5,000 Coaches Strong – How Brianna Battles Is Changing the Game for Pregnant Athletes
It all started in 2013 when Brianna Battles got pregnant.
The strength and conditioning coach, who holds a Master’s degree in coaching and athletic administration, realized she needed her own coach to help navigate training during her pregnancy, but it was difficult to find one.
- “In 2013, there was significant oversight for understanding how to work with female athletes through pregnancy and postpartum. The information was either really generic or dismissive. I was humbled, both as a coach and an athlete,” Battles, now a mother of two, said in an interview with the Morning Chalk Up.
That’s when she realized she wanted to shift her focus to work with pregnant and postpartum female athletes.
She began by offering a strength class for women at a local CrossFit gym and sharing her own postpartum journey on social media.
- “That prompted a lot of questions,” Battles said. “I started getting a lot of emails from people saying, ‘I wish somebody had talked to me about diastasis [recti]…or ‘I pee my pants during double-unders. Can you help me?’”
Eventually, Battles couldn’t keep up with the volume of questions, so she developed an hour-long online course to address many common questions and concerns that pregnant and postpartum women were asking.
In 2014, she launched Pregnancy & Postpartum Athleticism, offering training programs for pregnant and postpartum women.
Where She Is Today
Today, Battles continues to market her training programs and personally coaches pregnant and postpartum elite athletes, including CrossFit athletes, MMA and UFC professionals, and Olympians.
- Most recently, she partnered with CrossFit Games champions Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir to help them launch their own pregnancy training program.
Her main focus is on a coaching certification program that teaches coaches how to train their own athletes through pregnancy.
- “As my [pregnancy programs] started to get a lot of traction, it opened my eyes to the idea that, if we want to support more female athletes in pregnancy and postpartum, we have to get in front of the coaches and practitioners who are seeing them weekly. Because me giving advice online isn’t as impactful as them working with their coach in person,” Battles explained.
Battles has found an important niche, and since launching her coach certification in 2017, over 5,000 CrossFit coaches, personal trainers, and even midwives and doulas worldwide have completed the self-paced online course.
- Worth noting: The course typically costs $1,497, but is currently on sale for $1,197 through Friday, October 24.
The Big Picture
Eleven years after Battles began answering questions from pregnant women on Facebook Messenger, she couldn’t be happier with where her company stands today.
More than 5,000 coaches have completed her certification, and tens of thousands of others have used her programs to support their training during pregnancy and postpartum. She knows this number will grow even more among CrossFit athletes through her partnership with Thorisdottir and Davidsdottir.
That said, she remains humble and has no plans to ease up.
- “I feel like I truly take it a year at a time. You have to read the room in this industry in terms of where things are going,” she said.
Ultimately, her goal has stayed the same since day one – to educate women about the benefits of training during pregnancy and postpartum.
- “This season is a catalyst for the rest of their life. I just want more information, more qualified coaches, and improved messaging in our industry, and I’m just going to stay really committed to that,” she said.
Featured image: Brianna Battles
