You Don't Have to Put Down the Barbell: Heavy Lifting in Pregnancy

Alyssa Brunt, Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist

"Don't lift heavy when you're pregnant." Whether you've heard it from a friend, a healthcare provider, or that one person at the gym who just had to say something — chances are, this advice has made its way to you at some point. And for a long time, women listened. Barbells got swapped for resistance bands, PRs got put on pause, and the weight room started feeling like off-limits territory the moment a positive pregnancy test appeared. However, strength training has never been more popular among women, and a whole generation of lifters isn't willing to stop once they get pregnant.

Exercise during pregnancy is genuinely good for you. Canadian guidelines actually recommend that pregnant women get at least 150 minutes of movement per week, including both cardio and resistance training. So yes, staying active gets a big green light. However, those same guidelines get a little vague when it comes to lifting heavy. Without enough research to back up specific recommendations, high-intensity resistance training has largely been left off the approved list — not because it was proven harmful, but because nobody had really studied it yet.

So where did all the caution come from? Why the discouragement? There was concern that heavy lifting could spike blood pressure enough to reduce blood flow to the baby. Some studies on women in physically demanding jobs found that repeatedly lifting heavy loads at work was linked to higher risks of miscarriage, preeclampsia, and preterm birth. But here's the important distinction: hauling heavy boxes on a warehouse floor for eight hours is a very different beast from a well-programmed deadlift session at the gym. Lying on your back can also compress major blood vessels, potentially affecting circulation. The Valsalva maneuver, that breath-holding technique powerlifters swear by, also had clinicians worrying about temporary dips in blood flow to the baby. And of course, there was the pelvic floor — already working overtime in pregnancy — with questions about whether adding a heavy load could push it too far.

Luckily, the research is finally catching up — and what it's showing is pretty reassuring. A 2023 study looking at women who continued heavy resistance training throughout pregnancy found that not only did they experience low rates of complications, but those who kept training at their pre-pregnancy levels all the way to delivery actually had fewer reproductive complications than women who scaled back or stopped altogether. They were also less likely to have a caesarean section. The heavy lifters also reported significantly lower rates of postpartum depression and anxiety compared to the general population. Lifting heavy didn't just appear to be safe. It may actually come with some serious perks.

Then in 2025, researchers at the University of Alberta decided to go one step further and directly measure what was actually happening to the baby during heavy lifting — something that had never been done before. Pregnant women with at least two years of lifting experience performed back squats, bench press, and deadlifts at up to 90% of their working max, with and without the Valsalva maneuver. And here's the part worth highlighting: pregnant participants lifted almost identical weights to their non-pregnant counterparts. Their bodies were keeping up — baby bump and all.

Fetal heart rate stayed steady across every exercise, every intensity, and every breathing technique, including the previously dreaded Valsalva and the lying-down bench press. No distress signals, no drops in umbilical blood flow, nothing alarming. Mum's heart rate went up — as you'd expect — but stayed well within safe ranges. A handful of participants noticed mild symptoms like light-headedness or some pelvic pressure, but nothing serious enough to stop the session. And the babies? All born healthy, full term, no complications.

The narrative around heavy lifting in pregnancy is changing — and it's about time. For too long, the default advice was simply "be careful" or "just don't," not because the evidence said so, but because the evidence didn't exist yet. Now evidence is telling us that if you're a trained lifter, you don't necessarily have to check your programming at the door the moment you see two lines on a test. Of course, every pregnancy is different, and working with a knowledgeable healthcare provider — like a pelvic health physiotherapist — to tailor your training is always the smart move. But the days of automatically swapping your barbell for a resistance band? The science suggests those days might finally be behind us.

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