Training Women - About Girls Gone Strong

On Molly Galbraith’s website Girls Gone Strong, there are a number of resources and courses for coaching women- most of them are even free! Before enrolling in her certification for coaching pre- and postnatal women, I tried one of her free courses, How to Get Started Coaching Pre- & Postnatal Clients. I wanted to see what the quality and structure of her content was like; was it downloadable? Could I learn through an online module? How comprehensive would it be? How useful would this be for the clients I coach, now and in the future? 

Like most of the free online courses offered by Girls Gone Strong (also known as GGS), this was meant to be completed over five days. GGS suggested spending around 20 minutes a day on each lesson which seemed surprisingly brief. Each day, participants enrolled in the mini-course received an email with a recap of the previous day, a link to the class of the day with a breakdown of what to expect, and a list of additional resources. The first day was titled "The First Trimester" and it helpfully included a video and a written, downloadable transcript of the first lesson. This lesson started at the very beginning: how to and how not to react when a client reveals their pregnancy to you. The downloadable program also describes common symptoms and issues your client may deal with during their first trimester and how you can help your client to understand and utilize what she calls the “core-pelvic floor Connection Breath”. The subsequent lessons emphasized the developments that occur during the second and final trimesters of pregnancy and how this can impact the mother as well as how to best support your pregnant client in regards to exercise, nutrition, and mindset. The course also delved deeper into when and how to screen your client for red flags and signs that a program modification is needed. A really helpful part of the first few days included written program guidelines for what to do and what not to do in pregnancy. Some exercise contraindications might seem fairly obvious (for instance, anything involving laying facedown later in the course of pregnancy is out), but many considerations for training pre-natal women are less intuitive and require more explaining, which is what GGS accomplishes so well. Many people view pregnant women as fragile, delicate, and unable to strength train when this is actually rarely the case; aside from cases of serious, life-threatening conditions during pregnancy that make exercise/movement dangerous, most pregnant women benefit greatly from exercising regularly and don’t need to be coddled. GGS emphasizes the importance of listening to your client and meeting them where they are at. I found this approach to be really refreshing and it certainly reinforces one of GGS’s core values- to empower women. 

What really impressed me the most was the comprehensive understanding of the early and later stages of post-partum and how oftentimes, we expect the post-partum phase to end exactly six weeks after birth- which just isn’t always the case. As GGS points out, healing after pregnancy is so variable, so it’s essential to set realistic expectations for your client about timelines for returning to exercise. There are also very distinct guidelines for returning to exercise after a C-section or a vaginal delivery, and although 

GGS looks at health from a holistic standpoint, so mental health, nutrition, sleep, pelvic floor, lactation, and so many other aspects of health that fall outside of the scope of practice of a strength coach are relevant to and can impact exercise, and GGS sets really clear guidelines for what questions to ask and when to refer out to a doctor or specialist.