Brianna Battles | Pregnancy and Postpartum Athleticism

Brianna Battles believes athleticism does not end when motherhood begins. Frustrated by the lack of resources and support for pregnant and postpartum athletes, she founded Everyday Battles to bridge the gap. Now, she empowers everyone from Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters and Olympians to hobbyists to challenge their perceived fragility, navigate body and identity changes, and pursue a lifetime of athleticism. Battles notes how strength and conditioning coaches are uniquely poised to influence communities and train general populations using a top-down coaching philosophy. Conducting needs analyses, she focuses on their athletic history, predispositions, and how they manage breathing, pressure, and tension during movement. By reverse-engineering a proactive return to performance, she helps clients overcome social media glorification and fearmongering to design an athlete-mom life that serves them. Battles discusses tapping into the “athlete brain” that craves routine and buy-in. Her advice? Get curious, practice brave, and embrace entrepreneurship as another form of progressive overload.

Connect with Brianna on Instagram: @brianna.battles and @pregnant.postpartum.athlete or by email at: brianna@briannabattles.com | Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs and LinkedIn: @ericmcmahoncscs

This episode discusses new CASCE field experience requirements that dictate a minimum of two substantially different work experiences. Learn more about CASCE accreditation at NSCA.com/CASCE.

“Athleticism does not end when motherhood begins.” 4:45

“We have a really big opportunity as strength and conditioning coaches to look at our knowledge base and our experience working with so many different high level athletes and saying, that is a small percentage of the population, but we have a responsibility to be able to apply our knowledge and help to our family, to our friends and to people to help them pursue this lifetime of athleticism, even if it's not at a super high level.” 8:50

“If we're wanting to pursue this lifetime of athleticism, which extends beyond just pregnancy and the trenches of postpartum, there's a lot we have to learn about our body and our relationship with fitness and just kind of our overall approach to health.” 17:10

“It's getting curious because it's not just about becoming a mother. It's knowing how to support girls and women in general because we have different-- we are not fragile at all, but we also might have different considerations. And that's all. It's just, it's understanding what those considerations may be at all different points across the lifespan, from coaching youth girls to collegiate athletes to professional athletes that are women, to then pregnancy and postpartum to perimenopausal, to menopausal, to elderly women.” 22:50

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[00:00:02.66] Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast, Season 8, episode 18.

[00:00:08.00] It's getting curious because it's not just about becoming a mother. It's knowing how to support girls and women in general because we have different-- we are not fragile at all, but we also might have different considerations. And that's all. It's just, it's understanding what those considerations may be at all different points across the lifespan, from coaching youth girls to collegiate athletes to professional athletes that are women, to then pregnancy and postpartum to perimenopausal, to menopausal, to elderly women.

[00:00:40.37] We might just have different life experiences than our male clients. That does not mean that we are less able or less capable. There's still so much athletic upside and po--

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[00:00:53.63] This is the NSCA's Coaching Podcast where we talk to strength and conditioning coaches about what you really need to know, but probably didn't learn in school. There's strength and conditioning and then there's everything else.

[00:01:04.28] This is the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm Eric McMahon, the NSCA coaching and sports science program manager. Today's episode focuses on women, but it's an important topic for everyone. We've had a lot of episodes over the years, and one thing I've seen is that there are more areas of focus within the field of strength and conditioning than ever before.

[00:01:25.93] Some strength and conditioning coaches work with just one sport and others may work with just male athletes. So there's a lot for us to learn about this topic. Today's expert is Brianna Battles. She specializes in pregnancy and postpartum athleticism as a strength and conditioning coach. Brianna, welcome.

[00:01:44.42] Hey, thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:46.55] Yeah, it's been fun getting to know you, talking a little bit in approach to this episode. And this is a huge topic, a topic that maybe a lot of us don't know everything we should know about it. I wanted to give you the opportunity to share your story, how this became your topic, your passion that you'd like to share about. And yeah, so let's start with that.

[00:02:10.05] Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. I have been a strength and conditioning coach since 2008. That's when I first-- it's when I graduated with my undergrad. And immediately, while all of the exercise physiology was still fresh, I took the CSCS and that just kind of launched me into a variety of different coaching opportunities over the next decade-ish from working in collegiate athletics to corporate wellness to doing different personal training and group fitness into ultimately starting my own business, supporting female athletes, but in particular supporting pregnant and postpartum athletes.

[00:02:47.86] And that was about 10 years ago when I first started that business. And I had gone on to get my master's degree when I was coaching in collegiate athletics, and my master's is in coaching. So I'd always really been involved in the coaching field, just in different capacities, but always really focused on women. And when I first got into these fields, there just weren't a lot of female strength and conditioning coaches.

[00:03:13.54] I remember going to all the different conferences and being really young in my early 20s and there just were not a lot of women in the room. And of course, we've seen that grow so much over the years, which has been great, but it's been especially rewarding to work in this capacity and to grown up in the strength and conditioning realm as a woman, as a coach, and to now be able to have a business that supports women, but even more niche, supporting pregnant and postpartum athletes and mothers who are what I like to term as pursuing a lifetime of athleticism.

[00:03:49.96] I think in so much of our undergraduate and our graduate work, there's not a lot of specific info for coaching women. Nevertheless, pregnancy or postpartum or different physiological considerations that influence training and long-term athletic performance. It's almost like, well, once you're out of college, so when you're 22, that's where we cap it at in terms of our care and understanding of this population.

[00:04:17.74] But what we're seeing and what we've been seeing, this isn't new, but what we're seeing is more women who are competing through their twenties into their thirties and beyond, and oftentimes they become mothers during that time period. There's been a lot of thought that, well, like once you're thinking about starting a family, you've got to bow out of competition. You cannot-- your career as an athlete or your time as an athlete is over.

[00:04:44.58] But athleticism does not end when motherhood begins. That's something I say all the time. We look at any triathlon event, the majority, like a large majority of that population are women in their thirties and forties and beyond that are participating. Many of them are mothers. 80% of women will go on to have children. And the majority of people working out in group fitness settings from whatever kind of group fitness setting it is.

[00:05:10.44] Our clientele, if you're working as a personal trainer, a lot of them are women. And our scope as strength and conditioning coaches can expand beyond the sport specificity of different team settings and sport settings. We can apply our knowledge to a variety of populations in coaching capacities, and there just wasn't a lot of information for knowing how to support female athletes once they cross over into thinking about starting a family and what their body goes through, the transition in their identity as an athlete and as a woman, and then how to return to performance and their sport postpartum.

[00:05:45.04] So I work with a lot of different professional athletes from UFC fighters to Olympians to high level CrossFit athletes and then just to your everyday kind of hobbyist who they believe that this is still part of their lifestyle. Like being an athlete is still very much something they identify with and they want to do. That just looks different and it spans a significant spectrum of what that looks like.

[00:06:09.69] But either way, I've seen through my work and through my personal experiences, becoming a mother, still being an athlete, an athlete that competes. I do jujitsu like I've been involved in a lot of different sports over the last however many years. That it's not over, we're not washed up, and we need more coaches and professionals who know how to support this population because it is-- it's really an expansive conversation.

[00:06:33.06] Man, I love that. You're talking about training over the lifespan. But--

[00:06:36.93] Yeah.

[00:06:37.26] I hear a message in there that we don't talk about and it's getting away from the mentality that our athletes graduate away from us as strength and conditioning coaches. It's an empowering message because as strength and conditioning coaches, we have the ability to work with a wide variety of populations. Maybe we've chosen to work in a very focused setting for a period of time. But I mean, we've seen huge growth in the private sector of strength and conditioning where you thrive. And it's something that there just seems to be a lot of opportunities now to really grow a voice around, like you said, kind of a niche topic, but really it isn't.

[00:07:21.34] This is a every day topic and it's pregnancy, women. This isn't a special pops episode of the podcast. This is an every day episode. It impacts families. It impacts all these different sports. So you talked about some endurance sports. You talked about MMA. What are just for individuals that maybe don't have the background you have working with female athletes, make some connections between program design, needs analysis, just in how you approach this through the lens of pregnancy and postpartum athleticism.

[00:08:04.38] Yeah, so I think a lot of times we just have to understand that as strength and conditioning coaches. We have a scope that most people in the fitness industry do not have. We know how to coach at a very high level. And so I like to talk about a top down coaching philosophy where if you can coach at a really high level, if you know how to coach somebody in the NFL, if you know how to coach at a collegiate athletics level, then you should also be able to transfer that knowledge and application down the line. You should be able to help the hobbyist and you should be able to help the person who does not know how to hinge without back pain. You should be able to have that conversation.

[00:08:40.63] Conversely, we don't have a lot of people that can work with gen pop and scale it up to working with high levels of athletes, right. It's very hard for them to make that connection. So I think we have a really big opportunity as strength and conditioning coaches to look at our knowledge base and our experience working with so many different high level athletes and saying, that is a small percentage of the population, but we have a responsibility to be able to apply our knowledge and help to our family, to our friends and to people to help them pursue this lifetime of athleticism, even if it's not at a super high level.

[00:09:15.30] So when I'm looking at needs analysis, and really kind of trying to take into the big picture of what my pregnant, postpartum athletes need, I want to understand what their predispositions are and what their athletic history is. Like if they're a gymnast and then if they are now a-- and they're a gymnast who found CrossFit, which, we often see that connection there, then I know automatically they're probably a really high-tension athlete. They hold a lot of tension in their glutes, a lot of tension in their pelvic floor, and then they have a lot of impact.

[00:09:43.97] So many of our female athletes, even if you're coaching them at the collegiate level or the youth level, may have pelvic-health symptoms like incontinence, where they might pee when they land, when their pelvic floor is not absorbing force and able to produce force in the manner in which we need them to. We also see that in our recreational powerlifters. They're not even really competing at a super high level.

[00:10:06.65] But we see women who have not had babies peeing on the platform all the time. It is a very common experience for female athletes. And that is really helpful information for me to know what their-- maybe what their symptoms are, maybe what their predispositions are, again, that high-tension athlete so that I can understand what their training needs to look like during pregnancy to ultimately not just give them-- help them have a fit pregnancy. They're already bought in.

[00:10:32.18] I don't need to convince them that pregnan-- or that training during pregnancy is healthy and safe for them and their baby. They know this. They know that. They're already bought in. And I think that's where the medical and professional field gets it wrong. Like they're like, oh, it's safe. But then they don't really give a lot of guidelines beyond that.

[00:10:48.35] So then female athletes just tend to go, like, full send, and they just want to keep doing what they've always done. And then there's not a lot of consideration for what their body is going to experience and, more so, the ability to zoom out on-- just because you maybe can right now, doesn't mean you should, not because of your ability to but more so looking at, how does that influence your recovery, and rehab, and rebuilding process, your return to sport, your return to fitness and performance postpartum?

[00:11:17.12] So there's a lot that we can do proactively in our approach to pregnancy that will then help set them up for what they want their return to sport or fitness to look like postpartum on behalf of their core, their pelvic floor, their mental health, their emotional health, their lifestyle, their training routine, whether they're trying to get back to the octagon at a year postpartum or they're trying to do a 5K with their family on a weekend sometime in November. You know what I mean?

[00:11:42.83] Like, we want women and families to be active and healthy and we have to reverse engineer that process, I like to know what their history is, what they're looking forward to, what they want their quality of life and quality of fitness to look like kind of on the other side, as I call them athlete mom. What do you want that-- what do you want your life to look like there? And now let's figure out what that process should look like for you.

[00:12:06.34] Huge lessons there in terms of needs analysis. And I love the everyday language you use to describe that. I mean, in the simple athletic scenario, our athletes want to be better athletes and they have a picture or a thought of what that might look like. And so reverse engineering that process through our needs analysis approaches of building a program, figuring out sports specific needs, metabolic conditioning needs of an activity, those still exist. But I actually think it's refreshing to hear.

[00:12:40.31] It's almost sounds like you're having the conversation with the athlete, hey, what do you want this to look like or feel like or what are your concerns around this? And maybe as a field, we haven't always been good at asking those questions of our athletes. You mentioned tension. You mentioned impact when describing that gymnastics athlete in. I think those are terms, that those are very real.

[00:13:05.42] I think that's something that just your approach to this is very connected with the individual. And I like hearing that. And I think it's encouraging for our coaches to actually almost put themselves in their athletes shoes of, if they-- I mean, you can't speak for every person or every athlete, but you can position yourself so that you can feel where, OK I get that. They want to feel this way, they want to connect this way. And--

[00:13:38.05] Well, they have athlete brain. And if any of us have worked with athletes, we know that they are stubborn, that they are routine driven. They need to understand the process in order to create buy in. Like if you're going to be a good coach, you need to be emotionally intelligent and be able to have good conversations. Just knowing the tactics, that is not enough. And that's especially not enough when you're working with people that are like outside of college now.

[00:14:00.85] They're not kids anymore. They are full grown adults that need to be communicated with, but they are also coming to the table with a whole history of sport baggage and coaching baggage and belief systems that infiltrate how they choose to train and how they approach their training. And, I say something like, athlete brain doesn't die. You just get more mature.

[00:14:22.41] Like you just get a little bit more self-aware. You know how to leverage it a little bit better. Like I'm still-- there's so many like toxic tendencies that we bring with us as we get older. But it's so much of it is rooted in this is what I did in high school. This is what I did in college. This is what that coach had me do. This is how I was taught to do x, y, and z. And all of that follows us into whatever sport we're doing and more importantly, into how we are mentally approaching our participation in that sport and that fitness. So you got to address the psychology first in order to have that kind of physical and performance buy in.

[00:15:00.62] Athlete brain may be the best term we've heard on the podcast in a while. I love that. And it comes across as a problem. It's a problem solving solution for these athletes. I mean, we all do that. If you were an athlete and you're faced with a challenge or a problem, what do you do? You dig in, you bear down and you get to work. You figure it out.

[00:15:20.89] Figure it out. And like that does not-- that translates. This is what makes athletes great. This is what makes them great and turns them into these high achieving humans once they're done with us at the collegiate level, when they go on. This is what makes great professional athletes is that they have got grit, and they got discipline. They know how to lock in.

[00:15:40.56] But like what happens when we are figuring out how to be like mostly average humans that still prioritize fitness and sports and you want to be a high-performing person? You still have athlete brain. That is rooted in you. That does not go away. That is something that you're either born with or you are-- it is drilled into you.

[00:16:01.05] For me, it was a lovely combination of both. And if you-- we have to learn to leverage that because it is a gift. It's a gift to be able to know how to think that way and move through life that way. And also that can backfire on you. That's why, like you pushing through injuries and returning too soon, doing too much too early, being dismissive of different symptoms, not wanting to-- in my world, not wanting to really modify a lot during pregnancy because there's this almost like an ego attached to being able to be this badass woman who's training and doing all of this. And that's what we see highlighted. That's what gets all the attention in the media. And it feels good to have that kind of spotlight.

[00:16:46.00] But ultimately, there's a conversation there of being able to say, does this serve you, not just now, but does this serve you long term. And it's having those conversations because, again, like athlete brain, they're going to say, I'm fine. I was doing this before. I can keep doing this. My doctor said, it's fine. We'll look for ways to compensate and to justify everything.

[00:17:06.43] But ultimately, if we're wanting to pursue this lifetime of athleticism, which extends beyond just pregnancy and the trenches of postpartum, there's a lot we have to learn about our body and our relationship with fitness and just kind of our overall approach to health.

[00:17:22.50] Yeah, ever evolving. It's always changing and there's always some experience you get to and you don't have all the answers. You got to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. Want to get into just some general advice, your advice for women as it relates to pregnancy and postpartum athleticism. And then I want to ask your advice for men as well.

[00:17:45.39] OK. So my advice for pregnant and postpartum athletes is getting like high levels of awareness of your body and maybe your predispositions when you're pregnant. It's so much more than exercise modifications. It's understanding how you manage your pressure. So like Valsalva, for example, we have been traditionally taught to inhale and like brace into the weight belt or out into the rib cage or we've been taught to set down into the pelvic floor, generating a lot of pressure downward.

[00:18:16.11] Especially for pregnant, postpartum athletes, we have to be aware of where that pressure is going because the abs, as your stomach grows throughout pregnancy, that midline, the linea Alba tends to or it does, it separates and expands. So that fascia has a lot of extra stress on it during pregnancy from just the natural adaptation it goes through growing the baby and as well as the forces through the pelvic floor.

[00:18:43.13] So now when we're adding not just the load of a barbell when we're squatting, or deadlifting, or whatever, but then the force of Valsalva, it's just something to be aware of, of how we tend to distribute pressure and then suggesting it to-- if you're coaching women at all, they all have a pelvic floor. Men have a pelvic floor too. But we have different anatomy that may need a different sort of approach to Valsalva, not always, but a lot of times. I like to teach all of my female athletes, whether they've had a baby or not, to-- I liked at the cue, breathe into your lats so that we're taking that Valsalva, that breath hold higher, and wider, and more distributed throughout the core instead of just out in the midline and, especially, away from just generating that tension and pressure down into the pelvic floor.

[00:19:29.81] So that's one thing. It's kind of rewiring their brains because they're not just doing a Valsalva at that 80% to 90% of their one rep max. We are seeing them breath hold kind in a lot of different movement and exercise activities. So kind of checking in on their breathing, looking at where they hold a lot of tension at. A lot of female athletes, we've been programmed our whole lives to suck in our stomach and also really like grippy with the glutes. If you're powerlifting background, a lot of hips forward, glutes squeezing to make sure that you get-- you don't get no repped or whatever.

[00:20:05.47] So we have to look at those tension strategies too, especially like I mentioned earlier, with our gymnasts and our dancers, people that hold naturally a lot of tension in their core and pelvic floor. So those are two things in particular that I really, really look at when working with both a pregnant and postpartum athlete is how they tend to manage their pressure and their breathing strategies and also where do they hold the most tension at. And then what does that look like in their movement, not just their daily life, but how does that look like when they're doing the sport activity or exercise that they're doing.

[00:20:36.56] And this is universal. This is not just pregnant and postpartum athletes. This is women, something that women need to understand about their body and coaches need to understand about female bodies as well.

[00:20:46.09] Yeah. Like we said before, it's a huge topic. It's important for everyone. What advice do you have for men that want to be great at working with female clients through pregnancy or postpartum?

[00:20:58.81] Yeah, I'd say just like get curious. I think when a coach can take interest in their athlete in the same way they would if their athlete just came back from a major knee surgery or a-- has an injury or has some kind of illness, like you'd get curious about that experience and you'd want to know how to bridge that gap in the ways that you can. Our superpower is using exercise as a tool. But we have to get curious first about that experience and what that is and all the different things that are influencing that experience.

[00:21:33.26] For a woman, when she becomes a mother, it's not just the physiological changes to her body. Like, yes, of course she has diastasis. She might have different pelvic floor symptoms that she's managing. These are significant considerations. And if we understand how to help somebody come back from a knee injury or manage shoulder pain, we should understand how to help our female clients navigate coming back from birth because you know what they're told by their doctors, you're cleared and that's it. They could feel like they can't even walk up stairs and they're told, well, you can go on a run, that's fine.

[00:22:05.51] That is a very real experience for so many women. They have nobody to look to. I mean, honestly, that's why I started this business was because I was like, God, I should know better. Like I work in this field, I understand the human body, but this was not anything I was taught. And I have, actually, nobody I can turn to. I-- no one I knew, none of my mentors, which-- of course, like most of them, like I said, there weren't a lot of women in this field, so they didn't know either. And then on social media, women just seem the glorification or the extremes of this person doing that, or also a lot of fear mongering.

[00:22:42.60] So we have to have a lot of nuanced conversation. And I think for men in particular, it's getting curious because it's not just about becoming a mother. It's knowing how to support girls and women in general because we have different-- we are not fragile at all, but we also might have different considerations. And that's all.

[00:23:02.52] It's just, it's understanding what those considerations may be at all different points across the lifespan, from coaching youth girls to collegiate athletes to professional athletes that are women, to then pregnancy and postpartum to perimenopausal, to menopausal, to elderly women. We might just have different life experiences than our male clients.

[00:23:23.85] That does not mean that we are less able or less capable. There's still so much athletic upside and potential. I know so many male coaches actually love coaching women because they're like a different. They're a lot more coachable sometimes. There's a lot more-- it's just a different kind of opportunity. And it's just that, it's an opportunity.

[00:23:41.91] Different is an opportunity. And if you're a good coach, you're going to get really curious about that because it's not just your clients, it's potentially your partner. It might be having daughters, it might be your sister, it might be-- you will have people in your life who know what you do as a coach and say, hey, do you have any advice about this?

[00:23:59.75] And since it's such a common experience, again, this is not a special population. This is a common population. We should be able to go to that table and have some good advice. And if nothing else, know who to refer them to. And I'm here. I'm here. You can refer them to me. I'm happy to help.

[00:24:17.60] And that's, I mean, that is ultimately why I created the program for coaches was so that we could learn more because it was frustrating. It was frustrating that I didn't have anybody, any colleagues that I could turn to and ask questions about my own process. And I felt dumb and I felt like dismissed. And it took a lot in order to get answers and help and support and just feel understood, and that-- we shouldn't have to feel like that in 2024.

[00:24:41.09] You've built your business to champion this message and share this information with a broader audience. What advice do you have for personal trainers, strength, and conditioning coaches, people in the field that have something they want to share and want to build a business on it? And how'd you develop that business acumen?

[00:25:03.01] Man, I mean, I had no intention of starting a business and there was nobody in my life that was entrepreneurs. I was raised by a single mom who was like, you need to go to school and you need to get your education, and you need to never count on anybody to take care of you. So that was like so embedded into my brain that I just had to have security. I had to have this career that would give me security.

[00:25:26.03] But ultimately, like, I kind of wanted to bet on me. And it took leaving collegiate athletics when I had a one-year-old to say, I don't know what the next right thing is, but I know that coaching and working in this capacity in this current season of life is no longer serving me. So I bowed out of working in collegiate athletics, but I knew I still needed to use my brain.

[00:25:49.13] I still wanted to coach. I could not like I don't want to say just be at stay at home mom. That it is a very hard job being exclusively a mom. So I needed something, an outlet that I could do where I was still coaching and still getting that interaction, still in that like gym setting, but in a way where I could still bring my baby with me. So I started a small group women's strength and conditioning program at a gym that I was going to and he felt so bad for me that he wasn't even charging me rent at the time. Because he was like, you know what, girl, like I know you're in the trenches. Yes, you can have your cute hobby of like coaching a couple of your friends here.

[00:26:25.10] And I started doing that and I did it for free for a little while. And then ultimately my clients started to feel bad. They're like, we're paying you. This is too valuable to not be paying you. And they told a lot of people. And I started coaching more.

[00:26:42.77] I started like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:30 in the morning class. That class time, guess who that attracts? A lot of moms. So I started just really working with this population. But because I was very much an athlete myself, I always had a little bit of a spin of like, I'm not training you like cutesy exercises, we're training like athletes. We're pushing sleds around. We're doing like farmer's carries. I'm going to teach you how to deadlift. I'm going to teach you how to squat. You're going to know how to clean,

[00:27:08.37] I'm going to teach you how to be an athlete because that is the world I come from. And I created a group of really athletic moms. And it was freaking cool to see. And that evolved over the years into people on like sharing that class online.

[00:27:23.99] People got really curious about it and they were like, I want that kind of help and support too. So then it was just honestly, it was taking a risk on trying to figure it out as I go. I think so many people get in their own way, whether it's imposter syndrome or they're like, I don't know how to do that. No one knows how to do it. You literally have to experiment, you have to try.

[00:27:47.79] And as coaches, what do we tell all of our athletes? They're not going to get it right on day one, on game one in quarter one, right. Like they're going to have to figure it out and they get better over time. Business is progressive overload. That's what that is. Entrepreneurship is progressive overload.

[00:28:05.10] So if we understand these principles and we can see that play out in real time in our coaching, it is the same as building a business. It is one small step at a time. And where I started a decade ago with that women strength and conditioning class is very, very different from where I am now.

[00:28:23.97] But that's, I mean, it's the same way that we look at who you are as a youth athlete at 13 is probably very different than who you are at 23. It's going to be different. Of course, it's different. You have so many reps and miles on what you've been able to learn through those years and your way of presenting that to the world.

[00:28:43.20] So as things evolved for me, I was able to take it online and make an even greater impact. And then to extend that further, I realized it was-- we needed more than just the athletes that were learning from me. Coaches have the greatest influence and impact on their communities and on people.

[00:29:00.58] For every one coach, like one coach influences so many people. So I knew to, honestly to get this message and support and information and resources and education out there. It really took educating my peers, my coaches, the practitioners in this space or working in complementary spaces. So then people in communities all over the world had that kind of access to information, somebody who understood them because I couldn't find one person, I couldn't find one person, one colleague back then.

[00:29:30.64] So it's been cool to see where it started versus how it's going kind of thing. And I never envisioned that. I never saw that coming. There was no grand like five year plan. It was just the next right thing, thing after thing. And I just call it like, the series of learning how to practice brave.

[00:29:50.65] Progressive overload. I like it. And the information that you share in your course does seem like it fills a void in our field. There's tons of information out there. And I think we all know. We love the research. We hate the research.

[00:30:08.28] Nobody really loves getting into a long academic journal article and having to find the relevant takeaways and applications. That's hard. I mean, it's really hard for us to do. So we as a field rely on a lot like programs like you run to help move the message in certain areas.

[00:30:33.60] And it's nice that we have people like yourself in our NSCA community to help bring a different spin or different perspective to really important topics that in a lot of ways, and I hope this comes through in the episode, everybody should know something about.

[00:30:53.50] One thing I want to highlight for our listeners, you may not know. You should know at this point. The NSCA is moving towards CASCE accreditation for the CSCS. One of the requirements for these CASCE schools is that your internship or field work experience can't just be in one area of the field.

[00:31:15.98] So if you want to be an NFL strength coach, great. You can go get an internship in that area. But another one of your field work experiences, needs to be in another area of the profession. That could be in the private sector, that could be with pregnant or postpartum athletes.

[00:31:34.06] So there's a huge need for us to diversify our skill set. I think that comes through, Brianna, and just what you're sharing and scale our message because I mean, let's be honest. Of all the elite athletes in the world, there's a lot more out there who aren't at that level, even though we're really skilled and working with what in a lot of ways, you say the top of the profession or with these elite populations.

[00:32:04.92] There are some elite problems to solve across the masses with the general population. And these terms-- I think this is an episode where the terms you use to describe these areas. I mean, that's really what we're talking about. Pregnancy, postpartum, these aren't-- yeah, these aren't special populations. These are everyday populations. These are things we deal with and work through and these are challenges.

[00:32:36.51] And it's-- so I hope that's empowering and I hope how we're talking about it today is empowering to all our listeners. It's really important that we highlight these big topics and are willing to have the discussion in the conversation. So, Brianna, thank you so much for sharing.

[00:32:53.88] Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And I think, I'd just like to play off of one of the last things you were saying there. We had the Olympics this past year, and there were so many moms that were there. And that's only going to grow, especially if we improve the support and resources. We are peaking later because we know more. We have different approaches and we're seeing that across the span of like fitness and high performance.

[00:33:18.97] We're peaking at different times. There's still so much potential. And whether, and if you are coaching at these high levels, you're going to see more of this population. Moms are going to keep showing up in the UFC, in different sports, at the Olympics, and they need their team, somebody on their team, their staff to know how to support them. And right now, that's a rare breed.

[00:33:44.13] Gosh, I mean, as coaches, we pride ourselves on making an impact, motivating our athletes, inspiring our athletes. And if that's the case, and you're working with female athletes, yeah, you're 100% right. If we're good at our job, there's definitely going to be more in the future, more active lifestyles through pregnancy, postpartum athletes at the Olympic level.

[00:34:11.09] It's exciting, to-- I think it's an encouraging and exciting message for our field to think about. And I challenge-- I challenge all of our listeners to take it to heart. Think about where your career might be going and how effective you are at training a variety of different populations within the field,

[00:34:31.89] Brianna, for, I know there's going to be people who want to reach out. You're great at following up and communicating and getting your message out there. What's the best way for our listeners to reach you?

[00:34:42.60] Yeah, you can check out my website, which is the pregnantandpostp artumathlete.com, or you can check out my Instagram handles @Brianna, B- R- I- A- N- N- A, dot battles and the brand page is @pregnant.postpartum.athlete. And I also have a podcast. It's the practice [INAUDIBLE] podcast so you can learn more about what we have going on there. And of course, I'm happy to answer any questions that might come up from this episode and direct you to the support and resources that I can.

[00:35:09.91] All right. This was fun. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We also want to thank Sorinex Exercise Equipment. We appreciate their support.

[00:35:17.20] I'm Ian Jeffries, the NSCA president. You've just listened to an episode of The NSCA Coaching Podcast. Hopefully it's generated some interest in strength and conditioning and the NSCA. If it has, get involved. Go on to the NSCA website, see what opportunities are available, and I hope to see you at one of our events where you can be the next leadership generation of the NSCA.

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[00:35:44.65] This was the NSCA's Coaching Podcast. The National strength and Conditioning Association was founded in 1978 by strength and conditioning coaches to share information, resources, and help advance the profession. Serving coaches for over 40 years, the NSCA is the trusted source for strength and conditioning professionals. Be sure to join us next time.

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