Pregnant and Still Lifting? The Guidelines Don't Fit You

A study published this year in the Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal followed women who kept lifting heavy through pregnancy and postpartum. One number stood out to me. Thirty five percent of them said someone had warned them against their usual training, most often a midwife.¹

That number does not surprise me. I hear a version of it in almost every intake conversation with a client who trained seriously before getting pregnant. She wants to know if she has to stop. Often the advice she has already gotten is vague, cautious to the point of being unhelpful, or contradicts what she knows about her own body from years of training.

Why the Guidelines Don't Fit Every Body

The researchers point to a real gap. Most exercise guidelines for pregnancy were written with a general, moderately active population in mind. They were not written for someone who squats twice her bodyweight or has spent a decade under a barbell. So when an experienced lifter asks a provider for specific guidance, the provider often falls back on general caution because that is the only guidance available to them. Caution is not wrong. But generic caution applied to a specific body is still a mismatch.

The same study found something else worth sitting with. Resistance training was often more feasible for these women through pregnancy than running or jumping, because it can be adjusted in ways high impact cardio cannot. Load, range of motion, and position are all things a coach can modify week to week as a pregnancy progresses. That is a very different conversation than simply telling someone to stop.

Where Coaching Fits, and Where It Doesn't

I say this as someone who is not a doctor or a physiotherapist. I am a coach, and my job in this situation is not to override anyone's medical care. It is to sit between a client and her provider and translate. If a provider raises a specific concern about a specific movement or symptom, that concern needs to be taken seriously and often means bringing in a pelvic floor physiotherapist or getting clearance in writing. What I push back on is the version of caution that says stop everything with no plan for what comes next.

What This Looks Like in Practice

In practice this looks like a few concrete adjustments as pregnancy progresses. Trading barbell back squats for goblet or front loaded variants as the belly grows and the bar path gets awkward. Watching for coning or doming at the midline and regressing load the moment it shows up, not after. Slowing the pace of progression rather than stopping progression altogether, since deconditioning has its own costs. None of this is about pushing anyone to train harder than feels right. It is about not assuming that pregnant automatically means fragile.

If you are pregnant and lifting, or thinking about staying active through pregnancy, the most useful thing you can do is find a coach who works with active pregnancy and postpartum clients and will ask what your training actually looks like before telling you what to change about it. Generic advice is easy to give. Specific adjustment takes more work, and it is worth asking for.