MamasteFit started in October of 2017 after the birth of my first daughter, Adeline.
I was an active-duty Army Officer and decided to transition off of active duty to become a stay-at-home mom in 2017. This transition from a full-time career to a stay-at-home mom was a confusing one. I was so excited to be a mom, but for the past 7+ years I had identified myself by my career, and suddenly I no longer had a career to focus my energy.
And I was healing from an unexpected birth experience where I was poorly treated by my medical team.
I was trying to figure out what to do as a creative outlet, and my friend Casey and I came up with the concept of MamasteFit: a place where moms could come with their babies and kids to be together.
It began in 2017...
In September 2017, I decided that I wanted to become a perinatal fitness trainer. I reached out to one of the men I was deployed with while I was in the Army to connect with his wife who was a personal trainer. She gave me some great initial guidance on how to approach becoming a personal trainer and introduced me to Randy Sharpe, the owner of SPARTC gym.
SPARTC was a personal training-focused gym in Aberdeen, NC. Randy welcomed us into the space with open arms and was a great mentor as I was slowly building MamasteFit.
The best part about being in SPARTC was that Randy supported us being in the gym with our babies and kids. Childcare can be a huge barrier to postpartum fitness. So, being able to have our kids with us while we were in the gym was so helpful!
The gym was great! We had space for us to exist without feeling like we were a burden to others. Moms would come with their kids and do a prenatal or postpartum-specific workout, and the kids would play together.
We were moving our bodies, preparing for birth or healing after birth, and socializing with others! This was huge for our postpartum health.
A few months after starting MamasteFit, I realized we needed to adjust our prenatal program to support more birth preparation. And the labor prep workout was born!
The labor prep workout included:
- 15-20 seconds of a cardio effort to increase heart rate and create exercise-induced stress
- Then we would practice different labor positions, comfort, and relaxation techniques for 1-2 minutes.
This allowed our clients to begin to practice different labor positions to figure out which ones they felt they could relax the most with and which comfort techniques they preferred as they prepped for their birth.
We encouraged their partners to attend these workouts too!
But, one day, one of my client’s husband was not massaging the same way that I had been, so she asked me to be her doula. And I said absolutely!
I pursued by doula certification and was mentored by an incredibly experienced doula! I was really fortunate in how I began my doula journey.
After about a year of only offering fitness classes, we expanded to offer birth doula support and childbirth education classes! I am so thankful for my clients that transitioned to becoming coaches and my first doula partner that helped make this expansion in services possible! I could NOT have done as much as I have with MamasteFit without the support of so many along the way!
The MamasteFit IG Page: Our Humble Beginnings
Our instagram page started with just a few followers–mostly my family and friends. Slowly, we started to gain some local followers but overall, nothing impressive was happening with our IG page.
Until we had our first “viral” post!
After taking a Spinning Babies class, I was introduced to pelvic mechanics and how movement can influence how your pelvis opens for birth!
I wanted to demonstrate the bottom of the pelvis opening more with internal rotation of the femurs (knees in, ankles out), so I painted some white dots on my butt and asked my husband to film some borderline OnlyFans content. (I kid)
In the video, when my ankles moved out (aka internal rotation) the white dots also moved out further! And we had just over a 100 likes on the post, we saw it on our explore page, and we suddenly gained over 1000 followers!
We realized that for our online growth, we needed to emphasize the use of visual aids and educational content to grow our social media page.
Over the next 2 years, our page slowly grew as we continued to share more and more educational content. And the gym grew too!
Eventually, we needed to move to our own facility. We were sad to leave Randy, and I was sad to leave our daily conversations, but we had grown to a point where we needed our own space.
The MamasteFit Fitness Program Development
Because we trained perinatal clients in-person, we were able to develop fitness programs that supported a large number of clients.
This makes us unique as a perinatal-focused training company. Many online prenatal/postnatal fitness trainers do NOT train in-person clients, so they write programs based on their own experience. If they do train in-person clients, they tend to train more general population.
We exclusively train perinatal fitness clients, which makes our expertise in their training population hard to beat. Similarly, if a trainer only trains bodybuilding clients or Olympic weightlifting clients; they will have the expertise to make an athlete really good in that one particular sport. We do this with perinatal fitness.
If I only wrote programs based on my own pregnancy or postpartum, it would be a disservice to every client who has a different experience than me. And with our in-person clients, we realized that there were so many different experiences throughout the perinatal timeframe!
Roxanne had more SPD during her pregnancy, while I had more SI joint pain. Casey had a c-section birth, while I had a vaginal birth. There we so many different experiences that we needed to support!
We were able to develop our programs to support a variety of experiences, such as with our pelvic stability program and c-section-specific recovery program.
Training in-person clients helped us make better online prenatal and postnatal fitness programs! We tested every program and tweaked it based on in-person feedback from our clients.
MamasteFit 2.0 and the Pandemic
In early 2020, we moved into our current location! The gym was packed, we were excited to be in our own space. And then the pandemic hit and our gym was closed by the state for several months.
During this time, we realized that we needed more than JUST fitness classes to support the gym. Being such a niche training facility, we needed other revenue sources to fund the facility.
We offered in-person childbirth education courses, in addition to fitness memberships. But this was not enough. We realized we needed other professionals in our gym to support the overhead costs of running our own facility.
Because of the pandemic, our gym gained a few wellness practitioners who were either laid off, had their hours reduced, or realized they were not happy where they were previously.
Currently, we have a Webster Certified Chiropractor, Physical Therapist, and Massage Therapist that all share our space to support our local community! This has made a huge difference in the support that we can provide. Each of us has found that we can provide more quality care since we did not need to be as worried about overhead costs.
The Start of MamasteFit Online
Roxanne and I had been talking about filming and creating an online course as our social media following grew, but just kept putting it off.
And then the pandemic shutdown our gym (and it seemed the world), so we decided now was the time to film the online childbirth education course.
With an empty gym, we furiously filmed the course in a few weeks and released it to the world! And then we followed it with more online courses, such as our birth workers course and fitness programs.
The timing of the online courses met the increased demand for online and virtual content as the world was slowly recovering from the pandemic shutdowns.
MamasteFit Today
In 5+ years of MamasteFit, we have grown from a small class offering in SPARTC to our own training facility that specializes in perinatal fitness with other professionals offering support for this phase of life.
We have expanded to offer not only in-person support, but also online and virtual support for those all over the world!
In the future, we hope to offer more postpartum education classes and c-section specific resources! Maybe one day we will even expand to offering more lactation and nutrition support. Thanks for being with us and following our journey. We would not be MamasteFit without all of your support!
The MamasteFit Podcast
Listen to the MamasteFit Podcast, new episodes every Wednesday!
Our podcast is sponsored by Needed a nutrition company focused on optimal nourishment for the perinatal journey, and Crossover Symmetry, world-class training, and equipment for pain, fitness, and performance.
Use code MAMASTEPOD for 20% off your first Needed order.
Use code MAMASTEFIT for 20% off your Crossover Symmetry equipment package.