When it comes to prenatal lifting, many expectant mothers wonder if it’s safe to continue weightlifting during pregnancy. The good news is that with some modifications, weightlifting can be a great way to stay fit and healthy throughout your pregnancy.
Exercising throughout pregnancy is incredibly beneficial for both you and your baby. Prenatal exercise has been associated with increased prenatal comfort, improved birth outcomes, and decreased occurrence of prenatal complications such as gestational diabetes and hypertension-related complications.
Resistance training, or lifting weights, during pregnancy, is recommended by ACOG, the governing body of obstetrics!
But it can be confusing HOW to modify your workouts throughout your pregnancy to accommodate for your pregnancy and stay safe as you lift weights!
Let’s break down three ways to modify your prenatal lifts to support your pregnancy and preparation for birth!
3 Ways to Modify Your Prenatal Lifts
As we approach lifting weights during our pregnancy, we want to ensure that we are lifting with optimal form to decrease injury and support a strong pregnancy!
There are simple things we can do to optimize our prenatal lifting.
We can modify our lifts by:
- Widening the stance to make space for belly
- Increasing support at the bottom of our lifts
- Changing the set up of the lift to better support our pregnant body
1) Widen the Stance
The first modification is to simply widen the stance to make space for your belly. This is a common modification for lower-body focused exercises, such as the squat or deadlift!
When the stance is too narrow, it can impede hip flexion. If we can’t bend at our hip, we will round in the back to lower in our squats or deadlifts. This is less optimal, as we want to maintain a fairly neutral spine position under load, especially during pregnancy when we have more relaxin that increases joint laxity!
Want to learn more modifications for each main lift throughout your pregnancy? Join our prenatal lifting modifications seminar! We will break down HOW to modify each lift throughout your pregnancy.
The deadlift is a common lower body exercise that we can widen the stance to modify throughout our pregnancy! The deadlift I find is one of the first lifts we need to modify to accommodate the belly due to the deep hip flexion required to lower the bar to the floor.
Watch the video for a breakdown of how to modify the deadlift during pregnancy.
If you want more of a breakdown of WHAT to do throughout your prenatal workouts, check out our prenatal fitness programs! We offer it in two formats:
- 40-Week Prenatal Strength in the Teambuildr App (traditional delivery format)
- Prenatal On-Demand with full-length workout videos that you follow along as you workout
2) Increase support at bottom of lifts
Next, to modify our prenatal lifting we can add more support to the bottom of our lifts. This can decrease the overall range of motion, which can decrease strain or discomfort at the end range positions.
Usually at the bottom of our lifts, we may have decreased space (belly is in the way) for our hip thrusts or deadlifts, or we may need more support to limit lower back strain, such as in our squats or bent over rows.
Adding a box or plates to support at the bottom of our lifts can increase comfort while you are lifting during your pregnancy, and with the decreased strain the lower back could also limit injury, as well.
Watch the breakdown video on how we modify the bent-over row to accommodate pregnancy.
3) Change the set up
Finally, we can change HOW we are set up in our lifts. We can keep the same focus or intent of the movement but set ourselves up ina way that better supports our pregnant body.
Some common ways to change the setup are:
- Bring the feet up onto the bench to decrease strain in the lower back and belly for bench press;
- Adjust to a seated position for the overhead press;
- Or even change from a horizontal to vertical set up such as a hip thrust to a kneeling hip thrust variation.
There are a lot of set up variations and reasons to modify that we will break down in our prenatal lifting seminar and that we include in our prenatal fitness programs.