Pilates, Pregnancy, and Parenthood

I first found Pilates after having my daughter, during a season when my body felt unfamiliar to me. I was dealing with pelvic floor weakness, and something as simple as going for a walk became stressful because I often worried I wouldn’t make it home without leakage. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening — only that my body no longer felt as strong or supported as it once had.

Someone suggested strengthening my pelvic floor through Pilates. As a mother of two who knew very little about the method at the time, I started searching for videos and eventually found Mari Winsor’s mat Pilates workouts. Every morning before my children woke up, I would quietly roll out my mat in the living room and practice.

What started as an attempt to reconnect with my body eventually became something much bigger.

But even though I quickly fell in love with Pilates, there were still movements that felt completely unattainable to me. Because of my scoliosis, certain exercises — especially anything involving open-chain leg work or lifting both legs away from the floor — often left me feeling strain and discomfort in my lower back rather than strength and support.

At the time, I didn’t yet understand how to properly access my powerhouse or deeply engage the stabilizing muscles that support the spine and pelvis. I only knew that some movements felt empowering while others made me feel disconnected from my own body.

That’s when I eventually discovered reformer Pilates and began to understand something that many people misunderstand about Pilates as a whole: mat Pilates is actually more difficult than reformer Pilates because you don’t yet have the support, feedback, and assistance of the apparatus.

Looking back now, I realize how important the reformer was in helping me understand connection, alignment, and stability. The apparatus didn’t just make movement more challenging — it helped teach my body how to move more intelligently and with greater support.

To this day, the reformer still holds a special place in my heart, but if I’m being completely honest, the tower became my true love affair. There was something about the push-through bar that completely changed the way I connected to movement.

For the first time, I felt supported enough to explore strength, mobility, and articulation without fighting against my body. The feedback of the springs and the assistance of the apparatus helped me understand where movement was supposed to come from. In Pilates, the body prepares for movement before the movement ever begins. Instead of reacting afterward or muscling through exercises, I began learning how to create stability, engagement, and support first — allowing movement to emerge from a place of control rather than compensation.

Ironically, it was the apparatus itself that eventually gave me the strength, awareness, and deep core connection to perform mat exercises that once felt completely unattainable to me. Movements that had once caused strain in my lower back slowly began to feel more stable, supported, and accessible because I finally understood how to move from my center rather than compensate through tension and imbalance.

That experience completely changed the way I viewed movement. I realized Pilates was never about forcing yourself into the hardest variation possible — it was about building the awareness, control, and support necessary to move well within your own body.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Pilates is the tendency to equate difficulty with effectiveness. In reality, some of the most foundational exercises are often the most intelligent because they teach the body how to move with alignment, awareness, control, and support before layering on complexity or intensity.

Footwork on the reformer, for example, is often underestimated because it appears simple from the outside. But true Pilates footwork is not just pushing a carriage in and out with the legs. It is deep core engagement, pelvic stability, breath, alignment, length, and the coordinated integration of the entire body. In many ways, the intelligence of the exercise is found not in how heavily the springs are loaded, but in how well the body is able to organize and support itself throughout the movement. Sometimes lighter spring tension reveals far more about control, stability, and true connection because the body must learn to guide the carriage with precision rather than simply overpower it through momentum or brute force.

Pilates was never intended to be about surviving endless planks or forcing the body into exhaustion for the sake of intensity. It is about training the body to move more efficiently, more intelligently, and with greater awareness long before movement becomes advanced or visually impressive.

That philosophy becomes even more meaningful when you begin looking at movement through the lens of the different stages of a woman’s life, in particular, pregnancy.

During pregnancy, the body is constantly adapting and changing. Postpartum, many women are navigating weakness, instability, exhaustion, and a completely different relationship with their bodies than the one they knew before. During motherhood, we spend years lifting, carrying, bending, rushing, and often placing our own physical well-being somewhere near the bottom of the priority list. And during menopause and midlife, many women once again find themselves navigating changes in strength, mobility, joint stability, recovery, and body awareness.

What I have come to appreciate most about Pilates is that it meets you differently in every one of those seasons. It is not movement rooted in punishment or performance. It is movement rooted in awareness, support, adaptability, and longevity.

Pilates does not ask your body to be the same forever. It teaches you how to move intelligently within the body you have today while continuing to build strength, stability, and connection for the years ahead.

Pregnancy

When I see pregnant women walk into the studio now, I often find myself thinking how smart they are for beginning this journey before or during pregnancy. I wish I had understood then what I understand now.

I wish I had entered pregnancy already connected to my core, my breath, my pelvic floor, and the deep stabilizing muscles that support the spine and pelvis. I wish I had known how much easier movement, posture, balance, and even recovery might have felt if Pilates had already been part of my life.

One of the things I find so fascinating now is how much the Pilates apparatus teaches the body to adapt to changing balance and shifting center of gravity. The reformer is constantly asking the body to stabilize, organize, and respond to movement while maintaining control and alignment.

Pregnancy asks the body to do very similar things. As weight distribution and posture change, the body is constantly recalibrating. Pilates helps build awareness within those changes rather than leaving the body feeling unsupported by them.

Emerging research has suggested that Pilates and pelvic floor-focused movement during pregnancy may help support labor outcomes, pelvic floor function, body awareness, breathing mechanics, and postpartum recovery. Some studies have also associated Pilates training during pregnancy with reduced labor pain and shorter labor duration.

Of course, Pilates is not a guarantee of an “easy” pregnancy or birth experience, nor is it a replacement for individualized medical care. But growing evidence continues to support the role of intentional movement and pelvic floor-focused exercise in supporting women throughout pregnancy and postpartum recovery.

More than anything, I believe Pilates helps women feel more connected to and supportive of their changing bodies during one of the most physically transformative seasons of life.

What many people don’t talk about enough is that childbirth is not the finish line — it is the beginning of an entirely new relationship with your body.

After birth, so many women are focused on caring for everyone else that they barely have time to process the physical changes happening within themselves. The body is healing, hormones are shifting, sleep is limited, posture changes from feeding and carrying a baby, and muscles that once felt connected can suddenly feel weak, unstable, or unfamiliar.

To be completely honest postpartum movement was initially about “getting my body back,” however, I quickly realized this was not what I needed, it was more about learning how to reconnect to my body in a completely different way. Pilates helped me begin understanding strength not as punishment or intensity, but as support, stability, breath, and awareness during a season of life that often feels physically and emotionally overwhelming.

And then, almost without realizing it, motherhood itself becomes physical. Years of lifting children, carrying car seats, bending over cribs, standing with shifted posture, rushing through daily life, and constantly placing yourself second begin to accumulate within the body.

That is one of the reasons I believe Pilates can be so valuable for mothers. Not because it asks women to “bounce back,” but because it creates an opportunity to reconnect, realign, strengthen, and care for a body that has spent so much time caring for everyone else.

Of all the pilates principles, the ones I have come to value most over the years are concentration and centering. In a world that constantly pulls mothers in a hundred different directions, there is something incredibly powerful about taking time to reconnect to both the body and the mind.

Pilates asks us to slow down enough to pay attention — to our breath, our posture, our alignment, our patterns, and the way we move through the world. That kind of awareness is rare in everyday life, especially during motherhood when so much of our energy is constantly being given to everyone else.

Sometimes the most meaningful part of Pilates is not even the exercise itself, but the quiet connection it creates. For an hour, the focus shifts inward. The breath slows down. The nervous system settles. The body and mind begin working together again instead of simply reacting to the demands of the day.

I think that connection is something many women don’t even realize they’ve been missing until they finally give themselves permission to experience it again.

Parenthood, I’ve learned, is a lifelong act of loving and worrying all at once. It doesn’t end when your child starts walking, starts school, leaves for college, or begins building a life of their own. The worries simply evolve alongside them.

One day you are leaning over a crib, quietly checking to make sure your baby is still breathing. Years later, you find yourself sitting awake on the couch waiting for headlights to pull into the driveway, checking your phone to make sure they made it home safely, or holding your breath while they wait to hear whether they got into the graduate program they worked so hard for.

And somehow, at the very same stage of life, many women begin finding themselves navigating another kind of heartbreak entirely — watching the people who once cared for them begin needing care themselves. Parents who once felt larger than life slowly becoming more fragile. Bodies moving more cautiously. Memories becoming less certain. Conversations repeating. Names occasionally slipping away.

There is something profoundly emotional about standing in the middle of those two realities at once — still loving your children with every part of yourself while quietly grieving the changing versions of your own parents.

Motherhood changes shape over time, but the emotional weight of loving people that deeply never truly leaves the body.

I think that is one of the reasons Pilates has remained such an important part of my life. It creates space to find calm within the chaos. To breathe deeply again. To reconnect to yourself in the middle of constantly caring for everyone else.

In many ways, Pilates became more than movement for me. It became a practice of grounding, centering, and returning to myself during every changing season of motherhood.

References

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (2020). Physical Activity and Exercise During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period. Retrieved from https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2020/04/physical-activity-and-exercise-during-pregnancy-and-the-postpartum-period

Gulluni, N., et al. (2025). Effects of Pilates Exercise During Pregnancy on Labor and Delivery Outcomes. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39905474/

National Institutes of Health / PubMed Central. (2025). Pelvic Floor Muscle Training and Prevention of Urinary Incontinence During Pregnancy and Postpartum. Retrieved from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12013572/