If you’ve spent any time googling “can I lift weights while pregnant” or “when can I start running postpartum,” you’ve probably come away more confused than when you started. One source says never exceed a certain heart rate. Another says wait exactly 12 weeks before anything high-impact. Someone in a Facebook group swears you should never lift anything heavier than your baby.
Here’s what nobody tells you: most of those “rules” aren’t actually rules. They’re defaults — blanket guidance built for the most cautious possible scenario, handed to every woman regardless of her history, her body, or what’s actually going on for her right now.
Where the “hard rules” actually come from
Somewhere along the way, fitness advice for pregnant and postpartum women got flattened into a checklist. Wait this many weeks. Avoid this position. Never do that movement. It’s understandable — a simple rule is easy to hand out, and it protects against liability. But it also strips away the one thing that actually matters most: you, specifically, in front of me, right now.
When I was working through the research for my book, one thing became clear again and again: outside of a small number of genuine red flags — the kind involving blunt force trauma, specific medical complications, or symptoms that need clinical attention — there are far fewer hard rules than most women are led to believe. Most of what gets treated as gospel is actually a starting guideline, not a locked gate.
“It depends” isn’t a cop-out — it’s the honest answer
The truthful answer to almost every training question in pregnancy and postpartum is: it depends. On your history. On how this pregnancy or recovery is actually going. On what you were doing before. On how you’re feeling today, not last week.
That’s not the same as “there’s no guidance at all” — there absolutely are things worth knowing, patterns worth watching, and genuine warning signs worth respecting. But the goal isn’t to follow a rule perfectly. It’s to keep adjusting to what’s actually true for you, right now, and keep going anyway.
What this looks like in practice
“Heavy” is relative, not fixed. If you or a client has been deadlifting 80kg before pregnancy, dropping to 60kg might be exactly the right adjustment — still heavy, still strength training, just recalibrated. If you’ve never lifted weights before, “heavy” might mean progressing slowly from 3kg dumbbells. Neither version is more correct than the other. The rule was never “lift this specific weight” — it was always “lift what’s appropriate for you, and adjust as you go.”
I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t move my own nursing chair because it’s “too heavy” while pregnant. Meanwhile, I have a client who runs marathons. As long as her pelvic floor feels fine and she’s having a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy, there’s no reason she can’t keep running — maybe at a lower intensity, maybe shorter distances, but there’s no hard stop just because she’s pregnant.
And here’s the flip side, because “it depends” cuts both ways: I’ve been running for years, but the moment I get pregnant, I don’t feel comfortable running even 5km — because of urgency to pee and a personal history of pelvic floor issues. Same activity, same fitness background as my client above, completely different answer. Not because one of us is “doing it right” and the other isn’t, but because it genuinely depends on what’s true for each of our bodies.
Instead of “wait until 12 weeks postpartum to run,” it becomes: what does your body feel like today, and what signs would tell you to scale back or push a little further?
This is the whole idea behind adjust, don’t quit. Not lowering the bar permanently. Not pretending nothing has changed. Just meeting the season you’re actually in, instead of the one a generic checklist assumes you’re in.
If this resonates, the first chapter of my book — Strength Through the Messy & Beyond — is free to read right now. No waiting for the launch.
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