What Kind of Exercise Should I do After I Have a Baby?

What Kind of Exercise Should I do After I Have a Baby?

Apr 8, 2022 mindpump

A lot has changed since you probably last worked out. You just had a baby now, so your body has gone through a lot hormonally and your life has made huge changes. Make sure you ease back into working out and really listen to your body. Don’t overextend yourself. The best exercises are going to be compound exercises but have some compassion for yourself and understand you might not be ready to fully jump right back in.

Include Mobility

I’d say before even getting back into lifting, let’s focus on mobility work first. This can come in the form of just bodyweight exercises that you can take through a full range of motion to get your strength back. Your body went through muscular changes during pregnancy and because of that you probably have a lot of areas that got weakened during pregnancy. Some common areas are the pelvic floor, and core overall. Let’s target these areas to tighten and get their strength back. We don’t want to risk getting injured because we overextended ourselves.

Mobility work is one of the most important things we can ALWAYS include even if we are in tip top shape. It’ll always address the weaker areas and help you form a strong mind muscle connection to that area so that when you do your regular lifts, you are able to better feel that movement and get your muscles to grow.

Progress Into Compound Movements

As I mentioned before, compound movements like the squat, shoulder press, deadlift, and row will allow you to get the most bang for your buck. They hit the most muscles in a given exercise. We want to rebuild your foundation, or get back any overall strength you may have lost.  

If you are able to get into the gym, you don’t need to be doing a body part split workout. Shoot for 2-3 full body workouts. The beauty of this training style is, now that you have a kid your schedule is going to be thrown out of whack. By shooting for full body workouts, if you end up missing one, it won’t be a huge deal cause you’ll have still hit the full body at least one other time that week. On the other hand, if you only did chest Monday, and missed legs Wednesday, you’ll be waiting an entire WEEK just to hit the legs again. Don’t lift to failure. Stay 2-3 reps shy of technician failure so you prioritize good form over moving more weight.

You’ll not only hit the full body, but for most people you may even find you grow the most using this method. It gives you the frequency to stimulate muscle growth on every body part at least two times a week. You are also hitting the exercise for a given body part fresher, allowing you to utilize more weight which is the key to muscle growth.

Increase Your Daily Movement

If working out with weights isn’t feasible yet, there are still other ways you can get the ball rolling again. Try increasing your daily movement (or step count), by finding moments in the day to get moving. This could be taking your baby for a walk around the block, or intentionally getting up to walk around the house. The key here is creating those little bouts of movement to increase your overall activity even without a gym.

Incorporating resistance training into your lifestyle will build more muscle. Having more muscle means less risk for injury, gaining back your independence, and increasing your metabolism. The more muscle we have, the more calories we burn at rest. Resistance training will also maintain any current muscle you do have, so we want that strong signal that cardio can’t provide to keep and build any muscle we are looking to achieve.

Other than that, make sure your sleep is as on schedule as you can. Having a baby definitely doesn’t make it any easier, but this is why we need sleep to be the biggest priority. We can workout all we want, but if we aren’t allowing ourselves the proper sleep to recover from it we are just leaving our body in a constantly stressed state. Add IN the fact, you also have these new responsibilities of taking care of a family. Compassion, and self care is the main focus that should be on your mind for the next 12 months.