Your Postpartum Return to Running Plan: Building Strength, Coordination, and Confidence

Returning to running postpartum is about far more than just waiting a certain number of weeks or getting a “cleared for exercise” note at your six-week check-up. It’s a process that requires strategy, understanding, and a deep reconnection with your body—especially your core and pelvic floor. In this blog post, we’re diving deep into what a postpartum return to running plan really looks like when it’s built on connection, strength, and solid movement mechanics.

The Truth About Postpartum Running Readiness

Many new moms are told they can resume activity at six weeks postpartum, but that checkmark often doesn't match where their body is actually at. The six-week postpartum visit is primarily about internal healing, not readiness for high-impact activity. There's nothing magical that happens at six weeks. Six weeks is simultaneously too soon to start some exercise (like running, especially if you did nothing until this point!) and unnecessarily late to start doing others (the breathing and foundational movements). 

Running is not low-impact. It’s a single-leg, dynamic plyometric movement. That means every time your foot hits the ground, force travels up through your feet, knees, hips, pelvic floor, and core. You need every link in that kinetic chain to be strong, coordinated, and able to manage that load.

Running Postpartum: Not Just About “Going Slow”

Postpartum recovery advice often sounds vague: “Go slow. Listen to your body.” But what does that actually mean in practice? And what if you’ve spent years not listening to your body—pushing through discomfort or normalizing pain and fatigue as an athlete?

This is where we go beyond general advice and into real strategy.

The first step, learning to tune into your body, requires you to understand the physical changes that happened during pregnancy. 

Understanding the Physical Changes Postpartum

Before we get into the specific strength training strategies, it’s important to understand the shifts that happen during pregnancy and early postpartum that impact your running mechanics.

1. Disruption of the Core Canister

Your core is a dynamic system that includes the diaphragm (your main breathing muscle), pelvic floor, and deep abdominals. During pregnancy, the diaphragm is pushed upward, altering your breathing mechanics. Meanwhile, the pelvic floor experiences sustained pressure from the growing baby—even if you had a C-section.

2. Anterior Pelvic Tilt and Hip Mechanics

As your belly grows, your center of gravity shifts, often resulting in a more pronounced anterior pelvic tilt. This affects your range of motion through your hips properly and changes how force is transferred through your body when you move.

3. Reduced Glute Stability and Loading

The widening of the pelvis in late pregnancy shifts your lower body into more external rotation, making it harder to access your glutes effectively—especially through mid-stance, the phase in running when one foot is on the ground and absorbing the most force. There’s no mid-stance with that pregnancy waddle!

4. Rib Flare and Limited Thoracic Mobility

Changes in posture, including flaring of the lower ribs and reduced movement in the upper back, can prevent proper stacking of the rib cage over the pelvis. This also limits your ability to rotate efficiently while running—something that is essential for fluid, injury-free movement.

A Strength-Focused Postpartum Return to Running Plan

Let’s get into the strategies that can help restore these foundational movement patterns to restore the mechanical integrity your body needs to handle the demands of running.

Strategy 1: Reconnect with Your Core and Pelvic Floor via Breath

This can and should begin before your six-week check-up. Breathing is the gateway to restoring core function. Using your breath to create gentle intra-abdominal pressure helps activate the diaphragm and pelvic floor together, reestablishing the coordination that was disrupted during pregnancy.

You can find exercises and a roadmap for this early phase in the Postpartum Run-Ready Roadmap. And yes, this is something that can also be practiced during pregnancy to give yourself a head start.

Especially in these early days and weeks, the path of least resistance for pressure will be out the front of your abs (those muscles were stretched quite a bit). These exercises help get the rib cage moving again so that your abs can more easily return to and maintain their proper length tension ratio over time. Doing more specific “core” work without this step will be an uphill battle.

Strategy 2: Transition Out of Anterior Pelvic Tilt Using Proximal Hamstrings

One of the biggest postural changes postpartum is a tendency to stay stuck in anterior pelvic tilt. Instead of just squeezing the glutes and shoving the hips forward to compensate (hello “mom butt”!), focus on activating the proximal hamstrings—the upper portion of the hamstrings near the sit bones—to gently guide the pelvis back toward neutral.

This movement pattern can start as early as 2–4 weeks postpartum using foundational exercises like wall-supported positions that cue proper hamstring engagement. Using the wall for feedback—such as in an all-fours position with your feet on the wall—helps you feel the correct muscle activation. You’ll learn to find that subtle tuck without overusing the glutes or lower back.

Strategy 3: Lengthen Through the Backside and Access Internal Rotation

To effectively move through mid-stance while running, you need to be able to internally rotate the hip and load through length in the glutes and pelvic floor. This skill is often lost during pregnancy due to a natural waddle-like gait and the body’s shift toward external rotation.

Exercises that retrain mid-stance—like hip shifts, lateral lunging and hinging patterns—help reorient your center of mass over your stance leg. These movements restore the ability to absorb and produce force through the backside, which is absolutely essential for efficient, injury-resistant running.

This isn't just postpartum advice—if you’ve followed me for any amount of time you know this is something all runners can benefit from. But for postpartum runners, it’s even more critical given the compounded movement changes.

Strategy 4: Restore Rib Cage Mobility for Better Stacking and Rotation

The postpartum body often compensates for anterior pelvic tilt with flared ribs and compression through the back of the rib cage. These changes restrict the mobility needed for stacking (rib cage over pelvis alignment) and the natural rotation of the torso during running.

The antidote? Intentional, expansive breathing.

Start by learning to take full, 360-degree inhales—expanding not just your belly, but your chest, side ribs, and back ribs. This rib cage mobility improves rotational capacity and sets the stage for a functional core. Pair this with full, bottom-up exhales (often cued with a “haaa” breath) to re-engage your deep abdominal muscles and draw the low ribs back in. These breath practices are foundational and appear throughout the Postpartum Run Ready Roadmap.

Strategy 5: Train Thoracic Rotation with Upper Body Strength

During pregnancy, the growing baby sits between the pelvis and rib cage, reducing natural rotational motion. But running requires that exact movement: rotation through the pelvis countered by rotation through the torso.

We retrain this by adding alternating and reaching motions to your upper body strength training. Simple variations—like alternating chest presses or rows—help restore thoracic rotation while also building strength. It’s a double win: reinforcing your full-body running mechanics while addressing often-overlooked postpartum mobility needs.

Strategy 6: Gradual Progression Back to Impact

Once you've built foundational movement patterns and strength, the final step before running is progressive exposure to impact.

You start with exercises that teach your body how to accept ground reaction forces—like landing softly from a small drop. Then you build to producing force through jumping and hopping drills. This prepares your body to absorb, store, and reuse the forces that naturally occur during every running stride.

This stage aligns with the latter part of the Postpartum Run Ready Foundations Course, when you're preparing to meet the strength and impact readiness benchmarks in the Run Ready Checklist (part of the Run Ready Road Map)—things like single-leg hops, running in place, and coordinated landings.

You are not fragile. Pregnancy changes your body, yes, but with smart training, your body can adapt and become strong enough to run again—confidently and powerfully.

What This Looks Like in Practice: A Timeline-Based Progression

Here’s how a strength-centered postpartum return to running plan might look across the first weeks and months (in “When Can I Run After Having a Baby? A Coach’s Guide to Postpartum Return to Running” I covered this timeline in more detail):

Weeks 0–2: Rest and Recover

• Focus: hydration, nourishment, support
• Gentle breathwork to reestablish core and pelvic floor connection
• No need to “get back to it” right away—this is about setting the tone

Weeks 2–4: Foundational Reconnections

• Start breathing exercises in supported positions
• Reconnect with proximal hamstrings to begin repositioning the pelvis
• Begin gentle movements to rebuild the connection and coordination foundation for future strength work
• Add thoracic rotation drills and rib mobility breathwork

Weeks 4–6: Building Basic Strength and Mobility

• Work on strength work that specifically promotes internal rotation and lengthening the glutes
• Gentle strength work in squat and hinge patterns
• See a pelvic floor PT if possible

Weeks 6 and Beyond: Layering Strength and Impact Preparation

• Build in squats, lunges, and step-ups
• Add single-leg drills and supported hinging patterns
• Start impact prep: hops, landings, low-level plyometrics
• Build rotation into your upper body strength work with alternate presses and pulls
  
  

A Closer Look at Squat Progression

Let's look at how we might use this timeline and progression strategy with strength exercises using the squat as an example.

As you sit down into the squat, the glute muscles are supposed to lengthen, so that they can work with the quads to contract as you stand back up (strengthening through the full range of motion). Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen as naturally as we’d like postpartum.

Each workout in my Postpartum Run Ready Foundations Course progresses you through, first building the mind-muscle connection so that you can fully lengthen the muscles, then activating the glutes for stability, and then finally loading the squat for strength and power.

1. All 4s Squat: Start in a quadruped position and sit back, allowing the glutes to lengthen. This teaches your body to access range of motion without loading.

2.  Assisted Squats: Holding on for support, lower into a squat with control—especially through the mid-range, where internal rotation happens. Focus on eccentric (lengthening) strength.

3. Goblet Squats: Add load with a dumbbell or kettlebell held in front. This helps reengage deep core muscles while continuing to access glute and quad strength.

4. Step-Ups and Single-Leg Work: Move to unilateral exercises like step-ups and single-leg squats to sit. Eventually, progress to full single-leg squat-to-stand*.

This is the benchmark movement found in the Postpartum Run Ready Checklist, which helps you gauge whether your strength foundation is truly ready to support running. The Postpartum Run Ready Foundations Course progresses each movement pattern intentionally towards meeting these benchmarks.

Trust the Process—You Will Get There

We get it—you miss running. You miss the solitude, the rhythm, the freedom. But by working through these foundational strategies and progressions, you’re not only preparing to return safely, you’re preparing to return stronger.

Every phase in this plan is designed to feed both your athletic side and your healing body. This isn’t “just core and pelvic floor work.” It’s whole-body strength, nervous system retraining, mobility restoration, and confidence building.

You can find everything discussed here—and more—in the Postpartum Run Ready Roadmap, a free download that introduces the five-step START formula and gives you exercises you can begin today. If you’re ready to take the next step, the full Postpartum Run Ready Foundations Course offers a structured, week-by-week strength plan tailored to the needs of postpartum runners.

**I have another version of both these resources created specifically for going through this postpartum season after pregnancy or infant loss. The workouts and main content are essentially the same between the two. However, after experiencing the loss of our daughter it became abundantly clear that each needs to be taught in its own context and with respect to what life looks and feels like right now. Click here to access all the resources mentioned above specific to pregnancy or infant loss.

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