Coming back from 2 pregnancies, 15 months apart was brutal. I attribute so much of my recent success to the mundane but necessary exercises I performed in my return to competitive training. There's an element of faith and consistency you have to have in strength training and ancillary work because you don't often see results immediately and that's tough for people to accept. 

Strength training by it's definition is a type of physical exercise specializing in the use of resistance to induce muscular contraction which builds the strength, anaerobic endurance, and size of skeletal muscles. Steph, slow down, you're speaking gibberish. The way I look at strength training is keeping my muscles, tendons, and ligaments strong and powerful so I can ask them to run lots of miles, pound the pavement, and stay healthy. I perform 2-3 specific strength training sessions each week, one with my team NAZ Elite at Hypo2 and the other in my garage. I have a mini gym set up with a Rocky poster and an NAZ team poster that serves as my visual motivation. When my boys were babies, after they went to sleep, I always tried to go to my garage and spend at least 15-20 minutes doing ancillary exercises. I was sleep deprived those first few months but I knew if I wanted to return to training 100% there were no shortcuts. You get out, what you put in. I look back and think the nights I put in doing these boring and tedious exercises, are the nights I built a foundation. 

In the the early months post partum this meant kegals and breathing exercises because my goal was to control peeing my pants during running, delay incontinence, and teach my core to work together with my pelvic floor. I then met Celeste Goodson of Recore and worked with her from 2016-2017 and saw the most gains of retraining my core, ab muscles, and closing the gap of my diastasis recti. I continue to repeat these exercises anytime I feel my incontinence is resurfacing or the pressure in my pelvic floor is being aggravated by my training, lifestyle, diet. My DR continues to improve but will always be something I deal with, visually and functionally. Between all my PTs, chiros, pelvic floor specialists we have gotten me to about 99% functional, 99% pain free, and about as strong as I can be. I will say, different than most of the PP population I am pushing my body to it's limits running 100 + miles a week and asking a lot, so to be 99% pain free is a huge victory for me.