A client tells you she is pregnant. Or she messages five weeks after giving birth asking when she can start again. Either way you now have a client whose training sits inside a medical picture you cannot see, and most coaches respond by either guessing or going quiet.
Neither is the job. This article is about the coaching problems — what to ask, who to talk to, how to set expectations, how to keep someone engaged through months when progress is not the point. The clinical questions belong to her doctor, midwife or physiotherapist, and this article sends them there on purpose.
Know where your job stops
Pregnancy and the postpartum period are medically supervised. Your client has a care team — a GP, a midwife or an obstetrician, often a physiotherapist — and that team holds information you do not have and cannot get from a check-in form. How the pregnancy is progressing, her blood pressure, what happened at previous births, what happened at this one.
So you work inside whatever her clinician has told her. You do not interpret it, stretch it, or find a way around it. If she has been told to keep things low-impact for now, that is the brief you program to. If she wants to do more because she feels fine, the answer is that she goes back and asks, not that you make the call for her.
This matters more than it sounds, because the public guidance is written for uncomplicated pregnancies and you often cannot tell from the outside whether a client is in that group. The Australian Government's physical activity guidelines for pregnancy, released in 2021, apply to women who are healthy and whose pregnancies are progressing normally; the NSW Government's summary of them states that anyone with complications should get expert advice from a health professional before starting, continuing or returning to physical activity. Whether your client is in one group or the other is not a determination you make.
Most coaches need a specific qualification for this
A general personal training certificate does not qualify you to program for pregnancy or for the return to training after birth. Specialist pre and postnatal certifications exist, they are not long, and doing one before you take these clients is the baseline. Check your insurer covers the population too — that is a five-minute email and it is worth having the answer in writing.
If you do not have that training, say so to the client. Plainly, in the first conversation, before she has paid for another month:
"I'm not qualified to program for pregnancy, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Here's what I can keep doing for you, here's what I can't, and here's who I'd want you working with instead."
Coaches avoid this sentence because it feels like handing a client to someone else. It usually does the opposite. A client who has been told the truth about your limits at the start is the one who comes back to you afterwards, and refers her friends in the meantime. Taking on work you are not trained for is how you lose her — and, if something goes wrong, considerably more than her.
Ask what she has been told, not what her symptoms are
The first conversation is not a screening. You are not assessing anything. You are finding out what advice already exists so you can work to it.
Worth asking:
- Who is looking after her — GP, midwife, obstetrician? Is she seeing a physiotherapist?
- What has she been told about exercise, and when was she told it?
- What does she want from training over the next few months?
- What has changed since you last spoke that she thinks you should know?
The date on the advice matters. What she was told at twelve weeks may not hold at thirty. After birth, what she was told at her six-week check does not cover month five.
What you do not do is invite her to describe symptoms so that you can work out what they mean. If she mentions pain, bleeding, leaking, a feeling of pressure or heaviness, dizziness, or anything that worries her, the session stops and she contacts her clinician. You do not name it, rate it, or program around it. That is the whole protocol, and it is short on purpose.
What is yours and what is not
Most of the difficulty in coaching this population is sorting questions into two piles quickly, while the client is in front of you waiting for an answer.
| The client asks | Who answers it | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Is it safe for me to train at all? | Her doctor or midwife | Ask her to raise it, then work to the answer |
| Can I keep lifting heavy? | Her clinician | Send a plain description of what her training involves so they can answer specifically |
| My pelvis hurts when I squat | A physiotherapist | Stop that movement, refer, adjust the rest of the session |
| I'm leaking, or feel heaviness, when I run | A pelvic health physiotherapist | Refer. Do not program around it yourself |
| Do I have a diastasis, and what do I do about it? | A physiotherapist | Refer. No assessment, no protocol, no exercises "for" it |
| When can I start training again after the birth? | The clinician looking after her | Wait for the answer. Plan the ramp once you have it |
| What should I do in the gym this week, inside my clearance? | You | Program it |
| How do I train consistently on four hours' sleep? | You | This is the actual job |
The pattern is that anything requiring a judgement about her body's condition goes outward, and everything about behaviour, structure and adherence stays with you. That second column is not a consolation prize. It is where the client's outcome is actually decided.
Work with her clinical team, not around it
Find a pelvic health physiotherapist before you need one. Know their name, know how to refer, and tell clients about them early rather than at the point something has gone wrong. Referring quickly reads as competence, not as losing a client — the same way sending someone to a physio for a shoulder does.
With the client's written permission, you can also go direct. A short email — here is the program, here is what I plan to change, tell me what to avoid — gets a useful answer from most physiotherapists, and it takes less time than the guessing does. The client then hears the same thing from both of you rather than two versions she has to reconcile.
This is the same discipline as programming around a client injury: the constraint comes from outside, you do not negotiate with it, and the coaching happens inside whatever room is left.
The coaching changes more than the program does
Assume for a moment that the clearance is broad and she can train. Most of what you have to get right still has nothing to do with exercise selection.
The goal moves, and you have to say so out loud. Fat loss and personal bests stop being the frame. Depending on where she is, the goal might be to stay strong, stay active, and get to the birth having kept training. Name that early, because if you do not, she will keep measuring herself against her old numbers and conclude she is failing.
Progression stops looking like progression. Load may go down for months, and that is not a programming error. Progressive overload for online clients is worth re-reading with this population in mind, because you need a definition of a good week that works when the bar is getting lighter — sessions completed, movement quality, how she felt afterwards.
Sessions will be missed. Nausea, exhaustion, appointments, and later a newborn who does not care about your split. Write programs that survive a 40% completion rate. Two twenty-minute sessions that actually happen beat four that do not, and habit-based coaching holds a client together through this period far better than a training plan alone.
Change what you ask for at check-ins. Weight and progress photos may be the wrong questions for months. Ask about sleep, energy, how the sessions felt, what got in the way.
Returning after birth is a medical decision
She does not start again because six weeks have passed, because she feels ready, or because you have a program written. She starts when the clinician looking after her says she can, and you work inside exactly what she was cleared for.
Continence Health Australia's Pelvic Floor First guidance (accessed September 2026) advises checking with a doctor, midwife, physiotherapist or continence professional before returning to sport or exercise after the birth, and considering a physiotherapist check before returning to high-impact exercise, running, sport or abdominal exercise programs.
Two things follow from that for you.
"Cleared" is not one thing. Clearance to start walking and doing gentle work is not clearance to run, jump or lift heavy. Ask her what specifically she was cleared for and what she was told to hold off on, and write the answer down.
The ramp is longer than she expects. She is comparing herself to people on the internet who were back in the gym at four weeks, and she will push. The useful response is not a lecture about patience — it is a specific, small plan for the next four weeks that she can finish, so that progress is visible while the volume is still low.
Whatever happened at the birth — surgery, tearing, a complication, a long recovery — is not something you program around based on a description in a message. That goes to the physiotherapist, every time.
The part nobody warns you about
A postpartum client is often sleep-deprived, in a body she does not recognise, on a schedule she does not control. A pregnant client may be dealing with a level of physical discomfort that makes training feel pointless. Coaching either one well is mostly patience and low-friction accountability.
Some things that help:
- Do not bring up her body composition. If she raises it, follow her lead; otherwise leave it.
- Do not treat postpartum weight loss as an automatic win to celebrate.
- Let her pause. A hold on the account rather than a cancellation costs you a month and keeps a client who would otherwise be gone for good.
- Reply to the message about the terrible night before you reply to the one about the program.
You are also not her therapist. If a client describes persistent low mood, anxiety, or not coping, say once and plainly that this is worth raising with her GP or maternal and child health nurse. Do not diagnose it, do not coach it, and do not let it pass without saying anything.
Follow her lead on who knows
A client often tells her coach before she tells most people, because the training has to change and you are the one it changes with. Treat that as confidential until she says otherwise, and ask directly: does she want it referenced in a group chat, a community post, a challenge leaderboard, or anywhere else other clients can see. Coaches get this wrong by being pleased for her in public.
The same rule holds if a client tells you she has lost a pregnancy. Follow her lead entirely. Do not ask for details, do not offer a plan, and do not decide on her behalf when she should train again — that is a conversation for her and her doctor. Say you are sorry, tell her the spot is held for as long as she needs, and pause the account rather than making her cancel it.
Some clients want training to be the one part of their life that has not become about the pregnancy, and will tell you so. Others want the whole program rebuilt around it. Ask which, rather than assuming, and ask again a few months later, because the answer changes.
Write down what you were told
Every conversation about clearance goes in writing. Not because you distrust the client, but because in six months neither of you will remember exactly who said what, and that conversation is the basis for everything you programmed.
Record who cleared her, what for, and when. Ask at every check-in whether anything has changed with her clinical advice — one question, every time, so that a change reaches you in the week it happens rather than a month later. And make sure the scope of your service is set out in what she signs at the start; both the client intake form and the liability waiver should say plainly that you coach inside her clinician's advice and do not provide medical or physiotherapy care.
Fitsly's forms and check-ins are built for exactly this record: an intake form can carry a consent agreement the client ticks and signs, and every submission stores the questions as they were at the moment she answered them, so editing your template later never changes what the record says you asked.
