 Our first caller is Jackie from New Jersey. Hey Jackie, how can we help you? Hey, so thank you for taking my question. I've been listening to you guys forever, so I appreciate it. To give you a little bit of background context, I am eight months pregnant, former athlete and personal trainer, fitness director. So I've been into lifting for probably about six to seven years or so. I have done maps aesthetic and strong and love them both. Currently training about two to three times a week, that's it right now. Kind of like a phase two in aesthetics, if I'm feeling up for it right now. So I have a two part question. The first part is, can I still make physical progress in the third trimester or should I really just focus on trying to move and like trying to feel good? And second part would be, you know, post baby once I'm cleared, of course. How do I measure what's too much and how do I, you know, what program do I do? What, how do I get back into things? This is so common with athletes and trainers and coaches. Of course. To shut off the athletic competitive mindset of I want to make gains and progress. Impossible. And absolutely is not, I mean, I had to have this conversation. Dominate this pregnancy. Katrina is the same way. She's a collegiate athlete. She's been into fitness for many years. She was in great shape going into the pregnancy. And so this was the same conversation I had to have with her as like, honey, this is not about making gains or progress in your body right now. It's about maintaining, being healthy and it's all about the health of the baby, not about you at this moment. And so you got to remind yourself that is that, you know, and you're, and like I told her, it's amazing how resilient the body is, especially for someone like you who's been training for as long as you've been training, your body's gonna bounce right back and your priority should not be to try and make gains that should be about optimizing how you feel on a daily basis. Yeah, now this is, now, of course, there's gonna be some people that can progress in the third trimester. I really, really, really advise against even aiming for that. Now, the first trimester totally different. That's like, you know, the first and second trimester, depending on if you have morning sickness and odd stuff, sometimes people's performance gets better. But what you're really trying to do is set yourself up for a great rebound after you have the baby. And then, of course, it improves or impacts the health of the baby. In fact, I just read a study that talked about how the ability of a baby or a child to build muscle and burn body fat is actually improved when the mother exercises probably, you know, due to gene expression, right? Because of the environment that the baby's in. But yeah, no, you're gonna go in and just listen to your body, train yourself to kind of maintain a little bit. Obviously, in the third trimester, you're not gonna do a lot of core exercises like you did before. There's probably a lot of split stance exercises you're not gonna be able to do because your belly's in the way. Yada, yada, yada. Post pregnancy, here's the deal. Go way easier than you think, okay? When you have, especially in the third trimester, with the stretching of the abdominal, the transverse abdominis, the core muscles, your core stability is gonna be non-existent compared to where it's been before. If you attempt to train the way you did before, the risk of causing problems or creating really bad recruitment pattern issues is quite high. Maps starter would be an ideal program post pregnancy. Now, here's the good news. Adam said how resilient you'll be. Oh my gosh, if you lift weights, build muscle, the resilience, even if you don't exercise, let's say something happens, you have a C-section, you can't train, whatever. Boy is the body resilient. It's really insane, like my wife, she worked out real hard pre and then during pregnancy and after pregnancy, she couldn't train for a while and her body barely changed because of the muscle that she had built. But go easier than you think. You'll get there faster that way than if you try to push yourself. So real easy, take your time. You'll find at about month six postpartum, month six to month nine is when really things start to feel kind of good. Some of this depends on breastfeeding. By the one year mark, you're gonna be flying. So give yourself some time. All right, it's awesome, thank you. No problem, do you have access, by the way, to Maps Starter? I don't. You do now, we're gonna send that over. We'll send that over to you. It sounds like, check your right pocket. Yeah, I like that. It'll happen. Hey, by the way, congratulations on the... Thank you, thank you very much. You know if it's a boy or a girl? It's a girl. Oh, that's great. Yeah, a little girl. September girl in our family, so. Wonderful, wonderful, congratulations. Thanks for calling in. Thank you guys. I remember managing gyms and I would have, of course, female staff, right? And they were all typically into fitness. And I remember distinctly, there was this one period of time where I had this female trainer and this group X instructor, both pregnant at the same time. And it was a big deal because they were both pregnant and they'd come to the gym, everybody knew or whatever. The group X instructor was obviously a cardio fanatic. Classes and spin classes and, you know, at the time it was step classes, that was a big deal. The trainer was straight up resistance training, strength training, fanatic. Love lifting weights, the whole thing. It was incredible. And of course, this is not technically a study because it's only two people. But I remember watching... Yeah, I know exactly the difference in their bodies afterwards. How quickly they bounced back. Oh, the strength training trainer, like it was insane how she bounced back. And the other trainer, the other, excuse me, group X instructor, actually after a while came to the other trainer and was like, my body isn't responding, what's going on? She's like, you need to lift weights. So that's when I, that's the first time I really saw that difference. All the work you had in the first two trimesters, which is, you know, what you kind of brought up. But I remember even with Courtney, it was the same thing like between the difference between the two boys, you know, pregnancies because the second one was a little more difficult and there was issues in terms of her being able to work out. It was complete contrast, you know, how quickly she bounced back, you know, with our first. So yeah, that's the majority of the work going, you know, into the recovery process. So like the third trimester is like, okay, let's just get ready. Yeah, I was amazed by how fast Katrina bounced back. And you know, I've read a lot of stuff on what they estimate like the calorie burn, metabolism boosting that you get from breastfeeding. And I don't know how much I subscribed to how accurate a lot of those are, because I think there's a major variance for per women and stuff. But boy did Katrina have a huge. Courtney did too. Oh my God, Katrina, I was, it blew my mind. I was just like, yeah, she was building muscle and leaning out like and eating like crazy. I was so fascinated with how her body was morphing and changing like week over week with the amount of calories that she was consuming because the breastfeeding completely sped her metabolism up. So it definitely worked in her favor.