Strength Training During Pregnancy: What’s Safe and What to Avoid

If you strength trained before getting pregnant, one of your first questions might be whether you can keep doing it. Can you still squat? Deadlift? Lift a barbell? How heavy is too heavy? And if you've never strength trained before, is pregnancy an okay time to start?

For most women with healthy, uncomplicated pregnancies, strength training is not only safe, it's encouraged. You don't suddenly have to trade your dumbbells for 5lb weights or stop using a barbell because you're pregnant. Current guidelines recommend that pregnant women remain physically active, and strength training can be a really valuable part of that.

There are, of course, some things we do have to change. Pregnancy probably isn't the time to chase a deadlift PR or see how close you can get to failure on a set of squats. Your body is also going to change a lot over the course of nine months, which means an exercise that feels great at 14 weeks may need to be modified at 30 weeks.

At Iron and Mettle, we work with women throughout pregnancy and postpartum, and our approach is pretty simple: we want you to keep doing as much as you comfortably and safely can. That means paying attention to symptoms, adjusting exercises as your body changes, and understanding that prenatal strength training should still feel like strength training.

Why Strength Training Is So Helpful During Pregnancy

Pregnancy itself is physically demanding, and having a baby isn't exactly a break for your body afterward. You're gradually carrying more weight throughout pregnancy, and after delivery you're picking up a baby dozens of times a day, getting up and down from the floor, carrying a car seat, pushing a stroller, and somehow trying to carry a baby and every grocery bag into the house at the same time.

Maintaining strength during pregnancy can make those demands easier. Regular physical activity during pregnancy is also associated with benefits including reduced back pain and constipation and a lower risk of gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and complicated deliveries.

This is why we continue training the same basic movement patterns we use with our other clients: squats, hinges, lunges, pushes, pulls, and carries. The specific exercise, weight, range of motion, or setup might change throughout pregnancy, but those movement patterns remain incredibly useful.

A deadlift is still practice for picking something up from the floor. A squat still builds the strength you need to stand up while holding additional weight. Rows build the upper back strength that becomes very useful when you suddenly spend hours feeding and holding a baby.

The goal isn't to create an entirely separate category of "pregnancy exercises." It's to take good strength training and adapt it appropriately to the demands pregnancy and birth.

How Hard Should You Train While Pregnant?

This is one of the biggest questions we get from pregnant clients, and there's no single weight that's appropriate for every woman. Someone who was deadlifting 200 pounds before pregnancy is obviously going to have a very different starting point from someone learning to deadlift for the first time.

Instead of focusing on a particular number on the bar, we use RPE, or Rate of Perceived Exertion, to help our clients gauge intensity. During pregnancy, we generally keep training at an RPE of 8 out of 10 or below. You should feel like you're working, but you shouldn't regularly be grinding through reps or pushing yourself to your absolute limit.

The talk test is another easy way to monitor intensity. You should be able to speak comfortably while exercising. If you're working so hard that having a conversation becomes difficult, that's a good sign to reduce your intensity.

This also means pregnancy isn't a great time for max-effort lifting. We're much more interested in maintaining strength and movement quality than finding out the absolute heaviest weight you can lift that day.

Breathing matters here too. If you're an experienced lifter, you may be accustomed to using a Valsalva maneuver, where you hold your breath and create a significant amount of intra-abdominal pressure during a heavy lift. Current prenatal exercise recommendations advise against excessive breath holding and straining. We teach our pregnant clients to coordinate their breathing with their movement and manage pressure through the core and pelvic floor instead.

What Exercises Should You Avoid During Pregnancy?

There are a few types of exercise that aren't worth the risk during pregnancy. Contact sports where there's a significant risk of being hit in the abdomen should be avoided, including activities like boxing, hockey, soccer, rugby, football, and basketball. Activities with a high risk of falling, such as downhill skiing, water skiing, surfing, off-road cycling, gymnastics, and horseback riding, are also generally not recommended.

Scuba diving should be avoided during pregnancy, as should exercise in environments where overheating is a concern, including hot yoga and hot Pilates.

Strength training is a little different because there isn't one universal list of exercises that every pregnant woman needs to stop doing. Instead, we pay attention to how your body responds to a movement.

If an exercise causes urine leakage, abdominal doming or coning, pelvic heaviness or pressure, pain, dizziness, or nausea, we don't want you pushing through it. Those symptoms give us information about what your body can currently tolerate.

This becomes particularly important with jumping and landing. Some women continue impact exercise comfortably during pregnancy, while others begin experiencing leaking or pelvic heaviness. If that's happening, the answer isn't to ignore it because you technically can keep jumping. The risk-to-reward ratio has changed, and we'll choose something else.

How We Modify Strength Training as Pregnancy Progresses

This is where working with a coach who understands prenatal strength training can make a big difference. Modifying an exercise doesn't necessarily mean removing it from your program.

Imagine you've been doing goblet squats throughout your pregnancy and begin noticing some pressure or heaviness through your pelvic floor. We might start by reducing the depth of your squat, decreasing the weight, changing your stance, or adjusting your breathing strategy. If those changes don't resolve the symptoms, we'll choose another squat variation that feels better.

Core training works similarly. We still want a strong core during pregnancy, but exercises like traditional sit-ups, crunches, and hanging leg raises can create more pressure through the abdominal wall as pregnancy progresses. We also pay attention to visible doming or coning along the midline of the abdomen.

Push-ups and planks aren't automatically off limits, but they often need to be modified later in pregnancy. A push-up from the floor might become an elevated push-up against a barbell in the rack. You can continue training the same movement pattern while decreasing the demand on the abdominal wall.

We also modify prolonged exercises performed flat on your back later in pregnancy. As the uterus gets larger, its weight can compress a major blood vessel and reduce blood return to the heart in some women, potentially causing dizziness or nausea. A flat bench press can easily become an incline press, or we can choose another pressing variation altogether.

Your deadlift may change as your belly grows. Your squat stance might get wider. The weights you use may go up or down depending on how you feel that week. None of this means your training has stopped working. It means the program is adapting with you.

When You Should Stop Exercising and Contact Your Provider

There is a difference between normal exercise discomfort and symptoms that shouldn't be ignored.

You should stop exercising and contact your medical doctor if you experience warning signs such as vaginal bleeding, dizziness or fainting, chest pain, headache, calf pain or swelling, regular painful contractions, fluid leaking from the vagina, or shortness of breath before you begin exercising.

Your OB should also be part of the conversation about your exercise routine, particularly if you have pregnancy complications or a medical condition that could affect what is appropriate for you.

If you're planning to exercise at significant altitude, that's another conversation worth having. Current guidance recommends additional caution for pregnant women who aren't accustomed to high altitude, so talk with your obstetric provider before planning strenuous activity at elevation.

Why Prenatal-Specific Coaching Matters

One of the reasons we care so much about prenatal-specific coaching is that pregnancy changes quickly. What works at 16 weeks may not work at 28 weeks, and there's no template that can predict exactly what every woman will need.

A good prenatal coach should understand how to adjust load, range of motion, exercise selection, position, breathing, and training volume as your pregnancy progresses. They should know which symptoms mean an exercise needs to be modified and which symptoms mean it's time to stop training and talk with your healthcare provider.

They should also understand when something is outside their scope. We work alongside obstetric providers and pelvic floor physical therapists because there are questions and symptoms that belong with those professionals, not your personal trainer.

Most importantly, prenatal coaching shouldn't make you afraid to move. We don't want our pregnant clients spending nine months worrying that picking up a challenging dumbbell or touching a barbell is somehow going to hurt their baby.

We want you to understand your body, know how to adjust your training, and feel confident continuing to build or maintain strength throughout your pregnancy.

Strength training can be an incredibly valuable part of a healthy pregnancy, and you don't need to figure out how to navigate all of those changes by yourself.

If you're looking for prenatal strength training or a personal trainer in San Francisco who understands how to modify strength training throughout pregnancy, our coaches at Iron and Mettle are here to help.