 Next caller is Hannah from Wisconsin. Hi, Hannah. How can we help you? Hi, guys. So I'm currently 28 weeks pregnant and just thinking about after I have the baby reintroducing exercise and continuing to strengthen the pelvic floor. Okay, so congratulations, by the way, since you're first. Yep, thank you. Yeah, awesome. Congratulations. Okay, training right now? Yeah, I'm currently on a pretty consistent exercise plan. Are you following a MAPS program? Are you following something else? Not really right now. I've done MAPS anabolic, but then I started doing more like body weight and just lighter weight exercises. Some stuff that I learned from MAPS anabolic, but not super specific to that. Okay, that's good. Do you have MAPS starter? Because if you don't, I think that would be a perfect program for you to do now and then postpartum as well. Do you have that? No, I don't. Okay, well you do now, so Doug's going to send that over to you. Okay, so a couple things about, or a few things to talk about with your questions. So number one, a lot of the pelvic floor muscle issues that happen or damage that happens oftentimes has to do with the child birth process, the delivery process itself. If you haven't already, I would look into how to give birth while relaxing the muscles of the pelvic floor and allowing the baby to come out oftentimes. And I learned this recently through taking classes with my wife. A lot of times when women are tight and tense and they're told to push, this is where some of the damage in those muscles happen. So that's very important. It's very important to avoid damaging that area or those muscles during the child delivery process. So that's number one. Now, number two, postpartum. And by the way, a lot of the best resources in my experience are from the natural child birth resources. So look at doulas and midwives that do natural child birth. You're doing that that way necessarily, but they're experts at successful deliveries that result in the minimal types of injuries. So I would look at those resources. But now, postpartum, you want to practice, as soon as you get clearance, you would do what you want to practice strengthening the muscles that it's very similar to stopping urine flow. It's called a kegel, so I'm sure you've heard of these before. But you can practice these throughout the day and hold and squeeze those muscles. It's a very basic, simple exercise. And then other exercises you're probably already familiar with like squats actually help strengthen the pelvic floor, especially when you're controlling those muscles as you get to the bottom of a squat. You could try exercises like bird dog. That's another exercise that you could do for the pelvic floor. The key is obviously how strong are you going into childbirth, how the childbirth happens, and then are you able to do exercises postpartum? So I love Map Starter here because it does cover most of these exercises that I was having Katrina doing. But I did have a few things that I did that were kind of like custom to what I wanted her to do. So I had her do walking lunges. And when she'd do walking lunges, I'd have her stabilize on one leg every time. She'd lunge, balance, lunge, balance. And when she'd balance, I'd actually ask her to tuck her tailbone. So engage her glutes and tuck her tailbone. Same movement as you would do if you were doing like a floor bridge. So a walking lunge with just her body weight with that movement and the focus and control is on the stability portion and then being able to kind of squeeze her glutes and tuck her tailbone. So that was an exercise that I added that isn't into the routine or I modified, I should say. Another thing that I had her do that I thought she got a lot of benefit from is a Turkish getup. And we started with just her body weight at first. I didn't need her to load it. I just wanted her to perform the mechanics of that exercise and each portion of it's basically broken up into eight steps. Her really emphasized each step and control her body through. And then we slowly started to load it. And then the other thing was like her floor bridges. I think floor bridges. And I did a video on YouTube a long time ago, but you could look it up and I think it has to do. I forget the name of the video, Doug. I don't know which one it was. It was the glute activation. It's one of our top videos that you see me teach a proper floor bridge. I think the mistake that a lot of people make when they make the floor bridges, they don't activate their core before they go up into it. And so I think that portion of the floor bridge is so important even though it's such a small movement. Tuck your tailbone first. Yeah, get that activation. Yeah, I teach you to press your back against the ground first, activate the glutes and then come up into the bridge. That's all strengthening those pelvic floor muscles. I added those to her routine. And then I would say those exercises in with starter I think is a great way. And to Adam's point too with how he added that balance element with the lunges, you can also do with the floor bridges by just coming up with one leg. And really too with the bird dogs, the same thing. This is all anti-rotation. So we're trying to make sure that we regain that stability and that control there in the hips. So anytime it feels like it's about to turn on you, you're correcting that and you're stabilizing the entire pelvic girdle. Okay. Yeah, that's very helpful. So start maps, starter now, and then just resume that once I'm cleared for exercise. Yes. Yes, exactly. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for calling in, Hannah. Excellent. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's what you do before and during pregnancy is so important. So much focus is placed on what you do after that the setup is oftentimes ignored, I think. Well, we also didn't mention something to that, I think, because you talked about the importance of all this beforehand, right? Because so you don't tear anything when you go into actual pregnancy. I think the other challenge is if you already have a poor connection to your pelvic floor muscles because you don't train them and you don't strengthen them, right? You don't work on that connection. And then you take the drugs when you're in pregnancy because it's extremely painful and hard to get through in the first place. Then it numbs that area even more. So talk about making it even harder to connect to that. That's why it's even more important for the strength. So you have a very good connection to that area. So if you end up having to use any drugs in this case and you're numb, you still have the ability to connect there because you've practiced it so much where if you take a mother who hasn't been training, hasn't focused on the pelvic floor at all, then she goes into pregnancy and she takes the drugs because it's really, really rough. Then it's really tough to ask her to be able to connect to those muscles. Yeah, it's totally impossible. And again, I learned this while Jessica was pregnant. When you're tense or tight, you naturally tighten up those muscles and telling a mom to push while she's maybe unconsciously, not like willingly, but just doing it because she's scared or she's told to push or whatever, tightening those muscles. You are pushing through these muscles that are contracting and tight. You are going to cause problems. And so there's a lot of skill and technique that's involved in learning how to relax while you push. And this makes a huge difference.