Active Mom Podcast: Pregnancy, Postpartum, Perimenopause, Menopause & Beyond

Епизоде

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  Kegels to CrossFit: A Pregnancy & Postpartum Exercise History | Crossover with Practice Brave, Brianna Battles 18.09.2026 1ч 13мин

  Send us Fan Mail Carrie was taught to go gentle. Brianna was taught to go harder. Neither one worked. Bri Battles reached out and said let's chat about history. I said okay. So here we are, two podcasts running as one episode, looking back at the last 10, 15, 20 years of how pregnant and postpartum athletes have been advised. And I promise you, we barely scratch the surface. Bri came up through the barbell side. I came up through the clinic side. Same women, opposite ends of the field, and fo...
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  The First Real Data On Climbing While Pregnant | JOY BLACK 11.09.2026 1ч 15мин

  Send us Fan Mail Three years ago Joy Black came on this show to talk about climbing in pregnancy and postpartum, and quite honestly, we had almost no research to point at. She came back this time as a published researcher. Two papers, both in Sports Medicine, both with Dr. Margie Davenport's lab at University of Alberta. So we sat down and broke them open. The first is qualitative: 11 elite climbers, Olympic and World Cup level, on how they actually made decisions while pregnant. Not "is clim...
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  REWIND Summer Finale// Pregnancy And Postpartum Exercise Research Is Years Ahead Of What You're Being Told: Why It Isn't Reaching You | MARGIE DAVENPORT, PhD 09.09.2026 57мин

  Send us Fan Mail Labor Day is in the rearview, the temps are finally doing what they're supposed to do, and this is the last rewind of the summer. Quite honestly, this is the one I wanted to close out on. When Margie came on for this one, she spent a good chunk of the hour telling me she couldn't tell me things. I'd ask, she'd dodge. I'd ask sideways, she'd dodge nicer. At one point I told her she was like a mystery novel and I just wanted to know what happened on the next page. She said she'...
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  12 Weeks to Return to Run isn't Set in Stone - Solo episode 04.09.2026 46мин

  Send us Fan Mail Somewhere between 2019 and now, "wait 12 weeks" turned into a rule. It is not a rule. It never was. I have been in pelvic health for 26 plus years, and right now I am watching that number get handed around in Facebook groups, on social, and quite honestly by a lot of professionals who are leaning really hard on it. I don't know that the foundation exists to do that. So this is a solo episode where I walk you back through how we got here. 🔹 Why the six week visit was a medical...
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  REWIND // "Cleared at 6 weeks" doesn't mean cleared to run — what the research actually says — DR. SHEFALI CHRISTOPHER 02.09.2026 1ч 18мин

  Send us Fan Mail Shefali got hate mail. Not a snarky comment on a post. Emails. From other people who work with postpartum runners, coming at her over a single number in a consensus paper. The number was three. As in, after a minimum three week period of rest and recovery, some people might be ready to start doing some things. Drills. Not a 5K. Not a race. Some things. And she wasn't even giving her opinion. She surveyed clinicians and exercise professionals, coded what they said, and reporte...
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  Do Hypopressives Lower Intra-Abdominal Pressure? Here's What the Research Says with Silvia Saraiva 28.08.2026 45мин

  Send us Fan Mail This one is going to ruffle some feathers. Hypopressives. Low pressure fitness. Whatever your algorithm is calling them this week. The theory has been the same since 1984: you do the breath, you hold the posture, your intra-abdominal pressure drops, and your pelvic floor switches on because of that pressure drop. Nobody had measured the pressure. Silvia Saraiva did. She trained 36 women who had never done a hypopressive in their lives, gave them two weeks to practice, then br...
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  REWIND // You're Not Running Wrong: Running Myths Debunked | RICH WILLY, PT, PhD 26.08.2026 49мин

  Send us Fan Mail Okay, so this one is a Summer Rewind, and I'll be honest with you, I went back and forth on which episodes to bring back. This one wasn't a hard call. The original aired in September 2022. I re-listened before we re-ran it and quite honestly? I'm still hearing every single one of these myths in clinic. Every one. A couple of years later. Rich Willy has spent 20+ years treating injured runners and publishing the research the rest of us end up citing. And the thing I love about...
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  STILL A RUNNER, NOW A MASTERS HYROX ATHLETE, AND NOT SLOWING DOWN AT 55 | HILARY CAIRNS 21.08.2026 1ч 8мин

  Send us Fan Mail Hilary Cairns races Hyrox at the pro weights, which means the farmer's carry is a pair of 53 pound kettlebells and she is essentially hauling her own body weight down the floor. She is the top ranked American in her age group. She also has three kids in their twenties and has been racing in DC since 1993. Now the part nobody handed her. She nursed all three kids for years and trained hard the whole time. She got a stress fracture after her second. Nobody sat her down and talk...
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  REWIND // Pelvic Girdle Pain, Relaxin & Pregnancy Support: What Women Really Need to Know — with DR. SINEAD DUFOUR 19.08.2026 1ч 10мин

  Send us Fan Mail Relaxin is one of the first words you learn when you find out you're pregnant. Somebody hands it to you like a fact. Your joints are loose, your pelvis is unstable, be careful, this is just what pregnancy does. Here's the problem. Everyone has relaxin. Not everyone has pelvic girdle pain. This Summer Rewind is with Dr. Sinead Dufour, a Canadian pelvic health physiotherapist, researcher and co-founder of The Womb, and she has spent years trying to drag the actual state of the ...
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  THE POSTPARTUM EXERCISE GUIDELINES MOMS ACTUALLY ASKED FOR | DR. MARGIE DAVENPORT 14.08.2026 1ч 2мин

  Send us Fan Mail This should not be revolutionary in 2026. They asked the women. Went out across Canada, asked postpartum women what they were actually desperate to know, and let the answers drive it. What came back was mental health and sleep. That's the 2025 Canadian postpartum guideline. Dr. Margie Davenport, PhD, was primary author on it. She's the director of the Program for Pregnancy and Postpartum Health at the University of Alberta, and this is her fourth time on the show....
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  REWIND // EP 251: POSTPARTUM RUNNING RESEARCH YOU ACTUALLY NEED: WHAT SCIENCE SAYS ABOUT RETURNING TO SPORT | RITA DEERING 12.08.2026 1ч 15мин

  Send us Fan Mail Not everybody has time to sit down and read the whole paper. Not everybody wants to. I get it. But you do need to read beyond the abstract, so let's do it together. For this summer rewind episode, I'm bringing back my 2024 conversation with Dr. Rita Deering, PT, DPT, PhD, one of the authors on the two international Delphi studies and consensus statements on postpartum return to running. This is the one where we take the research apart. Rita walks through what a Delphi study a...
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  Everything We Now Know About Women's Health. Nobody Told the Women. | MEGHAN RABBITT 07.08.2026 1ч 2мин

  Send us Fan Mail Meghan Rabbitt has been a health journalist for 25 years. And the thing she said to me about reporting this book was: why don't I know this? If she didn't know it, what are the rest of us working with? Meghan writes about women's health for Women's Health, Oprah Daily, Prevention, and Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper. Her book, The New Rules of Women's Health, came out of years of interviews with the people actually doing the research. Her phrase for what she wants for all of us ...
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  REWIND // Everything you've been afraid to ask about prolapse — answered by a urogynecologist — DR. CHERYL IGLESIA, MD 05.08.2026 39мин

  Send us Fan Mail Prolapse might be the single most fear-loaded word in postpartum health. Not because of what it is. Because of how little anybody tells you about it. This week we're rewinding to one of our season one conversations, with Dr. Cheryl Iglesia, MD, urogynecologist here in Washington DC and one of the very first mentors I had in pelvic health. My first pelvic health job was at National Rehab Hospital back in 2001, and a couple days a week I was over in her office with absolu...
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  Pulmonary Embolism in Pregnancy: Symptoms You Shouldn’t Ignore — with RACHEL ROSOVSKY, MD 31.07.2026 1ч

  Send us Fan Mail "It is probably nothing." The swelling is probably the third trimester. The breathlessness is probably the stairs. The ache in your calf is probably that run you should not have done. And most of the time, all of that is exactly right. Most of the time is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Dr. Rachel Rosovsky is a hematologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she has spent twenty years on blood clots, and she co-authored the first ever AHA/ACC guideline on acute pu...
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  REWIND // YOUR ESTROGEN TANKED AND NOBODY TOLD YOU WHY POSTPARTUM & PERIMENOPAUSE DR. RACHEL RUBIN 29.07.2026 34мин

  Send us Fan Mail You leave the hospital with a healthy baby, a folder of paperwork, and zero mention of the fact that your estrogen just went from about 3,000 to almost nothing. That is where this conversation starts. In 2022, I sat down with Dr. Rachel Rubin, urologist and sexual medicine specialist, back in season one, long before she became the person everyone quotes about hormones. I've known her since she walked into the PT department at Georgetown as a resident and asked if she could sh...
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  The Thoughts You're Too Scared to Say Out Loud — Birth Trauma, Intrusive Thoughts & Postpartum Mental Health with DR. VANESSA KOMAREK (@heavy_lifting_psychologist) 24.07.2026 47мин

  Send us Fan Mail There's a thought a lot of moms have had and almost none of them have said out loud. Maybe it was an image of dropping the baby. Maybe it was something worse. And the second it showed up, the next thought was: what is wrong with me? Dr. Vanessa Komarek is a psychologist who specializes in trauma and PTSD recovery, a powerlifter, and a mom of two under two. She came on to talk about mental load and we ended up somewhere much more honest: birth trauma, intrusive thoughts, and w...
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  REWIND // Will working out hurt your milk supply? — KELLY KENDALL, RN, IBCLC aka @thebalancedboob 22.07.2026 18мин

  Send us Fan Mail "I don't have enough milk." It's the first place a new mom's brain goes when the baby fusses, wakes early, or pops off the breast. And when you add workouts back into the mix? The doubt gets louder. This week's Summer Rewind brings back one of my favorite conversations, with my longtime friend (and former neighbor!) Kelly Kendall, RN, IBCLC, aka @thebalancedboob. Kelly was an L&D nurse who thought she had breastfeeding figured out. Then she became a mom. Tongue ties, mast...
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  Everyone's calling it a 'tight pelvic floor'… but can we actually feel it? — with Gosia Starzec-Proserpio, PhD 17.07.2026 1ч

  Send us Fan Mail You've heard it. Maybe you've said it. "Your pelvic floor is too tight." It's everywhere right now — on the socials, in the clinic, out of the mouths of people who've never assessed a pelvic floor in their life. But here's the question almost nobody stopped to ask: can we actually feel the thing we keep confidently naming? Researcher Gosia Starzec-Proserpio, PT, PhD, just did the work to find out — across 528 women. And her answer is more interesting (and more freeing) than e...
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  REWIND // Why Moms Leak When They Run: What Urinary Incontinence Research Gets Right (and Wrong) with — DR. LINDA MCLEAN 15.07.2026 59мин

  Send us Fan Mail If you've ever accepted leaking as the toll you pay to keep running, this one's going to reframe it. Dr. Linda McLean (@mfm_lab) is one of the foremost researchers on the pelvic floor and urinary incontinence — a professor and Chair in Women's Health Research at the University of Ottawa. In this Summer Rewind, we cut through what the science actually shows about why running-induced urinary incontinence happens… and where popular advice for active moms gets it wrong. We get in...
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  You don't have to look like a runner to be one — with Melanie Cote (@the.curvy.runner) 10.07.2026 55мин

  Send us Fan Mail Melanie Cote spent years believing runners were a certain kind of person — thin, disciplined, elite — and she wasn't it. So when a coworker organized a 5K, she showed up to cheer instead of run, too embarrassed to try. A year later, she crossed that same start line. Today she's a half-marathoner who runs as @the.curvy.runner, and her story is for every mom who's ever thought "I'm not a runner." Carrie and Melanie get into starting couch-to-5K in your late 40s, why consistency...