Brianna Battles Wants to Keep Pregnant Athletes in the Gym
Who is Brianna Battles?
Brianna Battles is the Founder of Pregnant and Postpartum Athleticism, a program designed to help coaches, trainers and practitioners learn how to coach pregnant and postpartum athletes in an online, self-paced course.
OK, got it. So how’d this whole thing come about?
Six years ago, Battles was pregnant with her first son.
“My doctors told me to listen to my body and do what I’ve always done. Well, if you tell a CrossFitter that it can be extreme in some ways because of the mental approach. It’s a different mentality,” she told us in an interview.
Which is what she did until she had her son, Cade. But when she tried to return to the gym she discovered a whole new set of problems.
A tougher comeback.
“I thought I was exempt. I was not,” she told us in an interview.
Battles started researching and teaching herself what she needed to know to return to her regular training schedule. She started speaking out on social media about the problems she faced as a postpartum athlete and soon women everywhere were reaching out to share their stories. She realized that there was a gap in addressing the needs of pregnant and postpartum athletes.
So she decided to fill that gap.
Now, Brianna has worked with athletes like Lindsey Valenzuela and Quiana Welch during and after their pregnancies. She’s been on the Girls Gone WOD podcast and the Fed & Fit podcast, an appeared in Shape, W Magazine, and Muscle & Fitness.
And with more than 400 coaches trained as a PPA coach, Battles is seeing the tides turn.
“We’ve seen such an uptick recently in the number of women that have always identified of athletes and fast forward ten or twenty years and they’re thinking of families but don’t want to stop competing. And they don’t have to.
Every week through the 2019 CrossFit Open, Brianna and her coaches are highlighting Open scaling options, strategies and suggestions for pregnant and postpartum athletes on their Instagram page so that pregnant and post-partum athletes can still participate in the sport that they love.
“If we are advocating a lifetime of fitness and inclusivity, then there is a whole population of people who are being left out and being sold a hurtful message. We don’t need to be convinced to work out, the buy-in is already there. We need to be convinced to work out differently when our body is different.”
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