AUTO-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Brianna Battles  00:01

Welcome to the Practice Brave Podcast. I am the host Brianna Battles, founder of pregnancy and postpartum athleticism, and CEO of Everyday Battles. I’m a career strength and conditioning coach, entrepreneur, mom of two wild little boys and a lifelong athlete. I believe that athleticism does not end when motherhood begins, and this podcast is dedicated to coaching you by providing meaningful conversations, insights and interview topics related to fitness, mindset, parenting and of course, all the nuances of pregnancy and postpartum, from expert interviews to engaging conversations and reflections. This podcast is your trustworthy, relatable resource for learning how to practice brave through every season in your life.

Brianna Battles  00:48

Hey, everyone, welcome back to the practice brave podcast today I am doing a solo

Brianna Battles  00:55

episode because there was a post that I shared this past week that generated mostly good feedback, but it also pissed off a lot of people, which obviously happens all the time. When you share and teach and do anything online, there’s going to be people that are committed to misunderstanding you or making it about something that it’s not. But today, I want to talk to you about the state of what we see in the pregnant and postpartum athlete community, especially coming from the perspective of someone who has been in this realm for like when I was a pregnant athlete. So that was 13 years ago, and I started a business about 12 years ago where I started coaching more of that population, and over that time, we’ve seen a lot of different trends. So what I said that pissed off a few people and made others go like, Oh my God, yes. Like I was there I remember, was with all due respect, unless you were in the CrossFit mom scene between 2010 and 2015 you were not a victim of the strong narrative surrounding being a pregnant, postpartum athlete, and I went on in the post to talk about this pendulum swing that we’ve seen, but I want to acknowledge what it was like then. Okay, so if you were a crossfitter during that era, whether you were a mom or not, you know that it was very much an empowering time for women in general, they were coming into a sport where weightlifting was being promoted. Strong was the new skinny. Paleo was being presented as a good way of eating, and it was all about like being as strong and as fit as you could be at that time. So when you saw women start to embark on motherhood. There were a lot of CrossFit moms that were getting pregnant, that were postpartum, and it was like peak sharing, and they there just was, like, it was such an interesting culture, because we saw empowerment. For the most part. We were seeing women really claim strength. And so then when they got pregnant, they did not want to let that go. They did not want to step away from that image. They did not want to let pregnancy be a hindrance. And then the messaging that we were given on one side was kind of like that fragility mindset and messaging where it was like, Don’t lift over 20 pounds, don’t get your heart rate over this or that. And obviously that never, ever resonated with a CrossFit mom athlete brain. And I’m saying CrossFit as someone who, like, I’ve always been a little CrossFit adjacent. I’ve been very involved, but also not, like, directly involved. I’ve operated out of a lot of CrossFit gyms. I’ve trained there, I’ve run businesses there, I’ve worked with a multi, like, multitude of CrossFit athletes. But that was the first demographic of women who truly claimed that idea of pregnant athlete and of postpartum athlete. They were like, yes, that is me. Like the bodybuilding community, they didn’t really like claiming that that was more of, like a fit mom vibe. But CrossFit moms really resonated with the idea of pregnant athlete and postpartum athlete. And at the time, everyone was when I started talking about it. I mean, I bought domains, I started like, sharing programs, like over time. And people thought that was a crazy they’re like that doesn’t like apply to anyone you know. Like, it was so niche. And now we’ve seen a whole community and media blow up around some of these identities, which is great, but what I want you to know is, in 2013 specifically, it was not a thing. What we saw was moms who were participating in CrossFit who were like, Yes, I am a CrossFit mom, and this is how I’m going to approach my training during pregnancy. I am not broken, like they rebelled against the idea that we were fragile, because when I. Fragile, then or now never. We’re not fragile. Of course, there are sometimes some contraindications exercise, but that’s not what this is about to be really clear. So we knew even then that exercise and the way that we trained was beneficial for mom and or our baby. We knew that that was so embedded into how we train and what our belief systems were, which was in a lot of ways, during that time, it was pretty dogmatic ways of training, like there was an elitist mentality around how the CrossFit community ate and how they trained and what they did, and the lifestyle of it, it just was. And so obviously, we’ve seen a lot of growth there over the years for the most part, but back then, it was really like, this is what is right. This is what is healthiest. This is what is best, and this is what’s going to make my labor and delivery really easy. This is going to let me bounce back. We were made for this, and it was just like, a lot of like, a lot of confidence, which, again, like, this is a good thing, and it’s a double edged sword, okay? Because when it comes to pregnancy and postpartum, as we know, if you’re listening to this podcast, most likely you know that there are many variables that influence the experience of pregnant postpartum athletes. That is a lane I have tried to stay in for a very long time, from the beginning, because I, as somebody who is very much part of that community with all of those belief systems, got exceptionally humbled by that, because you can’t out athlete the variables of pregnancy and postpartum. But we frickin tried like we tried and so in this effort to go from fragility mindset and messaging that we were getting from maybe the medical community or others in the fitness community who, like, weren’t used to seeing women deadlift heavy and keep training and keep being in this sort of, like, rugged environment. You know, CrossFit is very mainstream now, but it wasn’t as much back then. It was still a little like, a little bit to counter culture. So when you throw on, like a pregnant belly to that, it was like a whole it was like a statement. And look, when you are in a season where you’re likely more insecure about your body and like, we don’t love it, you know you don’t like love it, when you typically want to be really lean and really strong and really capable to feel like, well, now you have this, this baby, so you’re gonna lean into the idea of like, if I’m gonna be this pregnant mom, I’m gonna be a bad ass. I’m gonna be like, the coolest, fittest, most athletic version that I can possibly be. And then that was reinforced by our cultural messaging, which was in that community anyway, which was, yeah, like you were made for this, and it will be healthy for you and the baby, and that means they’re going to bounce back, and your delivery is going to be so fast, your baby’s going to come out with ABS, all you know, like, there’s so many things that people say and that feels good. It feels good on the ego to be like, I’m a bad ass, because you don’t really feel like one. A lot of the times you feel like you’re just fat and bloated and uncomfortable and want to feel like yourself again. So it became this, like, almost addictive narrative of like, trying to be really bad ass during pregnancy with the expectation of a particular outcome, which was either, like a natural childbirth, pretty straightforward experience there, and then bouncing back and getting back into the gym early, early postpartum. At that time, there was no talk, I’m telling you, like, especially in that particular community, no talk of core and pelvic health symptoms. Diastasis was not on the radar in like the 2010, to, yeah, like, 1314, ish era. It was not on the radar, incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse. Like, absolutely not. I remember when I learned what pro life was, I was like, Oh, my God. Like that can happen to people. What? What? How am I a woman who’s had a baby and I didn’t know, like, what often happens to women’s bodies. So then there was essentially this, this group of women that graduated during that time, right? They were like, we were all fit. We all had athletic backgrounds. Many of us had coaching backgrounds and became mothers pregnancy and like for some maybe it was a really straightforward experience, but most women, most pregnant, postpartum athletes, have a variable, or a couple variables, and expectations that are not met, where you get a little bit humbled by motherhood, that’s there’s gonna be something that, like changes your opinion, that is a little bit of a reality check That is humbling for me, it was the natural childbirth mindset pipeline that led me to a traumatic birth like that was my that was my experience. Not that one led to that necessarily, but that was like, that was the trajectory. I was the Fit mom. I wanted a natural childbirth, but ended up with a traumatic. Birth and emergency C section. Did I do anything wrong? No, there that literally saved my life, and it saved Kate’s life. So I do not have resentment over the C section. I have a lot of resentment over the messaging in which influenced how I felt about the C section. I wish I could have been more neutral feeling and like, Okay, I’m grateful. I’m like, 13 years almost out from that, you know, like that first becoming of a mom. So I have a lot of perspective now, a lot more knowledge, so I can speak to it this way. But at that time, I felt like I failed, and I feel like an idiot because I talked about how my training was so beneficial, and the kind of birth I wanted, and that basically, like, I was just, I was tough and I was strong, and, like, obviously I could have a baby, obviously I could handle a natural childbirth.

Brianna Battles  10:52

Like, like, people do it all the time. Like, why wouldn’t I? Well, because so many variables influence how are babies coming into the world? What our bodies experience during pregnancy, what happens to us postpartum? There are some variables that maybe we have a little bit more control of, but that message right there that was not taught to us at all. We had to find that through like extreme growth, and I actually kind of recently started calling it like an ego death that happens. It happens to us all different points in our lifetime of athleticism. There’s an ego death where we get so attached to our ability, our body, our performance, our metrics, our routine, like all of these things. And then there will be something that happens that forces us to reevaluate our approach, that forces us to improve, truly improve, our relationship with our body, with our training, with our mindset, with our knowledge on our body. Some for some people, that’s an injury. For some it’s motherhood, where now there’s a whole other, like baby and human in our life that that requires a bit of a shift in our approach. And ultimately, these seasons are catalyst seasons, even if there’s a bit of an ego death that that goes along with it. So for that group of moms, you know, we we kind of, again, some people were very much myself included. Coping mechanism was like, I got to reclaim this experience. Like I just got freaking rocked, and I feel like an idiot for saying all of these things. Well, I got so committed to making sure it did not look like I had a baby. I was like, I’m gonna lose this weight. I’m gonna be the hashtag fit mom. That was like, very much a thing back then. And like, posting progress pictures of myself postpartum, which was like, I mean, my stomach got fat pretty quickly with Cade, but my belly button looked so weird, and I was, like, obsessed with it, obsessed, to say the least, because I was like, Why does no one else’s ABS on social media look like mine? So then I would go searching for stomachs that looked similar to mine on social media, and you couldn’t find any. You couldn’t find any because that was not shown there. Again, there was no talk of diastasis, of incontinence, of prolapse, of any of these common symptoms that women experienced postpartum, there just wasn’t but what we saw was a lot of like, get your body back and no excuses, mentality, do it all and basically be unfazed by motherhood like you just you were meant for this. And so it was a lot of like, showing you and your baby working out, and this, Does this sound familiar? You guys? Yeah, it should, because it’s still, like, the thing, there’s just, like, way more voices and way more examples of that. None of what we are seeing now in 2026 is new. That is, like, honestly, that is like, the bottom line of so much of this is, like, it’s just maybe louder, there’s more tension, there’s more support, but none of it is new, none what we have seen is because there were so many women like myself, so many smart, fit, good coaches. None of us had information about what our bodies experienced through pregnancy and postpartum, especially as athletes, especially as athletes, because, like, Jen pop is kind of told, like, Oh, you just, like, deal with that. Like, you just pee yourself and like, that’s fine. It was all very like, common, like, that was what you were told, you know, it was common part of motherhood, or that you’re gonna have, like, this weak core that obviously didn’t really resonate with this group of us that had become moms, that had, again, like this pretty solid athletic background, and we were coaches. We’re like, Why were we taught any of this? Oh, because our undergrad graduate work, all of our certifications, basically, you. I, you know, stopped accounting for women being athletic after 22 right, which is like when most women are done at the college level of playing, and then your pro athletes that were focused on a lot were, oftentimes, are young athletes. There wasn’t education and knowledge on pregnancy and postpartum. Nevertheless, like core and pelvic health like that, was too specific. Even though a large majority of the population women and large population of women have babies, that was not part of the fitness curriculum of the Kinesiology exercise science curriculum. It just was not so even those of us who had a good athletic background, good coaching and educational background, we didn’t know about the female body in this capacity, especially through the lens of pregnancy, postpartum and corn pelvic health as it related to athletic performance. So I was in my era between 2013 and 2014 of just trying to figure out, like, what had just happened to my body, and why do I feel like this? I’m tough, I’m strong. I know how to move. I enter, I know how to, like, train, but I can’t figure myself out. I can’t figure out what was up with my abs, and even though, like, my stomach was flat, they just kind of like looked weird. Still, my belly button looked weird, almost like I had like a thumbprint about it. And I was like, I was obsessed. I was absolutely obsessed. And so the more searching I did, the more I was able to find out. And then I went to my doctors. I went to so many different physical therapists, and they’re like, Oh, you have a hernia. And like, okay, maybe I did. But ultimately, what was wrong with my abs was I had a significant diastasis, like, around that 12 centimeter mark. So I know, like so many ladies freak out about the two centimeter diastasis. No, I had a really significant diastasis, and the ABS were able to, like, approximate more over time, but like, again, this was not on their radar of knowing, you know, it just wasn’t on the radar that our bodies would even experience that. Because the expectation was you have a baby, it’s no big deal. You were made for this bounce back and start hitting peers again, get back to your normal training routine. And for all my CrossFitters listening, my first workout back at, like, I don’t know, four to six weeks postpartum was Cindy. It’s like, the five pull ups, 10 push ups, 15 squats for 20 minutes. I was like, Oh, that’s easy. You know, it’s like, body weight workout, just 20 minutes. Like, makes sense. So that was my first postpartum workout back then, didn’t know like and again, it’s not about certain exercises being bad or or a very particular timeline. It is about the idea that we had no idea what a big deal having a baby was from physiological standpoint as one but more importantly, like the psychological side of it and the long term performance side of it, we know that if we injure our knee, that we’re not just going to pick up where we left off after knee surgery. You know, you have a gradual, phased progression of rehab into strength, into more performance, that is basic frickin strength and conditioning, that is basic progressive overload. We apply that to every orthopedic consideration that there is. We do for a long time, and we understand how tissues heal and timelines in every other orthopedic capacity. But we weren’t applying that to, you know, the physiological event that is birth. Nevertheless, the idea that our bodies and hormones and everything had been influenced and changed over the last nine months of pregnancy, and then you have baby vacate your body, regardless how that baby comes out, like, it’s a big deal. So your body goes through a significant physiological event, even if it was a great, straightforward birth, it’s still like a big deal. And there needed to be some idea of this is what we do after to give your brain and your body and your long term athletic performance, the potential to, like, improve and improve in a way where, like, there’s less chance of a setback. You want to set yourself up, not set yourself back. But we were desperate to feel like ourselves again, and this was not common knowledge, so we just kind of got back to it, because that’s what we saw other women do. That’s what we saw other women on social media do. That’s what we were told to do. Like it was, like, it was so dogmatic in that community. And again, I’m talking about this CrossFit community, because this was the era and the group of people in particular that claimed the preg. Athlete and the postpartum athlete title. This is not to be dismissive of other

Brianna Battles  20:06

people that maybe feel like they were a victim of the strong, like body back narratives. I’m talking about it through the athletic lens, and I can tell you because literally, I own all of the domains, I kind of like, put the flag down on pregnant athlete, postpartum athlete, that terminology and it was picked up on in the CrossFit realm. That’s not to say that there were not other like Olympians and moms that were athletic, that were doing this stuff. Yes, it’s just, I’m talking about like, claiming the name, resonating with the name, hashtagging the names like that was the community that took to it. And I’m just I’m saying it that way. It’s not to be dismissive of other people that were athletes or pregnant at the time, or who also had shitty messages, like we all did. It was shitty back then period. Talking about it through the lens of this particular demographic, because it’s a different breed. It’s a different breed of female athlete of of mentality and of like, belief system, again, like there was a little bit of, like, we all kind of had, like, this ego and a little bit of an elitist attitude back then and again. It has evolved a lot in a lot of ways, but back then, especially as it related to motherhood, pregnancy and training, approach, all these things, it was like, this is the right way, this is the best way, this is the healthiest way. And if you are not in alignment with that, then like, what’s wrong with you? And that just obviously feels shitty when you’re already in a vulnerable season as a mom. So from there, we started putting more information out there. I kind of accidentally started what has gone on to become the pregnancy, postpartum athleticism brand. But back then, I had resigned from coaching Division one. I started coaching locally at like, a women’s strength conditioning class, because I just needed to do something so because I was still in the process of, like, trying to learn a lot about my own body and rehabbing my own body, I ended up having surgery on a hernia that wasn’t really a hernia, because it was mostly a diastasis, but that still hadn’t been mentioned to me at that point in time. But I was like, it was leading me down a rabbit hole. And when you have ADHD, you also have, like, this significant hyper focus, and just you go all in. And I did. And so then I started coaching women out of a CrossFit gym, a women’s recognition class, and I started seeing a lot of patterns. I started seeing a lot of women who had different symptoms, and women who were struggling in different ways, who were athletic and who were Gen pop and like, not they hadn’t moved a lot yet. There were a lot of common themes. And then I started working with a lot of CrossFitters, like in particular, and they really had a lot of symptoms, but they just didn’t, like, really tell people about it, like they were peeing their pants doing double unders. Some of them had been doing that even before becoming a mom. And so he started saying, like, damn. Like, this isn’t like, just me. This is so many people. So I started sharing about that on social media. And again, this was like, 2014 2015 ish, and I was sharing a lot. Started connecting with a lot of people. I started working with more CrossFitters, and I was also working with different pelvic floor physical therapists, and learning and connecting dots and trying to, just like, take it all in, essentially, learning about women’s health considerations, core and pelvic health, and then connecting the dots to the minimal research that we had at the time. But it was mostly like in the pelvic health realm. And then how is that related to basic strength conditioning principles that are still to this day? It strength conditioning is what is overlooked in the pregnant and postpartum athlete conversation, strength conditioning principles and basic research there is not, still not part of the conversation. When guiding training approach for pregnant and postpartum athletes, we tend to look at these seasons through a vacuum, instead of all of the like, long term training considerations, that is what has always distinguished what I do from just talking about pregnancy and postpartum. Because I got to be honest with you, like, I don’t love pregnancy and postpartum, but I freaking throw down for moms claiming the title of being an athlete across the lifespan, lifetime of athleticism. Athleticism does not end when motherhood begins. And if I’m going to claim that and believe that like so hard, and if I’m going to live that myself, which I do you better freaking believe, I’m going to give a shit about pregnancy and postpartum, because those are catalyst seasons. Those seasons are so pivotal for women, and yet, we tend to look at how women train during those seasons through a vacuum. We look at it through baby safety, and we look at them through physical ability. And I can tell you, if you know, like female athletes, we will. Throw down at any point in time. You can be bleeding, you can be struggling. You can be on your worst mental health day. You can be on your period. You can have like, somebody close to you die, and you will still perform, because you can you have this override and that has been trained into you. It’s gonna be like beaten into you for some of us, maybe from an era of of coaches that just really were hardcore on us, but like female athletes know how to perform under literally any physical, mental and emotional circumstance, pregnancy and postpartum does not have to be that. It doesn’t have to be these seasons of like challenge and pursuit. And I say this. I say this, as someone who works with professional athletes, I say this as somebody who supports women training the way that they want to train during pregnancy, sometimes that means they are competing. They’re doing a lot, they are pushing, maybe, quote, traditional boundaries of training, and they have big postpartum goals. I want every woman to feel informed, supported, autonomous, and have a strategic game plan at an individualized level that’s going to look different from person to person to person, but the messaging and the undertones really freaking matter. It’s taking the elitist out. It’s taking the fragility out. It is taking the invincibility out. It is removing a lot of dogma and introducing choice, introducing education, and introducing ways for women to feel empowered that are not always attached to physical output and ability, but attached to the significant growth and maturity that is acquired in motherhood, starting in pregnancy, you know, improving our relationship with our body, with our training, with our with our mindset towards everything, towards our nutrition, like, there’s just such an opportunity here. And so when I say that athleticism does not end when motherhood begins, what I’m talking about is saying, like, it’s it doesn’t end, but it’s going to be different. And we’ve typically framed different as being bad. But what I see and what I have lived twice is that different will be one of the best opportunities for you, both as a woman and as an athlete both, and it’s a lot easier when you freaking let it, when you don’t resist it. Because, like, I certainly resisted it. I was like, I gotta get back. I gotta get back to, like, what I was doing, who I was, what I looked like, and all of this. And that was a messaging, right? And that was messaging for so long, was like, body back, blah, blah, blah.

Brianna Battles  27:37

And we did because our identity and worth and self esteem was so attached to what we looked like and what we could do, we’ve come a long way. Like we’ve had, like the whole body positive movement. We’ve had, like the fitness industry just expand in ways, in messaging and how women are training and how ways women are identifying as athletes. We’ve seen more women in the media that are, like showing what is possible through pregnancy and in their postpartum return to sport, the Olympics, to the octagon, like I get to work with these women. It’s been so freaking cool. Over the last 12 years, I’ve been able to work with so many amazing professional athlete women, and I have seen the top down effect of that, like the women I’ve been able to coach at a high level, a lot of the themes remain constant for the people that I’m working at the more like working with and coaching with at the more like Gen pop level, and I try to share stuff on social media. And of course, there’s always going to be nuance. But you know, you see that there’s a lot of transferable themes just at different levels, right? And again, that’s this individualized level. But what we’ve seen is as more information has been put out, yes, by me, but by so many others, too, about core and pelvic health and training approach during pregnancy and and different symptoms that women experience, and then different like normalizing more of the stories and experiences of women through these seasons. Sometimes the more information there is, and the more awareness there is, we accidentally swing that pendulum in interpretation anyway, back to oh, now I’m afraid. I don’t want diocese. I don’t want that to happen. My abs. I don’t want birth to happen. I don’t want that kind of birth. I don’t want prolapse. Oh, my God, you mean that it can happen. And so it’s like there’s some people who don’t want to know anything, and there’s people that want to know everything, and we have to, like, somehow navigate that messy middle, because we in an effort of, like, putting knowledge and education out there, that’s also going to create fear and rules and rigidity. And the more voices there are, the more uninformed voices there are. Sometimes it does that. That’s why we have to speak in nuance, even when people don’t want to interpret it that way, you do have to acknowledge that there is just this, this gray area and and that can be really hard, because we went from don’t do anything to then that full send like rebuttal, that. So many CrossFit ish moms experienced during that era, and then we great that is sparked more increase in saying, What the hell happened to me? What happened to my body? Like learning, sharing, getting information out there, the more information gets out there, the more marketing and selling opportunities there are. We’re now capitalizing on women’s insecurities and fears. We’re selling fear based messaging, because that converts, that converts to a sale, and then women are now afraid to train. They’re afraid of their body, so in an effort of creating awareness, sometimes that does create fear, but then that fear based fragility messaging. Then again, influences the the other, like the full coming full circle. Now to the train. As hard as you want, you are invincible. You’re a badass. You’re not fragile. And again, the conversation is not about fragility, and it is not about invincibility. It is about adaptability. And I stand on that. I’ve stood in that for a long time, since the freaking beginning, because you cannot be in one camp or the other camp, because the real life lived experiences happen in the center, and it does swing a bit, but you adjust your messaging and approach based on who has what mindset, who has what belief system, who has what training style? Is it? My scared, fear based client, okay, that I know I need to push her. I need to encourage her a lot more like I need to make her understand that exercise is going to be really beneficial for her, even if she has symptoms, you’re not going to make them worse. There’s a lot of different things we can do right? And then on the other end of the spectrum, my like full send athlete brains invincibility mindset, help them scale back their approach, because there’s so much growth that can happen for them when they learn to kind of reframe these seasons. They’re not just desperate to hold on and prove something to themselves or to others or culturally like there’s so much growth that happens when you take a little bit of a step back, because it catapults you forward. It’s just so freaking hard to see during these seasons, like you don’t see till later. So here I am, like, big sister. I’m here to tell you like I’ve been there, not just personally twice, but I’ve walked this path with 1000s of women, 1000s of pregnant and postpartum athletes, I have seen what works, and I have seen what tends to backfire, and I think that there is a way to approach it where you can improve your outcomes because you’ve improved your experience, okay? And I’m gonna like, just pause there for a second, because there are so many variables we cannot control during these seasons, but we can control our approach, we can control our mindset, we can control how we how we choose to show up during these seasons, and empowering is going to look different for any given person, my goal has always been for women to feel supported so that they’re not saying. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t anyone tell me? And then if they do struggle with something, okay, they have the support, they have the resources that they need. And if they’re trying to push boundaries, whether it’s during pregnancy or postpartum, they have the support, they have, the tools they have the training strategies that’s going to take into considerations, one, their psychology, two, their core pelvic floor physiology, and three, their long term performance. Those three variables are what I lean into in my teaching. Those are the three like main pillars that the pregnancy and postpartum athleticism coach certification is based around right because you cannot work with a partner and postpartum athlete without acknowledging their mindset, their psychology, their core and pelvic health physiology or their long term performance goals. Everything has to be reverse engineered in terms of our messaging and and training approach from those three lenses, and that’s what I do. That is what differentiates a lot of the messaging and information I put out from, I think, just the greater fitness community, and that’s what we’ve been committed to for a long time. We’ve seen growth, we’ve seen interest. We’ve seen incredible women come through. We’ve seen a great intake or uptake in research and more interest being put into that. It is awesome. It is validating so much of what we understand about training during pregnancy and postpartum that women are not fragile. And there are still other variables we have to keep considering when working with this population, because it is not just about looking at their experiences through the vacuum of pregnancy and postpartum, it is about their long term mental health, core and pelvic health and performance goals and reverse engineering that process to improve outcomes. Context matters. Nuance matters, the real life, lived experiences of what we see with pregnant, postpartum athletes that is not always reflect. It. That’s what really matters. That would help. That is what helps guide so much of the conversations that we need to have when it comes to improving the experiences of pregnant postpartum athletes, which then improves the long term outcomes. If you can improve the experience, you’re going to improve the outcome. And I think that is something that we just have to keep staying committed to. That’s something my brand is committed to, to doing. And in some ways, it is different. It is different than what a lot of the industry does, because we want to be told, Do this, don’t do that. Or, hey, everything is safe. It’s totally fine. You’re a badass. Or, Oh, maybe you should, you know, do this and only follow these protocols and do this, don’t do that, whatever, like it is about having a broader conversation. Why? Because that is coaching, that is basic freaking coaching, guys, and we overlook that because we want to create rules and parameters and guidelines and do this and don’t do that, and have a hot take and have a great headline, but we want to sell shit like, yes, all of that’s going to keep happening. But ultimately, we have to find a way to support women at an individual level in ways that considers the entirety of their experience. Because our bodies experience a lot, our brains experience a lot, learning to make manage expectations, give ourselves time. Coaching is acknowledging the whole person. It’s acknowledging the art and the science. It’s acknowledging timeline, patience process, not just outcome process. It’s talks about a macro cycle and then being able to reverse engineer that on more of a micro level, all of those concepts are typically left out of the conversation when we’re talking about working with pregnant and postpartum athletes. That is what you know we do differently. My master’s degree is in coaching. I’ve worked with athletes for 20 years in a variety of different capacities, not just pregnant and postpartum athletes and coaching is about guiding their longevity. It is about guiding their development, mentally, physically and emotionally. It’s not just about guiding ability. It is not just about guiding tactics. It is about guiding the whole person. And the whole person oftentimes gets left out of this conversation when this is the most vulnerable time for a woman as her whole self to be considered.

Brianna Battles  37:34

It is a most vulnerable time. She’s going through a significant transformation in her identity, in her ability, in her body, in everything, and when she’s only looking to others and she’s comparing herself to that, she’s comparing herself to what her expectation was versus like what her reality is. It’s a lonely place to be, and athletes need to be understood. They need it to be supported. They need a game plan, especially when so many things feel outside of their control. And again, this is even when an experience is like really positive, it’s still a significant transformation that they are going through in their life. And for so many women, this is the first time they have really been sort of forced to to like look within and to reassess their relationship with their body and their approach and whatever. Maybe it’s one of the first times they’ve been humbled, or they’ve had a setback, or they’ve had an injury or symptom, and they want to feel like themselves again, and they should have the ability to feel like themselves again. They should have the support to feel like themselves again. They should be able to look beyond the headline and and understand the nuances and understand the context, and understand that the very much real experiences of the majority of pregnant postpartum athletes. It’s not these narratives and stories of women being bad asses all through pregnancy and immediately getting back to the gym or to their sport early postpartum. Of course, there’s exceptions. I work with the exceptions, and when you train like you’re not the exception, you have more of a likelihood of becoming it something I tell a lot of my athletes of all different abilities and goals, there is a lot to be gained by reassessing your athleticism, your your identity as an athlete during these seasons, you are not fragile, not fragile, and You’re not invincible. You are allowed to change, you’re allowed to evolve, you are allowed to be adaptable. That is what needs to be coached, is the adaptability. What does adaptability look like? It’s being adaptable in our mindset and our belief systems. It’s being adaptable in our training approach because we’re now taking. Into consideration the changes to our body, maybe some of our core and pelvic health predispositions, maybe some. We’re understanding how our body is changing through those seasons, because nobody taught us that stuff we don’t know. And then we’re making training adjustments on behalf of our long term performance goals, not just short term current ability. Because current ability, of course, we can perform. Of course, you know how to do that. Your athleticism doesn’t just like go away. Your your mental grit that doesn’t go away. You’re always tough, you’re always strong, you’re always fit, you’re always capable. Doesn’t go away. But being able to leverage it is the gift, being able to reverse engineer this process with long term performance goals in mind. Because I my coaching, I give way more of a shit about what you’re able to do a year postpartum than what you’re doing during pregnancy. That’s what that is, the lens in which I coach you through. Not like how much are you able to keep doing during pregnancy, but what are you wanting to do postpartum at a year? And how do you want to feel when you’re doing that? So I talk a lot with my competitors about that when we’re trying to kind of figure out when they want to return to competition again. How do you want to feel? It’s not just, are you going to be able to compete? You’ll again. They will always be able to throw down always. How do you want to feel? That’s the difference. That is the difference. How do you want to feel when you’re performing? You want to feel really fully confident in your body and your ability and the training you’ve put in your readiness. You want to have full athletic and mental readiness. And with that, there’s a lot of reverse engineering that has to go on in terms of getting them ready to peak at the right time. And peaking at the right time is not about maintaining for a year or two year of of your physical ability and outputting capacity. It’s not that’s not good program design. That’s not periodization. Again, this that goes against all principles of strength and conditioning when we’re talking about, you know, coaching people and helping them reach peak performance. I care about what women are doing long term, how they want their bodies to feel long term, not just in these short seasons, not just based on what is safe for their body and their baby, or what they’re physically able to do, but what they are physically and confidently without symptoms, or at least with really well managed symptoms, able to do a year postpartum, or 10 years postpartum or 50 Years postpartum, that is what I care about. Again, it’s not just about pregnancy postpartum. It is about a lifetime of athleticism. I’m here to support girls and women across their lifetime of athleticism, and I understand so personally, so professionally, about what catalyst seasons, pregnancy and postpartum are, and that is why I’ve stayed committed to improving the messaging and the belief systems and the advice that women are given, and honestly, the coaching education that coaches have access to. We have the online certification. We’ve had almost 5000 coaches around the world. Get certified in that, and that is changing the game for not just pregnant person athletes, but for our like just our Gen pop women in local communities around the world. Is changing their lives. Why? Because they have support. They have understanding. They have coaches that can coach from a top down approach. Only thing I say a lot is like I talk through the lens of athlete, because if you can coach athletes, you can coach Gen pop, but if you coach Gen pop, you can rarely coach athletes. So you know, everything is like this, top down, if you know how to coach at a high level, it is transferable down to your gen pop clients, and they all benefit. They all benefit again, because the themes remain the same, and we have to know how to support them. We have to, and it’s not always intuitive. Listening to your body doing what you’ve always done different, like restrictions or whatever like that’s not good enough information. We need to understand nuance. We need to understand delivery of information, application of shifting training variables, not just like exercise modifications, that’s easy stuff. You really got to know how to coach from the outside in on behalf of that lifetime of athleticism, short term physical abilities and output. So when you work with athletes, when you work with like our high drive, stubborn women, they’re going to be able to perform high performers or high performers, no matter what they are. They’ll figure it out. And when you work with that population, you really got to know how to how to understand them, how to get them, how to support them, because they’re still vulnerable, like they’re still vulnerable as people during these significant life seasons and and we have a big opportunity to support women, regardless of their choices, regardless of their circumstances. We have a huge opportunity to support women through these transformative seasons that are pregnancy and postpartum and and let them believe, teach them that athleticism does not end when motherhood begins. We have a great opportunity to do that. And you know, you know, stay committed to this work. So I. Yeah, that was like my story time, but ultimately, I a little bit of a history lesson and state of where we’re at right now. We’ve come a long way, and sometimes we’re still missing the mark. Sometimes we still have to remember, like the person, not just the ability, just the person and what, what like, really, actually matters. Then we zoom out first, so then we can zoom in. So if all of this resonated, then, you know, I would love to connect with you. If you are interested in becoming a pregnancy and postpartum athleticism coach, I have two options for you. One, I am coaching a live weekend certification in San Diego, February, 21 and 22nd and I’m excited to do that. I only do that once a year, because for me, travel and teaching is is really hard during the season of life where kids sports are everything. So I’m teaching in San Diego that weekend, you can come get certified in person. It’s a highly effective two day certification, hands on. Great Learning Environment. Incredible networking. Ton of CEUs. So you get certified that way, or get certified online. I have my online certification pregnancy and postpartum athleticism, and also comes with a ton of different CEUs and really focuses on teaching the psychology, core and pelvic health, physiology and long term athletic performance considerations of female athletes through pregnancy and postpartum. So if you were part of that era, thank you for like, validating the experience. And if you are in that era now, like you have access to a lot of great support and resources, and I’m happy to help you. Can send the brand page a DM, and we’re, you know, we’re happy to like guide your next steps. What might what you might need right now. So thank you guys so much for listening. Appreciate the support you’ve given me through the years.

Brianna Battles  47:07

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Practice Brave Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and help us spread the work we are doing to improve the overall information and messaging in the fitness industry and beyond. Now, if you are pregnant and you are looking for a trustworthy exercise program to follow, I have you covered. The pregnant athlete training program is a well rounded program for pregnancy with workouts for each week that are appropriate for your changing body. That’s 36 weeks of workouts, three to four workouts each week, and tons of guidance on exercise strategy. We also have an at home version of that program if you are postpartum and you’re looking for an exercise program to follow. The eight week postpartum athlete training program would be a really great way to help bridge the gap between rehab and the fitness you actually want to do from there, we have the practice brave fitness program, which is an ongoing strength conditioning program where you get new workouts each week and have a lot of guidance for myself and my co coach, Heather Osby, this is the only way that I’m really offering ongoing coaching at this point in time. If you have ever considered becoming a certified pregnancy and postpartum athleticism coach, I would love to have you join us. Pregnancy and postpartum athleticism is a self paced online certification course that will up level your coaching skills and help connect the dots between pelvic health and long term athletic performance, especially during pregnancy and postpartum, become who you needed and become who your online and local community needs by becoming a certified pregnancy and postpartum athleticism Coach, thank you again for listening to the practice brave podcast. I appreciate you, and please help me continue spreading this messaging, this information and this work.