You’ve had your six-week check.
Your doctor says everything looks fine and you’re “cleared for exercise”.
So does that mean you can lace up your runners, load the barbell and go straight back to the training you were doing before pregnancy?
Not necessarily.
The six-week check is an important medical milestone, but it isn’t a test of your running capacity, pelvic floor function, abdominal strength or readiness to tolerate jumping, sprinting and heavy lifting.
Your body also doesn’t suddenly finish recovering at six weeks.
Pregnancy and birth place significant demands on the abdominal wall, pelvic floor and the rest of the musculoskeletal system. A caesarean also involves recovery from major abdominal surgery. Sleep, feeding, previous training history and the demands of looking after a baby all affect how quickly exercise can progress.
None of this means your body needs to be treated as fragile.
It means your return to exercise should be progressive and based on what your body can currently tolerate.
We approach it in much the same way we approach returning an athlete to sport after an injury.
You don’t simply wait for a date on the calendar.
You rebuild capacity, monitor symptoms and progressively expose the body to what you want it to do again.
When can I start exercising after giving birth?
You don’t necessarily have to wait six weeks before doing any exercise.
After an uncomplicated birth, gentle activity can often begin earlier, provided you feel comfortable and your medical team hasn’t advised otherwise.
The early goal isn’t “getting your fitness back”.
It’s recovery and gradually reintroducing movement.
What this looks like will vary considerably depending on your pregnancy, whether you had a vaginal or caesarean birth, complications during delivery, your symptoms and how active you were beforehand.
Someone who trained throughout an uncomplicated pregnancy will have a different starting point from someone recovering from a difficult delivery.
That’s why postpartum timelines are useful as starting frameworks rather than rules.
Weeks 0 to 6: rebuild the foundations
The first few weeks are primarily about recovery.
Walking is one of the simplest places to start.
Initially, that might mean moving around the house and taking very short walks.
As your body tolerates it, you can gradually increase the distance.
There is no prize for walking five kilometres at two weeks postpartum.
Increase it because it feels comfortable, not because you think you’re behind.
Pelvic floor exercises
The pelvic floor is a group of muscles supporting the pelvic organs and contributing to bladder and bowel control.
Pregnancy itself places considerable load on these muscles, regardless of how you give birth.
Gentle pelvic floor muscle training can usually form part of postpartum rehabilitation when medically appropriate.
In simple terms, imagine gently lifting and squeezing the muscles you would use to stop passing wind. You should still be able to breathe normally, and the muscles should relax again afterwards.
Pelvic floor training isn’t just tradition. A recent systematic review including more than 21,000 postpartum participants found moderate-certainty evidence that pelvic floor muscle training reduced the odds of postpartum urinary incontinence. (PubMed Central (PMC))
If you’re unsure whether you’re doing the exercise correctly, or you’re experiencing symptoms, an assessment with a pelvic health physiotherapist can be worthwhile.
Gentle abdominal exercise
Your abdominal wall has spent months adapting to pregnancy.
Early rehabilitation can involve comfortable breathing, gentle abdominal exercise and gradually reconnecting movement with everyday activities.
You don’t need to spend these weeks constantly “holding your core in”.
The objective is to progressively restore your ability to generate and tolerate force, not teach you that your abdomen needs permanent protection.
When can I return to exercise after a caesarean?
A caesarean deserves its own consideration because you’re recovering from abdominal surgery as well as pregnancy and birth.
In the early weeks, wound healing comes first.
Walking can usually be gradually introduced, but lifting and exercise progression should follow the advice given by your obstetric and medical team.
You’ve probably heard the early rule of thumb to avoid lifting anything substantially heavier than your baby.
That’s a useful practical guide during the initial recovery period, but it isn’t a permanent restriction.
As healing progresses, lifting should gradually return.
After all, motherhood becomes a progressive resistance program whether you planned one or not.
Your baby gets heavier.
The capsule needs carrying.
The pram goes into the car.
Laundry baskets still exist.
Our job is eventually to prepare you for those demands rather than tell you to avoid them indefinitely.
Weeks 6 to 12: rebuilding strength
For many women, this is where exercise begins to feel more like training again.
The six-week medical review can help confirm that early recovery is progressing appropriately.
From there, resistance exercise can gradually become more structured.
Depending on your starting point, this might include:
- squats or sit-to-stand variations
- hip hinge movements
- bridges
- rows and presses
- step-ups
- calf raises
- carries
- gradually progressed abdominal exercises
- low-impact cardiovascular exercise.
These aren’t arbitrary gym exercises.
They’re preparing you for things you actually do.
Squatting helps with getting off the floor while holding your baby.
Carries prepare you for capsules and shopping bags.
Hinge patterns build capacity for repeatedly picking things up from the floor.
Upper-body strength helps with feeding positions, carrying and the thousands of repetitions involved in caring for a growing child.
This is also where Clinical Pilates can provide a useful structured pathway.
Pilates equipment allows resistance and movement difficulty to be adjusted gradually, particularly for someone who doesn’t feel ready to return directly to a gym.
We’ve explained the difference between Clinical Pilates and general reformer classes in our Clinical Pilates vs Reformer Pilates guide.
Is it normal to leak when exercising after pregnancy?
Urinary leaking after pregnancy is common.
But common doesn’t mean you should simply accept it.
You might notice leaking when you cough, sneeze, jump, run or lift.
Other symptoms worth paying attention to include:
- heaviness or dragging in the vagina or pelvis
- a sensation of something coming down
- pelvic pain
- difficulty controlling your bladder or bowel
- pain during exercise
- significant abdominal bulging or doming that you cannot comfortably manage under load.
These symptoms don’t mean you’ve failed your recovery.
They also don’t mean you’ll never run or lift again.
They are information.
If running causes leaking every time, repeatedly running through it isn’t our preferred progression strategy.
We would rather understand why it’s occurring, modify the current exercise dose and build the capacity required for that activity.
Pelvic floor symptoms are treatable, and early assessment can help.
If you’re experiencing significant leaking, pelvic heaviness, symptoms of prolapse or other pelvic floor concerns, assessment by a physiotherapist with specific pelvic health training is appropriate.
What is abdominal separation or diastasis recti?
During pregnancy, the connective tissue between the two sides of the rectus abdominis stretches as the abdominal wall accommodates the growing uterus.
This increased distance between the abdominal muscles is commonly called diastasis recti, or abdominal separation.
It’s extremely common during and after pregnancy.
For many women, the distance naturally reduces during the postpartum period.
But here’s the part that often gets missed:
Your recovery shouldn’t be judged solely by the number of centimetres between your abdominal muscles.
Research into diastasis rehabilitation is still evolving. Exercise may influence the inter-rectus distance, but reviews have found considerable variation between studies and no universally accepted exercise program for “closing the gap”. (Springer)
What matters clinically is also how your abdominal wall manages load.
Can you get out of bed comfortably?
Can you lift?
Can you train?
Can your abdominal wall generate force as exercise becomes more challenging?
Those questions matter.
Does diastasis recti mean I should never do sit-ups?
No.
There isn’t good evidence supporting a lifelong ban on crunches or sit-ups simply because you have abdominal separation.
Early in recovery, certain exercises may be more appropriate than others.
If an exercise produces significant doming, discomfort or symptoms, we may modify the movement, load or breathing strategy.
But the long-term goal is generally to progress abdominal loading, not spend your life avoiding it.
Your abdominal muscles are designed to work.
We want to rebuild their capacity.
When can I run after having a baby?
This is probably the postpartum question where timelines cause the most confusion.
A widely used postnatal return-to-running guideline recommends that women consider returning to running from around 12 weeks postpartum at the earliest, rather than automatically returning at the six-week check. (ResearchGate)
But 12 weeks isn’t a magic number.
The original guideline itself was developed in an area where high-quality research was limited, so it should be treated as a useful framework rather than a guarantee that everybody is ready to run at week 12.
We prefer a time plus criteria approach.
Before running, we want to know that you’re tolerating everyday activity and lower-level exercise without symptoms.
Depending on the person, return-to-running testing may include things such as:
- walking for around 30 minutes comfortably
- repeated single-leg calf raises
- controlled single-leg squats or sit-to-stand variations
- single-leg balance
- repeated hopping
- jogging on the spot
- forward bounds or similar impact tasks.
The exact test battery and numbers shouldn’t be treated as universal pass or fail criteria.
What we’re looking for is whether you can tolerate increasing levels of single-leg load and impact without leaking, pelvic heaviness, significant pain or other concerning symptoms.
Running itself should then be graded.
You might start with short walk-run intervals on flat ground.
If those are tolerated, the running intervals gradually increase.
Then total volume increases.
Speed and hills can come later.
This is the same principle we use when returning athletes to sport after injury.
Calendar time matters, but capacity matters too.
If you’re returning to running, our Running Injuries guide also explains how we manage training load as running volume increases.
When can I lift weights after a caesarean?
There isn’t one date when every woman becomes ready to lift heavy weights after a caesarean.
Early restrictions exist to allow the surgical wound and deeper tissues to heal.
After that initial phase, resistance should gradually increase based on your healing, symptoms and capacity.
By the later postpartum months, the question should increasingly move from:
“Am I allowed to lift this?”
to:
“Have I progressively prepared myself to lift this?”
Someone whose goal is returning to heavy strength training needs a graded exposure to heavier loads.
That might begin with bodyweight exercises and light resistance before progressing through moderate loads and eventually towards their previous training.
The same applies to returning to CrossFit, netball or other higher-intensity activities.
Months three to twelve can involve a substantial rebuilding phase.
That timeline isn’t a sign that recovery has gone badly.
It’s simply the reality that strength, fitness and tissue capacity take time to rebuild.
Sleep deprivation also matters.
If you’ve slept four broken hours and are feeding a baby around the clock, your recovery capacity isn’t the same as it was before pregnancy.
Nutrition and adequate energy intake matter too, particularly if you’re breastfeeding and increasing your training.
You don’t need to “bounce back”.
You need enough capacity for the life and activities you want to return to.
How long does postpartum recovery take?
Longer than six weeks.
But that doesn’t mean you need to spend months avoiding exercise.
Think of postpartum recovery as a gradual continuum.
The early weeks focus on healing and gentle movement.
The following months rebuild strength and cardiovascular capacity.
Running, jumping and heavier lifting are introduced as your symptoms and physical capacity allow.
Eventually, exercise stops feeling like “postnatal rehabilitation” and starts feeling like training again.
For some women that transition happens relatively quickly.
For others, pregnancy complications, delivery, caesarean recovery, pelvic floor symptoms, sleep or simply the realities of caring for a baby make the process slower.
Neither pathway is a failure.
Do I need a postnatal physio check?
Not every woman requires months of physiotherapy after having a baby.
But an assessment can be useful if you’re unsure where to start, you’re experiencing symptoms or you’re trying to return to higher-level exercise.
A postnatal musculoskeletal assessment can look at things such as:
- your exercise and pregnancy history
- delivery and recovery
- current symptoms
- abdominal function
- general strength
- movement capacity
- balance
- impact tolerance
- your goals for running, gym or sport.
At VIBE, Rose is both a Physiotherapist and Accredited Exercise Physiologist, with Pilates training, which allows us to assess your overall physical capacity and build a progressive exercise program around your goals.
Where symptoms suggest that a specialist pelvic health assessment is required, such as persistent leaking, prolapse symptoms or other pelvic floor concerns, we can recommend appropriate pelvic health physiotherapy rather than pretending every postpartum problem can be solved through a general exercise program.
From there, rehabilitation might involve gym-based strength training, individual exercise programming or Clinical Pilates depending on what suits you.
The goal is eventually independence.
What exercises are safe in the early postpartum weeks?
There isn’t a universal list that applies to everyone, but early exercise often begins with:
Walking, gentle pelvic floor training, comfortable abdominal exercise and gradually increasing normal daily movement.
As recovery progresses, we add resistance.
Then more challenging cardiovascular exercise.
Then impact, running and sport if those are your goals.
The sequence matters more than finding a collection of special “postnatal exercises”.
Your body needs progressively increasing demands.
That’s how it rebuilds capacity.
Your six-week check isn’t the finish line
Being cleared at six weeks is good news.
But it doesn’t mean you should already be back to where you were before pregnancy.
And it certainly doesn’t mean you’re behind if you’re not.
Postpartum rehabilitation is better thought of as a return-to-performance process.
Start with what you can currently tolerate.
Build strength.
Build fitness.
Address pelvic floor symptoms rather than ignoring them.
Introduce impact progressively.
Then return to the activities that make you feel like yourself, whether that’s running, lifting weights, Pilates, netball or simply carrying your baby and everything that comes with them without worrying about your body.
If you’re six weeks postpartum, we can help you start.
If you’re sixteen months postpartum and still haven’t felt confident returning to exercise, we can help you start too.
At VIBE, we can assess your current strength and physical capacity and develop a progressive return-to-exercise program at our Homebush or Seven Hills clinic.
You can learn more about Clinical Pilates at VIBE or book a Physiotherapy or Exercise Physiology assessment to work out the right starting point for you.