Tone It Up’s Katrina Scott on why we’ve been talking about postpartum bodies all wrong

Motherhood changes so many things. It changes our priorities, our homes, our futures and yes, our bodies. No one understands this better than Tone It Up co-founder Katrina Scott. Prior to moving to California and starting Tone It Up, Scott was at one time exclusively training pre and post-natal women.

Scott is a master trainer with a degree in Health Promotion and Fitness—she’s a fitness star—and she was still surprised by how much her body and fitness level changed during pregnancy. During the second episode of The Motherly Podcast, Sponsored by Prudential, Scott tells Motherly co-founder Liz Tenety about how pregnancy has changed the way she sees perinatal fitness and her body.

When Scott first found out she was pregnant, she was shocked by how hesitant she found herself feeling about working out, which is her brand, her job and a big part of her life and identity.

“It’s ironic because I trained so many women for so long and said, ‘You know you can exercise and you know you can continue doing what you were doing before you got pregnant,’ and I walked around like I was walking on eggshells. As soon as I thought I was pregnant and as soon as I got that positive test I was so scared and I didn’t know that I was going to feel that way,” she tells Tenety.

For Scott, the first trimester was a scary time. She just wasn’t confident that she would stay pregnant. But when she did, she amped up her fitness and started really exercising again, as much as she could. She says the second trimester was great, but by the third, she was taking a lot of pee breaks and had a new appreciation for the challenges of prenatal fitness.

“Going from being able to balance very well and being a fitness instructor and then all of a sudden, day to day, your body changes so much,” so much she explains, recalling how she fell over doing a back lunge during a video shoot.

Scott says she knows that some women are able to keep working out at full strength throughout their pregnancy, but that just wasn’t her personal experience, and neither was the often cited narrative around breastfeeding and postpartum weight loss.

“We need to change the conversation with everyone and with ourselves and realize how cool it is that our bodies are different,” Scott explains.

That means that right now, she’s being patient with herself and kind to her body, and wants other mothers to be kind to their bodies, too.

To hear more about how Katrina Scott is finding her way though fourth-trimester fitness listen to The Motherly Podcast, sponsored by Prudential, for the full interview.

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