Why we created the Oh Baby! Fitness Prenatal/Postnatal Fitness Training

Several years ago, I sat with a team of newly hired Oh Baby! Fitness instructors in a live perinatal fitness training. This was the go-to pre/postnatal training at the time–basically the only one on the market. I had taken the live training a few years before with a great instructor and had spent the years since teaching 20+ Oh Baby! Fitness classes a week. I was excited for our new team, but about halfway through called Clare, the CEO and founder of OBF and said, “We’ve got to create our own training. NOW.” As I watched a team of group fitness instructors learn about the perinatal period for the first time I realized how much was NOT being covered– they weren’t being taught the latest research (of which there is a ton), they weren’t being taught the importance of the core box during pregnancy and the postpartum period (and how to rehab it), and they weren’t being taught WHY modifications and adjustments are needed during pregnancy and how to communicate that effectively to clients.

Clare and I got to work the next day creating the Oh Baby! Fitness Pre/Postnatal Fitness training….an intense process that took over a year. We hired an additional perinatal fitness expert, and the three of us read every study or article or research out there about pregnancy and postpartum exercise. We decided we weren’t just going to teach our instructors the science of perinatal exercise, we were going to teach them to teach their clients about it too—our Oh Baby! Fitness training needed to be so good that it made instructors EXPERTS who could educate their clients on safe pre/postnatal exercise.

Oh Baby! Fitness Co-Owner and her baby Bea teaching a pre/postnatal training in Dallas .

I’m proud to say we achieved that goal—and that our training, both the online and live version, has empowered hundreds of people across the U.S. and around the world not just to know what exercises to do during the perinatal period, but how to TALK to clients about exercise . We help group fitness instructors and personal trainers (and doulas and acupuncturists and RNs and doctors—all people that take our training!) gain confidence in helping new and expectant moms exercise safely, and when they educate women those moms gain confidence too—about becoming mothers.

A new fleet of certified Oh Baby! Fitness instructors pose for a picture after a live training

An instructor learns how to check for abdominal separation

We’re also extremely proud that our training goes up to 6 months postpartum, giving all sorts of insights about what to expect physically and psychologically and how to train women successfully in the period after giving birth. Most trainings cover the postpartum period in a couple pages, at best. Ours is the most comprehensive, representing what we’ve learned from the thousands of Moms we’ve worked with in our classes over the last ten years.

The Oh Baby! Fitness Pre/Postnatal Fitness Training is a core piece of our licensing program, but it’s more than that too—it’s a lasting (everyone who signs up has access to it forever), living (we update it regularly) contribution that we have made to the industry of pregnancy and postpartum exercise. I’m so proud of it, and sharing it with others through our live trainings is one of the favorite parts of my job.

(Oh Baby! Fitness is recognized as a Continuing Education Provider by ACE, AFAA, NASM and many other national fitness organizations. See our training page to learn the number of Continuing Education Credits (CECs) granted by each organization for our perinatal training).

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