body in the first trimester more than squats or double leg exercises. Now the reason for this is because split stance exercises, you'll hear me talk about later in this episode, you're not going to be able to do in the third trimester. Your belly gets in the way. You ain't doing lunges or step ups when your belly's really big. So I like to do them in the beginning, the first trimester when we can. I like to establish good left to right balance in that first trimester because later on- Just got the emphasis on stability. Exactly, later on I'm not going to be able to do that. I think this is very important now for women. You should do a little bit more exercises for your back than you do for your chest. You should focus on strengthening the shoulders coming back, having that good strong posture because you're going to need that when your weight comes on the front of your body and also later on when you're carrying the baby and breastfeeding, you want that mid-back to stay strong because a common problem you see with women at the end or especially after is they get neck tension, lots of neck tension because their shoulder girl's trying to stay stabilized while they're holding the baby in front of them. They're always looking down. Always looking down at breastfeeding. So I like to kind of offset that by while we're working out, let's strengthen those muscles that pull the shoulders back. So we actually eliminated all chest stuff. I was just, I told her that we're going to incorporate because you can, you can fall. We have several programs that actually fall pretty nicely for somebody who's pregnant, and but yet they still have some things like chest exercises. And what I did was I eliminated those and I replaced it with things like the Turkish Get Up or put more emphasis on rows and deadlifts and back posterior chain type exercises. Like that was a lot of, most everything was posterior chain type exercises, split stance type of movements, Turkish Get Ups, core stability, all that stuff was what we would do is we take out the standard chest press in one of our programs and replace it with movements like that. Now diet wise, you know, first trimester can be real tough. I again, I experienced this with Jessica. Do you remember Jessica as a trainer? This is a fitness expert. She became so like meat was so disgusting to her during this period. It was very, very difficult. So it's like, do your best. Essentially the advice in the first trimester or when you're feeling this way is do your best but meat, organ meat, eggs, dairy, very, very nutrient dense and often contain the nutrients that your body needs. Definitely eat adequate protein. Your body is going to be building new tissue and essential fats. That's important for the nervous system of the baby. So I did want to kind of touch on that a little bit. The routine for first trimester typically looks like when we're considering the fatigue and the nausea and all that stuff two to three days a week. Okay, so if you're lifting weights two to three days a week doing full body, you're doing a pretty damn good job. So in some of you might even only do once a week. That's okay. But usually in my experience, it's about two to three days a week. I know Jessica was about two days a week consistently in that first trimester when she was feeling so crummy. Now the second trimester, this is the good, the fun trimester everybody says, right? This is when my fatigue is gone, nausea is gone, energy is good. Belly's still not that big. Exactly. Believe it or not, Jessica started hitting PRs in her second trimester. She wasn't trying to. Oh, wow. She wasn't trying to, but it would just happen. She was just stronger. And I remember we were kind of tripping over that. She's like, oh my gosh, that's a, I think that's a PR. Like I'm feeling really strong. You just start to feel really good. And along the lines of listen to your body. If this is you, like it is for a lot of women, this is when you can have a little bit more fun. You can, of course, everything has to be done appropriately, but you can lift heavier. You can bump up the volume a little bit. You can do more. If you want to do super sets and you feel good, this is the time to do it. This second trimester is when you can start to really kind of get your fitness levels. But again, always listening to your body. I like to maintain core stability as the focus here because the third trimester that's gone. So I like to always throughout the whole workout make that your, the focus. Towards the end of the second trimester, we're typically moving away from split stance exercises. Now I'm doing the squats. Now I'm doing the, you know, more of the deadlifts. By the way, great exercise for pregnant women. Sumo stance deadlifts. One of the best exercises I ever had women do that nice deep stance. It's good for the pelvic floor, knees apart. It just seems, and that's an exercise we could do all the way. Goblet squats. Are also very good. But you know, Jessica was able to do barbell squats and front squats for, you know, all the way throughout. No, we kept that all. I kept that all the way throughout and I kept Turkish getups. Turkish getups. This is now where I started loading her getups. Like the first one was like, we used like a really light like eight pound kettlebell through the first trimester. It was all about technique and like that. I stress that to her. Like emphasizing when she lifts her hips up, pausing there and squeezing and really focusing. And then as she transitioned to each movement, I think it's like eight movements, right? Total and a Turkish getup. Breaking down each one in sections. And that whole first trimester was all technique, technique, technique. And then when she starts feeling better and second trimester, now I began to load it. Now I was like, okay, let's really start to see how much weight you can stabilize over your head while doing this movement. In addition to keeping deadlifts, keeping back squats, all those things were still going great in second trimester. Now one thing I did forget, I should have mentioned this early on. This is one of the only times I recommend this particular practice. But in between sets, when you're sitting on a bench or a physio ball, I recommend sitting on a physio ball, especially for pregnant women, because it allows you to activate and feel and strengthen your pelvic floor muscles. So in between sets is a great time to practice Kegels. Kegel exercises. So this is an interesting factoid, but a lot of the times that women get pelvic floor damage from birth is because their pelvic floor muscles, they don't have good connection to them, they're weak and they're tight. So having good strength and the ability to activate the pelvic, because here's the deal. You need to be able to relax the pelvic floor muscles when you're pushing out a baby, but this also means you need to be able to feel and connect to them. That's the other side of connecting to a muscle is knowing how to relax it and allow it to stretch out. Kegel exercises help you do that. And when you do these Kegels, imagine you're trying to stop the flow of urine. That's one way to kind of feel those muscles, but you also want to imagine that you're pulling up. So you want to squeeze and pull up and hold that position for 10, 15, and maybe work yourself up to 30 seconds. If you get real good, you could do it. You can do reps in between your sets of exercises. I will say this, if you've never done this before, easy to overdo. So I've trained women before and they're like, oh, I've never done this. They're like every set, they do this in between sets. And then the next day they're like, my Kegelings fried. I'm really, really sore. So start real slow, but these Kegels in between sets, they don't fatigue your body enough to take away from the rest that you're doing with your workout, but they are strengthening key muscles that you're going to want to have strong and that you're gonna want to be connected to. Obviously, definitely while you're having the baby and then afterwards, they heal a lot faster. I still like to put an emphasis on back exercises and rows. One thing to consider towards the end of the second trimester, definitely in the third, you're, when you're doing a row, you might want to excessively arch your back. Try to maintain good posture, but don't excessively arch the back when you're rowing or you'll start to feel some shearing in the low back. Yeah, we haven't mentioned this because I think you think it's obvious, but we should touch on it that at this point too, this is when you're starting to get away from any exercise where you'd be laying on your belly, right? You may allow yourself to do that in the beginning of the first trimester when it's not a big deal, but you want to get away from doing anything where you're lying on your stomach, so avoid any exercises like that. Yes, now in the second trimester, if you're relatively fit and you've been working out before and now during, now you're doing full body workouts three to four days a week and usually that fourth day looks more like mobility and the three days look more like your traditional resistance strengths. This is a good time, I would say, to do that kind of a workout. Then we move into the third trimester. Now, the third trimester now, you're out of that kind of fun trimester where you are feeling good. Things start to feel a little uncomfortable in the third trimester because baby's growing, you're not able to stabilize as well. Temperature's heating up. Temperature's heating up, yeah. So Adam said, don't lay on your stomach. Here's another one, don't lay flat on your back. Not necessarily because it's not a good idea. I know they recommend don't sleep flat on your back. But if you've ever laid, you've never experienced this, you will. When you're pregnant, especially third trimester, especially when you're losing core stability, let's say you're laying flat on your back on a bench and you're done with your exercise. Now try to get up. And if you don't have a partner in there to help you, you're gonna have to roll off the bench to get up. Yeah, you have to roll over on your shoulder. Yeah, because you can't, and then because the bench is narrow, you gotta do this weird shuffle thing and it's not gonna happen. So I recommend incline exercises if you're doing presses. I do not recommend flat exercise. Well, this is also why I'm gonna make the case for, again, the Turkish Get Up, because it's inevitable, you're gonna be in bed, you're gonna be on the floor at one point, you're gonna have to get up, right? So avoiding it and adding to it in exercises, I agree, right? There's no reason for you to be laying down, doing a bench press right now at this point. But there's gonna be times when you have to get up out of the floor, get up out of your bed. And if you've done a good job of incorporating that exercise the entire time, you've now learned to kind of navigate that movement, even with a belly. So I've continued this movement all the way through this trimester also. So even as Katrina started to really grow and show, we would still be doing Turkish Get Ups because she's maintained that this entire time and we've slowly progressed, so that when she does get up off the floor or when she does get out of bed, we don't have like a hernia. Right, and what you wanna do when you do this is you wanna pay attention that you're not trying to activate your abs really strongly to get yourself up. If you do that and you notice that that tenting or that peaking in your stomachs, you'll notice that you'll contract your abs and you'll get kind of that point along the midline of your stomach. That means you're using your abs too much. Now, here's why you don't wanna necessarily do that. If you push that, you could, and this is just in my experiences, I don't know if there's any research to support this, but you could potentially cause splitting of the abs, which becomes a problem. I know a lot of women after pregnancy have issues with the abs splitting because then they don't wanna go back together. So you wanna be able to use your arms, turn sideways, use your hips. Again, this is why I recommend all incline exercises if you're gonna do presses or upright seated exercises if you have access to like cables or bands and not exercises that are flat. In the third trimester, I typically start to reduce the volume and I start to reduce the intensity. You're probably gonna feel uncomfortable, you're gonna overheat a little bit, you might not, you're gonna fatigue a little faster. Again, listen to your body. So usually, if you were to look at the whole pregnancy kind of scale of workouts when I would train women, it was like we'd start off easier first trimester, we'd have a harder workouts in the second and then taper off. And then we come back down, kind of like pyramid style coming back down. Yeah, and I'm really working on, again, almost like coming right back to stability form technique, all that kind of stuff in the third trimester and like walk around doing like carries and things and really paying attention to how the body is now compensating with this different load. So that way, you're just more comfortable in your body and you're more aware of how to make these micro adjustments to help. Yeah, I really like wide stance squats during this period. First off, it clears your belly so it's not hitting your legs or getting in the way. Plus, there's benefit to getting stronger in that wide legged position. It tends to activate the pelvic floor muscles and it keeps those hips strong in that kind of that wide range of motion. So if you normally, you know, if let's say you squat traditionally conventional, as you start to get into the third trimester, lighten the load, you should do that anyway, but really start to practice getting the legs wider and wider and the feet pointed out further. If you ever watched me training a woman in a third trimester, the squats are very much like these, you know, sumo looking style, you know, type squats. Wide and trying to maintain depth. I mean, I used to even use the TRX a bit too to just have them sit in that low position and really like, you know, get comfortable in being able to access recruitment and work their way out of those positions. Well, here's a great example of how we manipulate things like tempo, right? So like you, Sal, I've, except for in the second trimester, I've put a lot of emphasis on the sumo squats, the sumo deadlifts, goblet squats, wide stance, right? So I've already started to really push and strength train here. When I get into the third trimester, now we're going to back off a little bit on the volume. One of the ways to back off on volume is pull back on the load a little bit, but then now I'm going to mess with like tempo. Slow down, slow it down at the bottom of the, of the metrics. Yes, exactly. Squeeze and control at the bottom. So I would actually do like pause squat, pause sumo squats with her. She get down to the very bottom and have her pause for two to three seconds, then come back out of it. So we lighten the load. So we have less risk now because we're not loading her up very much, but then we can still keep the intensity relatively high by slowing down the tempo and then really trying to control and strengthen all those muscles in the pelvic floor. Yes. Now I get a lot of women who ask me, what can I do for my core in the third trimester? Okay, nothing direct, but there are some exercises you can do to kind of help maintain stability. One thing I like to do is using a band. You can do this with a resistance band, attach a band to something and then stand sideways to it and with the band close to your chest, brace your core and then bring your arms. Pale of press. Pale of press. Bring your arms out in front of you and just brace your core. And what you're trying to do is just prevent your body from twisting. That counter rotation will maintain some of that, you know, that stability in the core and it's a great exercise to do that. Focus on breathing. This is really important, but especially in the third trimester, I think while you're exercising, while you're doing your reps, you're doing your lifts, don't hold your breath at all during these lifts, okay? So there's nothing wrong with holding your breath when you're lifting heavy normally, but in the third trimester, don't you get a weight, hold your breath and then do an exercise. The whole time you're... Yeah. The whole time. I want controlled breath throughout the whole workout that's gonna come in handy when you're going through labor to really be able to activate the diaphragm and keep core stability while you're breathing controlled. We don't wanna try to push the heart rate up for no reason. Yeah, I love those, especially working on breathing and things like that. On the days where we're focused a little bit more on mobility or like yoga poses and things like that where it's a little bit more focused on the restorative side of everything, but it's such an important piece and component going in is to be able to have breath control and be able to have access to that. Totally. We haven't really talked a lot about nutrition and there's a reason for that. I think it's important that we in this episode we at least go over and address that. There is a lot of myth around this idea that because you're raising a child inside of you that you need to eat for two. I think that was one of the biggest mistakes that I saw especially in earlier on. It's less, I think more people are aware of it today than what they were 20 years ago, but how many times have you heard that statement before? Oh, I'm eating for two now, right? Like so... It's like a free pass at that point. It does, it becomes a free pass to over-consume and I forget what the approximate number that they've came out with with research, but I think it's like 140 calories more a day is all your body really needs to support. Yeah, it's not that much. No, it's not very much. 140 calories is easy. You can get that in a little yo-play yogurt and you're already over that, right? So it does not take much more calories and you're probably at a greater risk over-consuming. So keep that into consideration as we're going through all of these trimesters even though that you're getting tired and naps and you may be sitting around more often and your belly's getting bigger and maybe cravings are kicking up. So you're thinking that you need to feed the body all these extra calories. The truth of it is you're not and over-consuming like that, you're at a greater risk than just giving your body what it needs. Now that's when it's averaged out. I know in the second and third trimester it's more calories than that. I know Doug just pulled it up right here, especially the third trimester could be as much as 450 calories extra a day. That's the recommendation from the Institute of Medicine but even that's not- Wow, I would challenge the shit out of that. 450 extra calories in a day. Yeah, and here's my experience training women through pregnancy. It's a range and it depends on her health. It depends on how she's working out. Here's what I would always do, I would always say. First of all, I've never and I do not recommend unless there's special circumstances that you sit there and weigh and measure everything while you're pregnant, wrong time to do it. First off, from a mental standpoint, you're probably already being challenged with the fact that your body's changing and that you can't do anything about it. So to make it even more of a focus that I got to watch all these calories and do all this thing too specific or too hardcore. Psychologically stressful. It's very, it can make things very challenging. I would recommend rather than doing the focusing on that, here's what you need to focus on. Focus on nutrient density. Make sure you try to aim for, rather than taking things away, prioritize foods that are nutrient dense, that have proteins, that have essential fats, carbohydrates that are easy to digest. So let's say you have a craving and you're like, ooh, I wanna eat, I don't know, something that maybe not the healthiest thing. Then I would say, okay, before you do that, prioritize these nutrient dense foods first. Let's do that first and then see if you still want some of these other foods. So the way I've done it with every client and did it with Katrina is we don't count calories at all like that. It's not, and if you're hungry, eat. But don't allow that to be the free pass to eat whatever it is that you want. Again, remember, you are feeding your child right now. Quality. Yes, and so I would never tell a pregnant client nor my wife that, hey, if you're hungry, no, you shouldn't eat anymore because you've had 2000. Your calories are too high. Yeah, no, eat, eat, but make a wise decision and just be careful that that doesn't mean a free pass of eat whatever you want. Because here's what ends up happening as you fill up on foods that are not nutrient dense. You end up eating 3,000 calories but 1,000 of those calories came from a frosty freeze or came from a pie or some shit like that. If you ate that all in steak and vegetables and pasta and things like, okay, go for it. I'd rather you get it from think calories like that than you getting it from a bunch of sugar or crap. So be mindful if you're going to monitor yourself that way where you say, hey, if I'm hungry, I'm going to eat, be mindful of the choices that you're making. That in itself, you'll be amazed by the body will naturally regulate, give yourself the extra calories that you need to just buy your appetite. Oh, I mean, you know, organ meats to some extent, I know they're gross, but those are good eggs, full eggs, the yolks themselves, you know, very high in choline and nutrients that your body's going to need. Very important one, yeah. Dairy, high quality meat, very, very nutrient dense. That's a good idea to eat. Fish, if you're okay to eat fish, if your doctor says it's fine for you to eat certain fish, I would go with the fatty fish, salmon, wild caught. You're gonna get those omega-3 fatty acids. You know, Jessica would supplement with fish roe. So she actually bought fish roe, which is very high in those omega-3 fish eggs. And she would take like a teaspoon every day to get those omega-3s. So that's, you know, something you can do. Of course, vegetables are good. You might want to fully cook your vegetables. You might find that your digestion is a little bit off and eating raw vegetables might actually bother you. Olives, olive oil, you know, those kinds of things are pretty good. Here's another thing we didn't touch on. One way to really help deal with fatigue that also will help you with the workouts is you're okay taking naps. You know, taking a nap one or two times a day, it may preserve the energy that you need to go and do your workouts and your exercise and you'll feel a lot better. Don't feel guilty about taking a nap. And then when it comes to nutrition, I want to go, you know, kind of bring it back to that. Like it can be very difficult, especially if you're having extreme nauseousness and your body just seems to reject almost everything around you. I look, again, I witnessed this firsthand with a fitness professional who is my wife. In that first, she really struggled with nutrition in that first trimester because healthy foods, some healthy foods were so just so gross to her that I even cooking them, she had to leave the room because it would make her throw up. And so in that case, I was like, and I sit down with them like, look, honey, it's fine. We're okay. We set ourselves up real well leading into this. Like you don't need to eat all these foods that you think you're supposed to eat, especially if they're making you throw up when you listen to your body. So gotta be okay with yourself. Gotta be reasonable. That's right. Now, if you want structured workout programming, well, first of all, number one, the best possible thing you can do is hire yourself a really good trainer. They're gonna individualize your workout. There's nothing that can replace that. But if you want the second best thing, you can follow some of our maps programs. And the ones that I recommend are this, if you're starting out and you haven't worked out and you're just starting your workout and you're getting into it, map starter, start there. That's the workout. But if you're somebody that's been working out, you've been relatively consistent and you wanna kind of have a whole routine that you could just follow, you don't have to think about it, we have something called the Fit Mom Bundle. That's at mapsfitnessproducts.com and that has maps anywhere. Great workout to start with. It's got maps hit in there, which is great when you're feeling good, you wanna get those calorie burning workouts, build up that stamina. It also has maps metabolic. Pre-phase and maps metabolic has been so appropriate for so many of the pregnant women that I've worked with and trained with. It's a great basic full body workout that you can follow throughout the whole pregnancy. And if you're fit and you're feeling good, you can even listen to your body, but you can even move through all the different phases of those programs. And then when you have the baby, of course, when you get the clearance, you can jump back in, start slow, you'll be blown away by how quickly your body starts to respond and how good you feel just because you set yourself up so well. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube if you wanna look at our faces. You can also find us all on Instagram. You can find Doug the producer at Mind Pump Doug. You can find Justin the funny guy at Mind Pump Justin. You can find Adam the handsome jerk at Mind Pump Adam. And then you can find me at Mind Pump South. Oh snap. 15 steps in a row is like a big deal of like staying balanced. You know, so like we stand apart from each other and then get a little bit further apart. Come on, come to mommy, come to daddy. And he's at that phase where he'll be walking and he's all excited to come towards daddy, loses balance and then go left and he just stays left. Yeah. And just keeps going to do this. Well, that's where we're going now. Yeah, he just goes the other direction.