Training Log from 2nd Pregnancy
Sarah Walls
A couple months ago a friend suggested I spend some time on Wendler's 5/3/1 Boring But Big program. It is simple and fairly fast for me to get through. The fast part was the most important factor at the time.
I'd done it before so I knew I had the template somewhere on my computer. Turns out, 5/3/1 was what I did during my entire pregnancy with my son. Honestly, it was pretty cool to review.
It looks like the program started at 20-weeks; I genuinely have no idea what I was doing prior to this program. Lifting, obviously, but I didn't log it.
I do remember pretty clearly the goals with writing this plan. I was trying to take my experience from my first pregnancy and become a little smarter and more effective. With my daughter (born in 2010), I had trained through that too, but was pretty shy about my strength training (per the usual doctor recommendations about "light weights and high reps"). I also ran for my aerobic conditioning, which caused very bad plantar fasciitis - this was a very bad decision on my part. Very bad.
With Mom v. Baby Training Round II, my goals were to prioritize my aerobic training but not resurrect the plantar fasciitis by stupid exercise selection. A side bar: aerobic training during pregnancy has HOOOOGE benefits for both the mom and, more importantly, the baby: better stress management, lower birth weight (I had no interest in birthing a baby the size of a Thanksgiving turkey), improved cognitive development from birth to age 5, plus some others I'm forgetting right now.
I also wanted to stay strong with my body weight exercises. There were a lot of pull-ups and pushups in this plan.
Lastly, I carried the mantra of "Winning" the pregnancy - this meant: healthy baby, quick delivery, and hit my recommended weight gain (no more and no less).
Okay, before you take a look at the actual plans below. Let me give you a "key" to reading it:
- I did not do the 5/3/1 standard of an all out rep max on the last set; I'd just do as many as I could until I got up to an RPE of, let's say, an 8
- You'll see in the 2nd-4th waves that each week is written as 25/5, 26/6, etc. This was to remind me how many weeks pregnant I was (the first number) and where I was in this 16-week training plan
- I did pull-ups and pushups twice a week with a repetition total equal to the number of weeks in the pregnancy I was; probably would have been much kinder to myself to do a countdown here, but that may not have occurred to me as a smart choice
- Same deal with the prowler pushers - 1 trip for every week; truth be told this was really a borderline choice, I wouldn't do this again
- You'll see I put in some very light interval runs in the last wave; I think at this point I was just so big and winded and uncomfortable all the time that I wanted something else to do besides push the prowler
Squatting was too uncomfortable for me, by the end of the 2nd wave, so I pulled those out and subbed in more deadlift variations.
This program is now 4-years old and looking back at it I can say I would use this approach again (minus the idiotic volume of Prowler pushes).
Did I hit my goals? I sure did. Duke was and is super healthy with a birthweight lower than mine at birth (so, I effectively controlled the turkey factor). I gained exactly 25 pounds. The delivery was quite fast and my recovery very fast (especially with regards to how quickly my uterus returned to normal size.... I believe this was from the training).
While I would never suggest this program be used by anyone other than me, it proved that challenging the conventional wisdom of physical training during pregnancy is okay when there is an established training history and the mother and fetus are healthy.