Pregnancy Fitness: What's the point?

This is something I've been thinking about a lot during my pregnancy, and ever since I started training preggo women.

Normally fitness is about some kind of performance or aesthetic goal for most people. It's also about health, (although that's not usually what gets someone off their bum and into the gym).

We want bigger muscles, a rounder bum, less body fat, we want to look good naked, run further or for longer, to lift heavier weights, to get stronger or faster.

For the most part, these aren't reasonable goals during pregnancy. Most women are going to lose strength and performance, get a bit slower, probably a bit fatter and lose a bit of fitness. That's probably normal, but not hugely motivating. Our goal isn't to see results, but to slow down this degeneration, limit fat gain - not massively motivating.

Also, you'll be able to do less and less as the pregnancy progresses, which is frustrating, and requires more knowledge and tools. And a flexible mindset. Ugh. But what are we actually trying to achieve? I think we should be trying to maintain 3 major components of fitness:

1. Strength and muscle mass 2. Cardiovascular fitness 3. Mobility and flexibility

At the very least we will want to maintain these 3, although you probably can improve 2 and 3, which we'll discuss.

STRENGTH AND MUSCLE MASS

Why is this important?

For most women, especially around the time that they start having babies muscle mass isn't something that comes high on their list of priorities. They equate muscle mass to looking like this:

When it actually might make them look like this:

Increased muscle mass does a few things:

1. It increases our metabolism, making it easier to lo