 Our next caller is Kenzie from Ohio. Hi, Kenzie. How can we help you? Guys, it's nice to talk to you. I've listened to you for probably about five years now, so this is pretty cool. So a little background on me. I'm currently 18 weeks pregnant with identical twin girls. I'm a twin, my mom's a twin as well, so I guess it just runs in the family. My background is college soccer at Ohio State. I've ran a marathon and then I had a hip surgery, and then I got into bodybuilding. So that was for about five, three years, then got engaged, so focused, kind of on family. So now being pregnant with my training background, it's been a little difficult. It's not as fun to lift when I'm not lifting as heavy, so that's been a little difficult. So lifting is kind of just two times a week maybe now, if that. So because my twins are identical, I'm high risk, so my activity has gone down a little bit. So I'm just curious kind of getting ahead of myself, but once I have the babies and I'm cleared to work out, what is the best option to start with? Because I know my core will be really weak and probably have lost like a ton of muscle, so I'm just kind of curious with my background, but I know how to do lifts. We have a full gym in my house, so just kind of curious kind of where to go from there once the babies are born. So Kenzie, the hardest thing for you is going to be your competitive mindset and knowing how to steer that correctly. Just hearing your background, collegiate level athlete, bodybuilder, competitor, it sounds like you're kind of a badass and you're definitely gonna be in a different situation here and starting slow and right is gonna be really, really important and you're gonna be challenged to get impatient. So that was the first thing that I wanna start off with. I got cut out. Can you hear me? Well, I'm gonna finish telling you or tell Kenzie what I would have told her anyways, whether she can hear me or not. So the thing that I would say is that you gotta be very careful on the desire to, and I know Justin will be able to speak to this really well too, because he has a competitive mindset too, is going slow and gradual, right? So the goal is always to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change. In your case, I think that a map starter would be the ideal place to start and the one thing that, again, you're gonna be challenged with is if you've got a competitive bodybuilding type of background, it's not like heavy barbell squats, it's not movements like that, but it's definitely where you should be right now before you progress into something like a maps anabolic. Yeah, you know, when you're training, first off, to post pregnancy, a lot of your success post pregnancy is gonna be what you did before you got pregnant and what you did during your pregnancy. Now, two days a week of resistance training during pregnancy is plenty to prevent a lot of muscle loss and to maintain some strength. So that's actually really, really good, especially considering that you're pregnant with twins, which makes things much more difficult. Post pregnancy, Adam said map starter, that's the best program I would recommend. If you don't have map starter or for people who are listening who aren't familiar with map starter, essentially you wanna train a lot of unilateral exercises. So one leg, one arm, you wanna use a stability ball, you wanna go light and you wanna focus on full range of motion and you really wanna practice the movements, don't push the body. Allow your body to slowly progress and consider this, because I've trained a lot of women pre, during and post pregnancy and the three months post pregnancy is the hardest. After about four or five months, then the body really starts to kick into gear. So what you're doing for that first few months is really just getting your body to move right, getting your core to function again, because you're gonna be so disconnected from some of the muscles in your core. So getting those to fire, getting everything to kind of strengthen. After about four, five, six months, then you'll start to, and this is the comment I used to get from pregnant women all the time or post pregnant women all the time, was after about five or six months, they'd come to me and say, oh, I'm starting to feel like myself again. And then we would start to kind of ramp things up and then their bodies would progress rather quickly. But post pregnancy, you're just trying to move, get your body to reconnect because, and just for lack of a better term, during pregnancy, it feels like, and in some cases this is true, your body's not yours. What I mean by that's not- It's transforming into something else. And that's- It feels very, very accurate. Right, yeah, like to Adam's point, it's such a mental hurdle, especially I think for athletes to really change the mindset and change the approach towards what is sort of like, I mean, it's your home base. Training used to be, it meant something completely different when you'd go to approach it. And so I think just really kind of putting your mind around what's gonna be best, in terms of like listening to your body, feeling your body as you're working out and trying to come in with more of a calm head space, I think that that's really gonna help a lot. Yeah, so here's your two, the two options for someone like you. Cause I think Adam opened it up with any hit the nail square on the head, okay? Here's your two options. Either one, you go slower than you think and slowly allow your body to adjust and progress. Or here's the other thing that would probably happen with someone like you, which I've experienced with clients, is you end up injuring yourself, which is actually quite common. And that really sets you back. Your pelvic floor muscles will probably have some stuff going on there at the very least, some disconnection with some of your pelvic floor, especially if you deliver, you know, the babies, even if you don't, there's gonna be some stuff going on. You're not connected to your core muscles. They all have to stretch. You can't fire them as well. In fact, after you have the baby, when you go to do anything with your core, it's all hip flexors. You're gonna feel like there's no core stability whatsoever. The relaxing hormone or chemical that's released during pregnancy that loosens your body up. When you have twins, there's more of that. And so you're gonna be a bit hypermobile, meaning you're lacking some stability. So going slow is the name of the game. And if you push yourself too hard with lack of stability, you know, pelvic floor muscles not being connected or possibly injured, which is quite common with core weakness, you can run into some problems that then become long-term chronic problems. And it's not uncommon to get a female client who used to be an athlete and then they had a baby and then they tried to work out on their own. Then they'd come hire me and they'd say something like, you know, after I had my son six years ago, I've had this chronic back pain or this chronic hip pain. And then it's like backtracking is very, very difficult. So go very slow, take your time. You've got great muscle memory that's gonna work on your side. It can take about three to five months for you to start to feel like your body is what it used to be or even a semblance of it. So take your time. Map Starter, perfect program. And again, if you're listening and you don't know what Map Starter is, it's a lot of unilateral exercises, a lot of stability and it's using a physio ball through a lot of the exercises. Perfect, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. No problem, Kenzie. And we're gonna send you Map Starter if you don't have it, okay? Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. No problem, appreciate the sport. Yeah, there was a period of time where this was like, I had a lot of clients that I trained that were either pregnant, gonna get pregnant or just had a baby. Cause I trained, I had a studio for over 15 years and I trained one woman and then she was a part of like a mom's group. And so I just started getting all these moms. And the challenges with pregnancy and post pregnancy are unique. They're very unique to anybody else and it's literally like your core post, you don't, it's like you don't, imagine having to try to get a muscle to contract and you don't even know how anymore. That's literally what it feels like. It's like out of body experience for sure. Yeah, so you gotta take your time and go slow but I can't stress this enough. And Jessica's experienced this right now. She's obviously my wife, my son now is five, a little over five months old and I just did some body fat caliper test on her. And she's down to 22% and she's just getting leaner and she's like, what's going on? And I'm like, she's like, I'm not even working out that much. I'm only working out to- Her roaring metabolism. Yeah, she's only working out a couple days a week. Same thing. Yeah, she's working out a couple of days a week cause the baby's barely sleeping so she has to focus on sleep. She's like, why? She's like, this is weird. I'm like, honey, you were so consistent with resistance training before the baby and during your pregnancy that you set yourself up really well. Well, that's the thing. Yeah, if you have all that going into pregnancy makes it so much easier to rebound and then also too, it was crazy when Courtney was breastfeeding. It was like, all of a sudden it was like this fat burning machine turned on and so that's another benefit to it even though it's very difficult and it's a struggle, things like that, that your body will provide is pretty interesting. Yeah, I would love to see her not only do starter but I would love to see her follow the Maps Prime Pro webinar that I did. That is something that I would ask her to do too. I think just that'll help get her reconnected to everything. Yeah, you gotta kind of piece it back together. Yeah, and it's something she can do on her living room floor, do it once a week in there. I think it's just a great way to get her back in the routine. The thing whenever I hear someone like that, like right away, I think, oh man, this girl's got competitive background. She's body-building before. Oh yeah, she's gonna want to go to work. Yeah, the desire. I mean, it's just like, it's no different. I mean, it's very different than obviously my knee surgery, right? Having a baby is nothing like that. So I don't want to fucking, I don't want all the women. I know what it's like. I don't want all the women to crucify me for a second. I pull my knee once. What I mean is having a competitive mindset to get back because you know what your body's capable of, and I can relate to that, right? I can't relate to having a baby, but I can relate to the thinking that I can do much more. I did have a hemorrhoid, though. When my body says I can't, and sure as shit, that's exactly, I re-injured myself, set myself back six more months, and so yeah, taking it slow, listening to your body is gonna be crucial. Truth be told, some of the most challenging clients I've ever trained in my entire life were ex-athletes. Oh yeah, they're so hard. They're stubborn. You gotta slow them down. They're stubborn, too. And they don't get it, you know what I mean? Because they have this, they just remember how their body used to be, and it's like, it's not the same, dude. Yeah.