Episode #11: Postpartum Fitness and Body Image with Jessie Mundell
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In this episode, Dayna and Rhonda are honoured to chat with one of our most influential mentors Jessie Mundell!
Jessie Mundell (she/her) has over 15 years experience in exercise coaching and personal training for people who are pregnant, newly postpartum, and parents.
She is a registered Professional Kinesiologist and holds a Master’s Degree in Kinesiology, with studies focused in prenatal and postnatal exercise.
Jessie is the creator of Core + Floor Restore, To Pregnancy and Beyond, the Postnatal Fitness Specialist Academy, and co-host of the To Birth and Beyond podcast where she coaches pregnant and postpartum people, moms, parents, and fitness and health professionals on strength training and fitness during and after pregnancy.
She currently works with hundreds of clients and coaches around the world, guiding them through exercise in their pregnancies, postpartum recoveries, C-section healing, and their return to more intense fitness training.
In this episode Jessie shares with us…
How she initially became interested in pre/postnatal health
How her motherhood journey shaped her approach as a fitness coach
Why it is so important for her mental health to NOT coach weight loss/ fat loss with her clients
Details of her Postnatal Fitness Specialist Academy (This course is currently open for enrolment until October 28, 2021)
Helpful advice on running a business as a mom
We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did!
Learn more about Jessie here:
Website
Instagram
To Birth and Beyond Podcast
Postnatal Fitness Specialist Academy
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Episode #11: Postpartum Fitness and Body Image with Jessie Mundell
We're excited to have you join us for this episode of Pelvic Health and Fitness. I'm Dayna Morellato, Mom, Orthopedic and Pelvic Health Physiotherapist. And I'm Rhonda Chamberlain, Mom, Orthopedic Physiotherapist and Pre Postnatal Fitness Coach. On this show, we have open and honest conversations about all phases of motherhood, including fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, menopause, and everything in between.
We also provide helpful education and information on fitness, the pelvic floor, and many aspects of women's health, including physical, mental, and emotional wellness. Please remember as you listen to this podcast that this is not meant to treat or diagnose any medical conditions. Please contact your medical provider if you have specific questions or concerns.
Thanks so much for joining us. Grab a cup of coffee. Or wine. And enjoy!
Welcome to episode 11 of pelvic health and fitness. And today Dayna and I are super excited to welcome our guest, Jessie Mundell, who is one of our most influential mentors, both Dayna and I are members of her postnatal fitness specialist academy.
And we're excited for her to talk about that today. And we're also super inspired by the fact that she herself has a podcast that she'll talk, touch on today as well. And we're just so excited to have her. So before we introduce Jessie, um, Dayna is going to do just a little intro. Uh, we know about Jessie, but for the listeners that don't know who Jessie Mundell is.
Yeah, so Jessie has over 15 years experience in exercise, coaching, and personal training for people who are pregnant, newly postpartum, and parents. She is a registered professional kinesiologist and holds a master's degree in kinesiology with studies focused in prenatal and postnatal exercise. Jessie is the creator of Core Plus Floor Restore to Pregnancy and Beyond the postnatal fitness specialist academy and is the co host of the To Birth and Beyond podcast where she coaches pregnant and postpartum people, moms, parents and fitness health, fitness and health professionals on strength training and fitness during and after pregnancy.
She currently works with hundreds of clients and coaches around the world, guiding them through exercise in their pregnancies, postpartum recoveries, c section healing and the return to more intense fitness training. You can learn more about Jessie on her website at jessiemundell.com or Instagram @jessiemundell and listen to the To Birth and Beyond podcast.
Ooh, welcome, Jessie. Welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. We're so excited to have you here. So before we get into some of the questions we have for you, um, I'd love to hear a little bit more and for our listeners to hear what initially got you into the world of pre postnatal fitness. Uh, so I was doing my undergraduate degree in physical and health education at Queens University and really it was that we did some prenatal exercise, learning some education around it during one of our classes and there was some pretty cool exercise and pregnancy research going on at the time at Queens and that just piqued my interest.
So the very first personal training job that I got shortly after that time was at this boutique personal training studio, also in Kingston, and it was only for pregnant postpartum people, moms and parents. And so that was really my first introduction. Into seeing pregnant people exercise and strength train and watching these moms and parents bring their babies and kids to fitness classes.
And from there, I went on to do my master's degree at UBC in human kinetics. And my master's was a coaching based program. And in the courses we took, we could basically study. Research, learn about whatever we wanted to. And I always chose pregnancy and postpartum and public floor and exercise stuff. So yeah, I've been hooked since.
Since I was probably at 20 ish years old, 19 years old. And this is the work that I've been doing consistently since then. Very cool. And can you tell us a little bit about how your view has changed over the course of your career? And then any changes in your strategies with working with this population after your own birth and your own postpartum recovery?
Yes, literally everything. Everything is different. I was mentioning this earlier in the week, but when I started coaching those pregnant and postpartum clients at that boutique personal training studio, it was of the era where we thought that a two finger gap between the abdominal muscles was bad and needed to be fixed.
And, uh, that was, yeah, that was not okay for people to have on their bodies, this very small gap between the rectus abdominus muscles. And, uh, So obviously things have just changed dramatically in our understanding of pregnant and postpartum bodies, the research that has occurred during that time, my own understanding of the pelvic floor symptoms, concerns.
prolapse, all the physical stuff has really shifted in every way. But for me, yeah, such big changes have come since my own experiences going through to full term pregnancies, to cesarean births and the recoveries through them. I think so much of what has just changed me as a person. And as a coach has been.
Going through motherhood and parenthood and the identity shifts that I have felt through that time that has really just rocked me to the core in every way. My youngest is over three, almost three and a half now, and I still feel like, wow, it is such a ride to go on to experience myself through it, not even to experience my children through it.
But to see myself, to get to learn and understand myself and when I know that this is also some of the things that my clients are going through, it just has made me such a more attuned, compassionate, empathetic. that I think that, yeah, the ways that even I was training people five years ago, even though I thought that it was, I thought that it was so good.
And like, I was doing so many of the right things and I was doing a lot of the right things, but I think just my. relational and communication skills and ability to really get to understand a client is so different now. Yeah, for sure. It's such a journey. We always chat about that, just Dayna and I as well, and how much we've learned since becoming parents.
And I'd love, so one of the things I'm super passionate about is the whole sort of mindset that You know, if you're fit, if you're strong, if you exercise regularly throughout your pregnancies, that society tells us we're just going to bounce back after we have our babies. And I'd love to hear your perspective on that and whether, did you hold that bias, you know, with, especially with the knowledge you had going into your pregnancies and deliveries, did you sort of assume you would bounce back and were you surprised if that wasn't the case?
Yeah. So it was interesting for me was that I had been doing so much body image work, even leading up to my first pregnancy. And I got pregnant for the first time, almost seven years ago. And for the last, at least three years before that, I had been doing a lot of work on myself about my relationship to my body composition, to my abilities, to my body size, because I knew that I had.
To in order to be okay mentally and emotionally through a pregnancy and through postpartum because of my own experience with an eating disorder and many years of overexercising and under eating. But then I had seen so many clients struggle as well. Through their pregnancy with their body changing and then postpartum really feeling such urgency to not be like this, to get smaller and tighter and flatter and all the things.
And I really just knew for myself that couldn't happen for me. I wouldn't be okay. So I didn't feel like. I had a lot of pressure on myself to be a certain way. The work for me during that pregnancy and that first time around postpartum was really to talk myself through the changes and to try to settle in and surrender.
And that was the narrative that went through my head for, yeah, the whole pregnancy. And then for, you know, years after, it's still the narrative for me. I think it will always continue to be the work that I do living in this body for the rest of my days living on this earth is just to, to keep settling in and to keep, you know, pulling back the layers of the anti-fat that we've all been conditioned in and to keep doing that work so good.
I love that you say it's still the narrative for you today because I think I hear from a lot of my clients often and we definitely want to get into this idea of weight loss, fat loss. Um, you know, I have a lot of people come in, they're very concerned about their diastasis and often the. Aesthetic of what their belly looks like or what they are.
Maybe even like grieving a little bit of what it used to look like and this idea that they have to perhaps accept that their, their tissues may never look exactly the same. And I think at the same time, in that immediate postpartum period, You, you mentioned identity shift because I chat a lot about with this clients, this with clients, pardon me, is this idea that like everything is different.
The world is a bit upside down. And so I'm just curious how you kind of chat with your clients about accepting, accepting their bellies if they look a little bit different. Yeah, this is really so, so important for all of us, even the practitioner, even the coach, what I realized that I was doing at a certain point in my coaching of postpartum people was that I was having conversations with them about the discomforts they were experiencing their bodies.
And I would tell them so early still. It's going to change. It's not going to be like this forever. It took this long for your body to adapt and be this way through pregnancy. And, you know, it's just going to take some time for things to settle, whether that's their body composition or the appearance of their tissues, et cetera.
And. What I realized was that I was just trying to soothe them in this way to say, I know that you're really uncomfortable with this right now, but it's not going to be like this. And the truth was, I didn't know what it was going to be like, and so that wasn't effective in itself, but then secondly, I was continuing to take them out of the experience in their body right now, because I was trying to quell their anxiety.
So what I was realizing was that I needed to invite them to just sit in, to sit in it right now, to feel what was actually happening in their body, because it was only then that we could start having the conversations about why this was uncomfortable and what the discomfort was, where it was stemming from, what our ideas around worthy bodies are, where did we get all this stuff?
Because if we didn't have those conversations, then we couldn't actually figure out what was happening, where the discomfort was stemming from. Because the thing is, that we might not be able to change the appearance of those tissues. We might not be able to change our body composition. So at some point to feel some true relief, comfort, peace, we might want to look at being in this body that we have right now and doing the work around all the discomfort stories and beliefs that we have about it to truly allow ourselves to be okay.
So good. Yeah, it's lifelong work, I think too, right for us and for our clients. And I would love to hear to Jessie. So, you know, this is very much the way you coach now that you don't coach weight loss, fat loss. I'm curious, did that always look that way for you in your career? And sort of what led to that shift for you?
And then did you have Clients sort of, um, frustrated by the fact that that's no longer what you were going to be coaching and what did that look like for you? Yeah. So it definitely was not the way I was always coaching and I was. I was intentionally coaching weight loss and fat loss for quite a long time in my personal training work because that's what I was taught how to do as a personal trainer, as a kinesiologist, someone working in a gym.
It's the clients that were coming to us were wanting to lose weight. That's really why they were coming to the gym most of the time, because they also assumed and believed that was the work of exercise and fitness professionals. It would help them to get smaller, to lose fat, to lose weight. Why else would you exercise?
Why else would you pay someone to help you work out? So, uh, Eventually though, I got to the point where I realized I wasn't okay. I, Jessie was not okay. Coaching these people. What I was experiencing was that it was making me so spirally in my body, the thoughts that I was having about my body. When I was telling people all these specific things about here's how we're going to change your body composition and it's time for your next round of.
You know, quote unquote, progress photos and let's measure your body again. This week, I could not handle it. I was not handling it well, years of doing this for clients too. And I really just made the decision in that time that. I have to start to move away from this somehow, and the shift was slow to some degree that I just started to change my language a little more at a time about trying to find other reasons of why they were coming to work out.
Reminding them of that started to move away from. Say weighing them are doing those photos of measuring their body slowly, but surely just getting away from all of that stuff. And then like you were saying, Rhonda, just eventually drawing a hard line in the sand of saying, we don't do this anymore at all.
We don't talk about weight loss. I don't guide you how to change your body composition. We don't even talk about food really and nutrition other than Please eat, please eat enough calories and fuel yourself in any way that you are able to be okay, mentally, emotionally, physically, and there was some pushback for sure, of people being like, But I'm just trying to be healthier or it makes me feel better if I do it this way.
And so that would just stem so many more of these conversations to of being like, but why, why do you think that makes you? Feel well. And what are the actual behaviors that help you to feel better in your body? And why do you think that this stuff is good? So yeah, over time, these conversations have just turned into hard lines in the sand.
Lots of conversations about body image and our experience of our body, but people know what they're coming for now when they come to work with us because our messaging and our marketing is so clear that it's just a real joy now to have conversations about body image and not about. I love that. And I did an IG live with you, Jessie, and we talked about that.
And I'm just so thankful. I came across your page, just the fact that you stated the reason you stopped in the first place was for your own mental health. And for some reason, I never thought of it that way before. I just, you know, I'm always very client focused, client centered care. And I just always assumed if someone's coming to me with the goals of weight loss, who am I to tell them that's not okay.
Right. And so I personally, I'm still kind of early in the journey of having that message that I don't coach fat loss, weight loss. I still have clients sort of bring that up and I will listen to that and sort of validate how they're feeling. But same as you, I'm still Slowly trying to change my language and slowly it's happening that I'm having less and less people come to me with that goal.
And it just, like you said too, it just feels better for me, just looking back to when I would weigh and measure my clients, you know, and I, again, would do it out of sort of health and trying to help them be healthier, but as I, Learned that our body size is not as closely tied to our health as we've been taught.
It just feels so much better now, not having to put them in that awkward position of being weighed and measured. No one likes to have that done. Yeah, that's exactly, I was just going to say, it's exactly if we really think about what health is, I think that's such a starting point for so many of us coaches, practitioners to really start to interrogate our own ideas around health. And if we say that we are health professionals. Is that what we're actually doing here? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. A hundred percent. Isn't it such a crazy thing to think that, you know, the body grows a human, supports this human for 10 months.
I often will say we're ripping people off here. It's 10 months, 40 weeks, give or take. And then we expect it to just look exactly the same afterwards. Wouldn't it be so great if we could just expect it to look different and appreciate those differences? Yes. Yes, please for us all. And this is why in the work that we do with clients, but also the work that we do with students in the postnatal fitness specialist Academy focuses so much on anti fatness and really understanding the roots of anti fatness, because I don't think we can have these conversations about athlete brain and ego around exercise and performance and skills without talking about what might actually be going on for people. And it's likely that there are so many ideas that we've been conditioned in around anti fatness and that stuff can be really uncomfortable to talk about. But I feel like we absolutely have to get there to make lasting change.
We're so appreciative of your work, Jessie. You are just such a light in this area. And I think again, these. Conversations can be uncomfortable and can be hard to have with our clients, but you know, so important, not only for their wellbeing and their health, but also for our own as coaches and practitioners as well.
So thank you for everything you do. And we would love to hear more. I know you have, um, your postnatal fitness specialist Academy is open for enrollment soon. Do you want to just tell us a little bit more about that? If we have, I know we do have listeners who themselves are trainers and physiotherapists.
So love to hear a bit more about that. Yes. Thank you. So the Academy is our post needle fitness and pelvic health coaching certification for fitness and health professionals working in any modality. And through 11 modules of education, we're really trying to. Give people the best preparation to most effectively work with postnatal clients and patients in their work and from this all encompassing look at physical, mental, emotional health.
So while we absolutely prepare you to understand the abdominal wall and the core pelvic floor fitness programming. for post pregnancy c section recovery, all the things we are also talking about. How do you support someone through pregnancy or infant loss? And how do we understand what postpartum mood disorders?
And what does anti racism work look like in your business and how are you committed and practicing those things? So it's a whole lot of topics that we think are just absolutely necessary. To again, most effectively working with postpartum people who will be diverse in their own lived experiences in their bodies.
I love it. So good. I can, as a, I took your, I took the, um, certification probably almost five years ago now, I was on my mat leave with my first daughter. And as a, I was trained in pelvic physiotherapy at the time, but truly found so much valuable information that I used. literally every single day. So it's a wonderful, wonderful program.
Yeah. I just finished it myself too. Not too long ago. I signed up for it at, when I first got back to work, it took me a little longer to get through than I thought it would once I was back to work, but so many great speakers. I got so much of out of everything. Um, such a great course. So when does that open for enrollment, Jessie.
So it is open now through Thursday, October 28th, and registration will close at midnight PST on the 28th. And that will be the last class for the year and likely until spring 2022 at some point. Amazing. I do have one last question. So I will be editing this podcast, but, uh, we experienced some real life mom moments in the recording of this podcast.
And I, myself and Dayna would love to know, and I think we have listeners who are trying to run a business or at least working moms. What are some tips that you have for trying to run a business with kids at home? Yeah, great question. So number one, I would say. You have to have some flexibility around your mindset and around your ideas about what it's going to look like.
As Theo is just peeking his head in again, I'm literally in the bathroom. Now I was in his bedroom. Now I'm in the bathroom, but I have gotten so flexible at just doing it, just doing it anyways, and knowing that it doesn't need to be polished and perfect and cute. It just needs to. Get done. And while it might not be perfect or my absolute best, it is still worthy and valuable.
And then the second thing is, is to really claim it, that your work and your business, even if it is a side gig right now, even if it's working at Nap time and after bedtime and earlier in the morning, claim it as important to you. So the whole family unit, whatever that family looks like knows that this work is important to you.
It's not just a hobby. It is a business and it is something that lights you up and show yourself the respect of it. And other people will get on board and respect it too. Love that so much. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Jessie. It's been a treat to have, have you all to ourselves to ask you some questions and have a good conversation.
Yeah. Thank you all so much for having me. Thanks for listening to today's podcast. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you liked what you heard, we would love if you could share this with a friend, leave us a review or subscribe to anywhere that you'd listen to your podcast. Thanks for being here.
