For many moms returning to exercise after pregnancy, losing fat while building muscle can feel like a daunting goal. Maybe you weren’t training as much as you normally did or you weren’t training at all,” says Bailey, coach and founder of Well Mamas Coaching, in a recent YouTube video. However, body recomposition is a gradual process, she explains, and consistency—“sticking with it”—matters far more than getting everything right.
It's not having an hour to yourself every single day to do all this magical meal prep and green juicing,” she says. Progressive overload means gradually making your workouts more challenging over time by increasing the weight, number of repetitions, or training frequency, or by reducing your rest periods. She recommends focusing on compound exercises such as squats, lunges, deadlifts, hip thrusts, and the bench press because “you're recruiting multiple muscle groups.” As for your workout schedule, she reassures viewers that you don't need to train “six times a week...for 45 to 60 minutes.” “Four workouts a week, 30 minutes or less, with progressive overload and compound moves...is plenty,” she says.
By now, it's well established that muscle growth and repair depend on eating enough protein. She recommends aiming for around 30g of protein per meal. That's broadly in line with research showing that consuming around 25-30g of protein per meal is associated with greater lean mass and both upper- and lower-body strength in healthy women.
Good options include lean meat, beans, and legumes, yogurt, cottage cheese, and canned tuna. A calorie deficit means consuming fewer calories than your body burns each day. However, the size of that deficit matters.
She recommends a moderate deficit of around 200-400 calories below your maintenance intake. She adds one caveat for breastfeeding moms. Bailey acknowledges this can be difficult for moms.
However, sleep is essential because it's during recovery that muscle adapts and grows. She also references research showing that sleep duration influences body recomposition, with shorter sleep associated with less fat loss. If “a solid eight hours” isn't realistic, she suggests finding even a few extra minutes by cutting back on doomscrolling or late-night TV.
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