Personal training pregnant clients may sound daunting, even for the most experienced of PTs. But in fact, prenatal personal training is a hugely rewarding and lucrative niche of the fitness industry.
Whether one of your existing clients has fell pregnant or you’re looking to specialise in being a prenatal personal trainer, our top tips cover everything you need to know:
- Pregnancy And Fitness
- Tips For Personal Training Pregnant Clients
- Skills Required For Personal Training Pregnant Clients
- How To Become A Prenatal Personal Trainer
Before we get started, since most women will experience lower back pain during pregnancy, taking a Level 5 Lower Back Pain course can help you deliver an even more specialist service to your pregnant clients.
Enquire today for more information, or download our free course prospectus here for more information about the range of courses that OriGym offers.
Pregnancy And Fitness
Before you start personal training pregnant clients, there are some things you should know about exercise and pregnancy that will help you get the most out of your clients.
Let’s start by discussing how often and how intensely pregnant clients should exercise.
If your client was active before getting pregnant, they should continue with their usual exercise routine for as long as they feel comfortable.
However, if they were not that active before pregnancy, they should not suddenly take up a strenuous exercise regime. They should start with 15 minutes of exercise 3 times a week, before working up to daily 30-minute sessions.
You should therefore make sure to assess your client’s current fitness level before starting their training programme, as this will determine the intensity of the programme you make for them.
You may be wondering, is exercise dangerous for the baby during pregnancy?
In general, controlled, gentle and safe exercise is not dangerous during pregnancy. Of course, there are lots of precautions that should be taken, as we will discuss in our top tips. But in general, regular exercise is actually highly beneficial for pregnant women.
There are several benefits to exercising during pregnancy:
- Can reduce the risk of health complications for the mother and baby
- Can make labour easier
- Can make it easier to get back into shape after pregnancy
- Can help alleviate and prevent pregnancy symptoms such as backache
- Boosts mood and energy levels
- Can help prevent type 2 diabetes
- Can relieve bloating and constipation
Given these benefits, more and more women are looking for a personal trainer for pregnancy!
The increasing demand for prenatal personal training, paired with the fact that expecting parents are willing to pay a premium for expert services, makes this a highly lucrative personal training niche to get into.
We’ll take you through exactly how to become a prenatal personal trainer later in this article.
Prenatal vs postnatal
You may have come across the terms ‘prenatal’ and ‘postnatal’ with regards to pregnancy:
Prenatal refers to women who are pregnant, i.e. before giving birth.
Postnatal refers to the period after childbirth.
Although they can both be grouped under the general term ‘pregnancy’, pre and postnatal fitness are two separate demographics, as they each have different requirements and things to consider.
Prenatal personal training focuses on using exercise to help the pregnancy and labour process, whilst postnatal personal training is generally more about helping women restore strength and maintain weight loss after childbirth.
With this in mind, this article will only cover prenatal personal training. So, here are our tips for training pregnant clients.
Tips For Personal Training Pregnant Clients
#1- Conduct an initial assessment
As we touched on just above, conducting an initial assessment is important when working with any kind of client, but even more so when personal training pregnant women.
An initial assessment should take place during the first session with a new client. During an initial assessment with a pregnant client, you should always do the following:
Make them feel comfortable: This is important when training anyone, but particularly when personal training pregnant clients.
Many pregnant women may have got a personal trainer for pregnancy because they are nervous about the safety of their baby whilst exercising. They may not have exercised for a long time, especially not whilst pregnant.
With this in mind, you should use this first session to establish a good relationship with them and make them feel as comfortable as possible.
A good way to do this is to start the session with some small talk. Before you even get into anything fitness-related, ask them some general questions on easy subjects such as:
- Their pregnancy (when they’re due, whether it’s a boy or a girl etc.)
- The weather
- What they did at the weekend
- How they are feeling today
- What they do for a living
- Their family
This will help your client feel at ease in your company and creates the foundations for you to build a trusting and comfortable relationship.
This will also benefit you in the long run, as the client is likely to be more cooperative and make more progress with a personal trainer that they are comfortable with.
Find out about their current level of activity: In this first session, you’ll need to get to know how active your client was before their pregnancy and how active they are at the moment.
You should ask them about how often they normally exercise a week and how long for, what kind of exercise they normally do (i.e. do they mostly do weightlifting, running or yoga?), as well as how active they are in their day-to-day life (i.e. do they have an office-based job or a more active profession?).
This will then determine the intensity of the programme you design for them.
As we have mentioned, remember that if your client wasn’t that active before pregnancy, they should not suddenly start an intensive exercise regime! They should simply maintain or even decrease their current activity levels.
Conduct a postural assessment: Your initial assessment with a client should also include a postural assessment, which will highlight issues in regard to postural imbalances, muscular weaknesses, and/or range of motion.
This is particularly important with pregnant clients, as it can highlight common issues in pregnancy such as lower back pain, which you will then know to work around.
Determine their goals: The initial assessment is also a great time to determine your client’s goals for personal training.
It is likely that the goals of your pregnant clients will have a slightly different focus to your usual clients. For example, it is unlikely that a pregnant client will have the goal to ‘lose weight’ or ‘get abs’.
Instead, their goals are likely to be more concerned with maintaining their overall health and wellbeing to benefit the baby and their pregnancy.
For example, they may be wanting to strengthen their pelvic floor and abdominal muscles in order to make the labour process easier.
Their goals for keeping fit may also be more holistic, such as:
- Improve their mood
- Boost their energy levels
- Keep active
They may also be more practically-focused. For example, they may want a personal trainer purely so that they can know which exercises are safe for them during pregnancy and to have supervision and physical support (i.e. someone to spot them during exercises).
As such, you should expect a pregnant client to have more holistic goals than other clients. For example, they may simply want to exercise to improve their mood and boost their energy levels.
Determining their goals in this first session is important, as you can then tailor the training programme exactly to their needs!
#2- Adapt programme for each trimester
A pregnancy is divided into 3 trimesters. During each trimester, the body changes in different ways that you will need to account for when planning a programme for a pregnant client.
In the first trimester, it’s common for women to experience:
- Dehydration
- Overheating
- Extreme tiredness
You should therefore make sure that your client always has water to hand, and that you are not working out in an overly-busy and hot environment.
During the second and third trimesters, the body undergoes more changes which need to be accounted for.
Later on in the pregnancy, the resting heart rate increases by 15% to around 80-90bpm. This means that a pregnant client will be working a lot harder to pump blood around her body.
With this in mind, you should lower the intensity of your exercise programme with women who are in the later trimesters of pregnancy, as a dramatic increase in heart rate could be dangerous.
However, whilst there are general patterns for each trimester, remember that they are not set in stone- not all women will experience the same things at the exact same time in their pregnancy.
As such, you should always check in with how your client is feeling before each session, and be willing to adapt your programme accordingly.
#3- Don’t neglect the weights
When personal training pregnant clients, you may think that you can ditch the dumbbells and forget about strength training. But in fact, there are lots of benefits of strength training for pregnant women.
Strength training in pregnancy can help to avoid aches and pains from their bump, strengthen the body for labour, and make it easier to get strength back after birth.
The main thing to remember when incorporating weight training in your training programme for pregnant clients is: lower weights, higher reps.
In other words, instead of getting your client lifting heavy weights for a few slow reps, focus more on lower weights for more reps. This is because lifting heavy weights puts more strain and tension on the body, which should be avoided with pregnant women.
For example, instead of sets of 8-10 heavy squats in a squat rack, ask the client to try sets of 15 try with a light kettlebell or two low-weight dumbbells, or even just bodyweight squats. This is still just as effective in building strength, but is less dangerous for a pregnant client.
In general, you should avoid giving a pregnant client any exercise that uses a barbell on their back after 12 weeks, such as back squats and lunges.
Pregnant women should also be careful with free weights, as there is a risk of dropping them onto their bump.
A good alternative to free weights and barbells are resistance bands. They are a good way to build strength without the risk of dropping a heavy weight and causing injury.
Another thing to consider is that breathing correctly is always important when lifting weights, but particularly for pregnant women.
Holding the breath whilst weight training can cause a surge in blood pressure, which can restrict blood flow to the baby. You should therefore encourage your client to breathe deeply throughout any lifting exercises to avoid this.
#4- Check if your client has a diastasis recti
A diastasis recti is essentially when the two muscles that run down the middle of the stomach separate during pregnancy.
It is very common, with around half of all pregnant women experiencing it.
So it is very likely that you will encounter a client with a diastasis recti. If you do, you will need to adapt your programme accordingly.
If your client does have a diastasis recti, then you should make sure to avoid exercises such as supine abdominal crunches, spinal flexion, all fours position or plank position.
Instead, try exercises such as pelvic tilts, toe taps, heel slides, single leg stretches and bridges. These are all safe for those with a diastasis recti.
#5- Focus on strengthening the abdominal muscles
As a pregnant woman’s bump increases in size, the hollow in their lower back will increase, which can cause back pain.
Strengthening the abdominal muscles will help reduce this hollow in the lower back, and therefore reduce back pain during pregnancy.
Since back pain is so common in pregnancy, if you want to really get into prenatal personal training, it is a good idea to take a Level 5 course in Lower Back Pain Management. This will qualify you to safely train clients- such as pregnant women, with lower back pain.
Exercises that target the transverse abdominal muscles are also beneficial for pregnant clients. This is because these are the muscles that are used in childbirth, so strengthening them may make labour easier.
Abdominal exercises are fine to include in the first trimester. But during the second and third trimesters, as the baby grows, the abdominals expand and become weaker. You should therefore avoid abdominal exercises if your client is in the later stages of pregnancy.
Some safe abdominal exercises to include in the first trimester are:
- Side plank
- Lying down side crunch
- Standing crunch
- Cat cow pose
You should avoid any exercise that involves being in the supine position (lying flat on their back), such as crunches, bicycles or leg drops.
This is because the weight of the bump will put pressure on the main blood vessel, bringing blood back to your heart which can cause feelings of faintness and is dangerous for the baby.
#6- Avoid exercising to the point of exhaustion
You may be used to pushing your clients to their absolute limits during your sessions. But when personal training pregnant women, this is not the right tactic to take!
You should avoid training a pregnant client to the point where they are completely out of breath, overheated and exhausted.
This is because it can cause things like a sudden increase in blood pressure, a sudden drop in blood sugar, dehydration and lightheadedness, which is of course all dangerous for the mother and baby.
Whilst it is good to push your pregnant clients like you normally would, you should tone down the intensity by at least 30-50%, or even more so in the later trimesters. That means no hardcore HIIT training, spirints or other high-level cardio exercises!
As a general rule of thumb, during pregnancy, a woman should still be able to speak and hold a conversation whilst exercising.
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#7- Pelvic floor exercises
As well as the abdominals, another area to focus on when personal training pregnant women is the pelvis.
Because of the musculoskeletal changes that go on in the body during pregnancy, the pelvic floor can come under great strain.
The pelvic floor are simply the muscles that support the bladder, bowel and uterus (in women).
There are benefits to strengthening the pelvic floor for everyone, but particularly for pregnant women. Doing pelvic floor exercises before and during pregnancy can help reduce the chance of becoming incontinent after childbirth.
Here is how to instruct a pelvic floor exercise:
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- To find your pelvic floor muscles, imagine that you are trying to stop the flow of urine. This contraction is how to engage your pelvic floor.
- Sit down comfortably and squeeze these muscles.
- Do this quickly at first, then more slowly, holding for as long as you can before relaxing.
- Remember to breathe deeply throughout the exercise.
- If this is the first time that your client has done pelvic floor exercises, then have them do this just once or twice. Then over time, work up to 3 sets of 8 squeezes a day.
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You could include pelvic floor exercises at the start or end of your session, as part of a warm-up or cool-down, which we will discuss next!
#8- Longer warms ups and cool downs
Warming up before and cooling down after a session is always important- but particularly when personal training pregnant women.
In fact, you should extend your warm-ups and cool-down by at least 10 minutes when working with pregnant clients.
Before a session, make sure that any stretching is dynamic. There are lots of benefits of dynamic stretching, especially when pregnant. Dynamic stretching pre-workout makes it less likely to overextend the muscles, put strain on the joints and cause injury.
Here are some warm-up exercises that are generally safe for pregnant clients:
- Walking on a treadmill for 3-5 minutes
- Neck rolls
- Side stretch
- Shoulder rolls
- Wrist and ankle rotations
Similarly, the cool-down is especially important for older clients. Even if you are rushed for time, you should always take the time to make sure that your client has cooled down before they leave.
Stretching after a workout helps prevent muscle strain and injury, as well as allowing the heart rate and body temperature to return back down to normal.
Some good cool-down exercises to do with your pregnant clients are:
- Overhead stretch
- Quad stretch
- Seated hamstring stretch
- Child’s pose
Each of these stretches should be held for around 30 seconds.
#9- Incorporate elements of yoga
As we have said, a pregnancy personal training session should be much less intense than the type of workout you might plan for other clients. Lower intensity activities such as yoga, may therefore be beneficial for your pregnant clients.
This could be during the warm-up and cool-downs, or even during the bulk of the session itself.
There are countless benefits of yoga for everyone, but particularly for pregnant women. Some benefits of yoga during pregnancy include:
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- Relieves aches and pains
- Stretches the muscles after exercise
- Breathing techniques can be used in labour
- Improves mood and reduces stress
- Improves blood flow
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Here are some safe and beneficial yoga poses that you could use in a cool-down with a pregnant client:
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- Cat-cow pose
- Wide-legged child’s pose
- Bound angle pose
- Downward dog
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Some more dynamic inverted poses- such as downward dog, should only be practiced during the first trimester. As always, check in with your client and take each pose slowly, spotting them throughout.
You should also avoid the following kinds of yoga poses with a pregnant client:
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- Poses that put pressure on the abdomen (i.e. lying face down)
- Deep twists
- Poses lying flat on the back (particularly later in pregnancy)
- Extreme inversions such as headstands
- Balances such as crow pose and tree pose
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So, if you feel confident, it may be beneficial to include some of these poses into a prenatal personal training session.
Skills Required For Personal Training Pregnant Clients
When it comes to pregnancy personal training, many of the skills required are similar to the general skills required to be a personal trainer listed here.
However, there are 3 skills that are particularly important when working with pregnant women. Those are:
#1 Adaptability. Perhaps the most important skill for a pregnancy personal trainer is the ability to be flexible and willing to adapt your training programme to any changes that occur throughout the pregnancy.
For example, you may have planned a particular session to have your client doing weighted squats with dumbbells. But your client may then turn up to the session feeling particularly fatigued or suffering with lower back pain.
Instead of making them do the dumbbell squats anyway, you should observe and listen to how your client is feeling and adapt the session accordingly. For example, you could see if they can manage some bodyweight squats instead, or even switch to more of a stretching-based session instead to reduce the intensity.
In other words, you should treat each session individually. Be aware that not every pregnancy is the same. You cannot always predict how your client will feel on that particular day- but that’s ok!
#2 Patience. Patience is one of the key skills that makes a good personal trainer. But this is even more vital when training pregnant clients!
A good pregnancy personal trainer should be patient, as you will likely have to work more slowly than you would usually with other clients.
For example, due to their more limited range of movement, or because they are nervous, you may find that they take longer to pick up a certain exercise.
Instead of giving up, will therefore need to be patient and willing to explain an exercise again if your client doesn’t get it the first time.
#3 Motivational. When personal training training pregnant clients, you may find that they need a little bit of an extra push to reach their goals compared to your other clients.
This is because pregnant clients may be feeling nervous about exercising during pregnancy, in terms of their ability and the safety of their baby. This may cause them to hold back during sessions.
Whilst you should always take things slowly, you should also still push your client to reach their full potential!
The best way to do this is through words of encouragement, and assuring them that they are in safe hands.
Check out our article on how to motivate your personal training clients for more tips!
How To Become A Prenatal Personal Trainer
If these tips have inspired you to work with pregnant clients, you may be wondering how to become a prenatal personal trainer yourself.
Firstly, if you’re not already, you will need to become a qualified personal trainer. For this you will need to take a Level 3 Fitness Instructing course and Level 4 Personal Training course.
You can achieve both of these qualifications by completing a Personal Training Diploma.
The good news is that a level 4 personal training course includes a module on training ‘special populations’. Special populations refers to clients with specialist fitness needs, including pre and post-partum clients.
So, by choosing a regulated level 4 PT course, such as OriGym’s, you can guarantee that you will learn how to create and deliver training plans for pregnant clients, which will give you the skills and knowledge to pursue a career as a prenatal personal trainer!
If you’re interested in becoming a pregnancy personal trainer, picking a reputable course provider and finding a regulated course is essential.
Before signing up for a course, you should ensure that the qualification regulated is by an Ofqual-approved awarding body, such as Focus Awards.
Fortunately, all of OriGym’s personal training courses are Ofqual-regulated as well as CIMSPA-accredited.
CIMSPA accreditation is a further ‘stamp of approval’ that guarantees you will be receiving only the highest standard of teaching in the industry, helping you become a successful prenatal personal trainer.
Simply look out for these logos to make sure that a course has the correct regulation and accreditation:
Read this article comparing the best personal trainer courses for more tips on finding a reputable course provider.
Once you are a Level 4 personal trainer, you are now technically qualified to train pregnant clients.
If you pair the knowledge from this course with the tips we have discussed in this article, you should feel like you have the skills and knowledge required to work with pregnant women.
Being level 4 qualified is ideal if you simply want to be able to continue training an existing client who becomes pregnant, or to take on the odd pregnant client.
However, if you are looking to exclusively specialize in prenatal personal training or even start your own pregnancy personal training business, you may want to consider taking a specialist course.
The exact titles of these courses will vary, but will likely be along the lines of ‘Level 4 Pre and Postnatal Instructor course’.
These courses will simply expand upon the things covered in this article, such as the anatomical changes that the body goes through during pregnancy, the benefits and risks of exercise during pregnancy, and how to create a training programme for pregnant clients.
Another beneficial course to take if you are wanting to get into pregnancy personal training is a Level 5 Advanced Sports Nutrition course. This will give you an in-depth knowledge of sports nutrition, which you can then apply to your pregnant clients.
For example, you will then be qualified to suggest certain types of foods or supplements to complement their training plan. For example, you could recommend that they consider taking folic acid, which is particularly beneficial during pregnancy.
Having a Level 5 qualification will mean that you can market yourself as a specialist and therefore increase your rates. In fact, increased earnings is one of the main benefits of becoming a prenatal personal trainer, which will cover next!
Benefits of personal training pregnant clients
Now that you know how to become a prenatal personal trainer, you may be wondering why you should consider pursuing this career path. Well, here are some of the main benefits of personal training pregnant women:
#1 Increase client retention. It is very likely that at some point, one of your clients will fall pregnant.
Rather than lose a client for 9 months, you will be able to simply adapt their existing programme to accommodate for their pregnancy.
You may find that if one of your clients falls pregnant, they will be more likely to stay with you rather than move to another PT who doesn’t specialise in pregnancy. Any client would rather stay with someone they are already familiar with, rather than go through the process of finding a new one.
This will increase your client retention rates, which will of course help increase your overall earnings and also offer you a more stable income!
#2 Expand your clientbase. As well as retaining your existing clients if they fall pregnant, being able to train prenatal women also means that you can attract a whole new clientbase.
If you are a freelance personal trainer, you should be constantly thinking about how you can attract more clients as ultimately, how much you earn is up to you, how many clients you have, and how much you charge them!
So, by expanding your clientbase to include pregnant women, you are also increasing your earning potential. As well as the clients you already have, you will now be able to enter the pregnancy fitness market.
The best way to do this is through your marketing materials. For example, you will now be able to add ‘prenatal personal training’ to your personal trainer bio on your website.
This means that you are more likely to appear when someone searches ‘pregnancy personal trainer’, or ‘prenatal personal trainer’ on Google, thus increasing your exposure.
You can also expand your client base through social media. For example, you can start including the hashtag ‘#prenatalpersonaltraining’ or ‘#pregnancyfitness’ on your Instagram posts.
As you can see, these hashtags have hundreds and even thousands of posts. So by including them in your captions, you can massively increase your reach to potential clients! This is because when someone looks at that hashtag, your posts will appear.
This could then lead them to look at your profile, exposing you to another potential new client!
#3 Start your own pregnancy personal training business. As well as simply being able to take on pregnant clients, many prenatal personal trainers decide to specialise exclusively in training pregnant clients.
There are lots of successful personal trainers out there who have started their own business that is completely focused on training pregnant clients. Their success is largely due to the fact that they can really target a specific demographic and focus all of their efforts into that.
This is largely due to marketing, as you can then base your whole brand identity around pregnancy.
Here is a good example of a prenatal personal trainer’s website:
As you can see, the logo, colours, copy and image all clearly indicate that this is a reputable pregnancy fitness business and is very clearly aimed at pregnant women.
If you’re thinking of starting your own pregnancy personal training business, check out our guide to starting a personal training business here.
#4 Increase your rates. As a freelance personal trainer with a specialism, you can also charge more for your sessions.
Since you can market yourself as an ‘expert’ in a particular niche, people will typically be willing to pay more for your services. This is because you are offering a higher level of service, which of course warrants a higher price!
The average personal training session costs between around €30-55. As a prenatal personal trainer however, you can expect to charge on the higher end of, or even more than this range, given the specialist nature of the service.
A great way to increase your earnings as a pregnancy personal trainer is to offer various package options.
Creating a package pricing structure means that you can charge a monthly fee for a certain amount of sessions a week, and increase the cost according to the amount of services you include in the package.
For example, you could offer nutrition advice alongside personal training for a higher price. This is therefore a huge benefit of taking a specialist qualification such as a Level 5 Sports Nutrition course, which would mean you could offer these kinds of additional services to your clients at a higher price!
Remember that many pregnant women who are looking for a personal trainer for pregnancy are doing so because they are nervous or apprehensive about the safety of their baby when exercising.
This means that they may be more inclined to pay extra for a highly qualified PT so that they can have peace of mind that they are training safely with a professional.
#5 Highly rewarding. Aside from the financial benefits, being a pregnancy personal trainer is a highly rewarding career!
Seeing your clients achieve their goals is a great part of any personal training, but particularly when working with pregnant clients.
Most prenatal personal trainers say that it is an amazing feeling to be part of someone’s pregnancy journey. They love seeing how a fitness programme that they have designed has helped them through the whole experience!
Before you go!
So, we hope that you now have everything you need to know about being a personal trainer for pregnant women, as well as the skills and qualifications you need to become one.
If you’re already a qualified personal trainer, taking a Level 4 Lower Back Pain Management course qualifies you to help pregnant clients suffering from lower back pain. Enquire today, or download our free course prospectus to browse the full range of courses that we offer.