Free Third Trimester Workout Videos for a Fit Pregnancy

Of my three pregnancies this is the first one where I really focused on healthy habits – eating healthy and exercising.  For most of the first two trimesters I just continued working out as I had before getting pregnant (I even trained for a 5k during the first half of my pregnancy and ran the 5k at 22 weeks along!) with some minor modifications as needed.  However as I got closer to my third trimester I found that I was getting more and more limited in what I could do and realized that I probably needed to switch to some workouts that were pregnancy-specific for the rest of my pregnancy.

I don’t have a gym membership and didn’t want to pay for pregnancy workout videos.  I also wanted variety otherwise I knew I’d get bored (so I wasn’t a fan of getting a workout dvd that I’d have to do over and over).

My solution

So I turned to YouTube and low and behold, there are a TON of great, free options out there specifically for working out during the third trimester!  Hooray!

Because I need things to be as easy as possible to make sure I have no excuses not to work out, I spent some time one day combing through all the YouTube videos and creating a spreadsheet with a list of what video to do each day. I ended up finding enough videos to make a plan for myself that had 11 weeks worth of workouts (6 workouts a week) without a single repeat and with lots of variety (weights, cardio, full body, targeted muscle groups, pilates, yoga, dance, barre, etc.)!

Because I know surely there are other moms out there who are in the same boat as me needing third trimester friendly workouts I want to share my spreadsheet with you!

Notes

A couple of my own notes about these videos:

• I am not a doctor or have any background in exercise training so I can’t vouch for all of these from a safety standpoint.  I felt perfectly safe doing all of these (or with doing some of my own modifications where needed) but I just want to be clear that I’m not necessarily endorsing these people as “pregnancy workout experts” or anything.
• I realize that trimesters are roughly 13 weeks long.  I didn’t compile this list until I was already in my 3rd trimester so I didn’t do a full 13 weeks as I didn’t think I needed that many.
• FYI some of these are super short.  My main goal in the third trimester was to just get my body moving every day and I had a lot of back issues that limited how much I could do so I was fine with short ones, but if you are able and want to do longer ones you can either repeat the short ones a couple of times or make note of some of your favorites from past days and redo those.  The times are listed on the spreadsheet so you can see how long each day’s video is
• Most of these require nothing more than what you have at home – yourself, your shoes, some weights (you could always use water bottle or cans), maybe a chair.  There are a couple that use some equipment you might not have like exercise bands or a stability ball.  I have tried to note that on the spreadsheet so that you know to skip those if you don’t have either (although I did most of the stability ball ones on the edge of my couch, ottoman, or chair because my kids went crazy if I pulled the stability ball out and tried to climb all over it and me so I just quit getting it out)
• Some of these videos include planks and push ups in their workouts.  From what I’ve heard, those are actually not usually a good idea in the third trimester because they can exacerbate or cause diastasis recti so I personally chose to skip those when they were include and modified by doing something else in their place.
• I personally did all of these workouts all through my 3rd trimester (even at 40w6d!).  Some I had to modify to accommodate my back/pelvis issues or because I didn’t want to do planks, but overall I was very happy with all of the videos!

Check it out here!

Free Third Trimester Workout Videos

Now I need to create a similar list of workouts that are babywearing friendly for once I’m able to exercise again post baby!  Let me know if you have any recommendations!