A new normal! With lots of new moms stuck at home amid the coronavirus pandemic, it can be hard to get back to that pre-baby body.
Jessica Simpson’s trainer, Harley Pasternak, recommends new moms focus on “strengthening [their] posterior chains” when working out post-baby.
“It’s really important,” the Body Reset Diet author, 45, explained to Us Weekly exclusively. “For the last nine months, you’ve had all this weight in front of your body. You’ve had the baby, the amniotic fluid, the placenta, probably breast milk and all of these things drawing you forward, so we really have to work on pulling your body back.”
Not only did the Canadian trainer walk Us through moves, from stiff-leg deadlifts to The Harley, but he also revealed which to avoid. “Stay away from pushups,” Pasternak told Us. “Stay away from bicep curls. Stay away from even crunches for a period of time because we really want to open the body up again, lengthen the body and make it a little more functional and balanced before we start closing it up again.”
Before attempting any workout, however, Pasternak told Us moms should speak to their doctors first, explaining, “Depending on what kind of delivery you had … do you have pelvis issues, lower back issues? Are there other things going on? Do you have gestational diabetes? So wait for your doctor to give you clean race, No. 1, before even starting on this kind of stuff.”
As for Simpson, the fashion designer, 39, who welcomed her daughter Birdie in March 2019, “focused on the 165 of the 168 hours [a week] when [she was] not working out,” which Pasternak called the “most impactful time.”
He explained, “Once you become a mom, it’s not about you anymore. You’re living for something else, for someone else, and so you have to really be efficient with your time and you have to do things that are not quick fixes, [but] that are long fixes. So with Jessica Simpson, we’ve been working with her for so many years. This time was different because it really clicked in her that, ‘OK, I want to do what I can do not just for the next 30 days or 90 days, for the rest of my life.’”
Besides tracking her steps on Fitbit — at least 12,000 a day — Pasternak and Simpson monitored her “quality of quantity of sleep and her food.” The actress, who also shares Maxwell, 7, and Ace, 6, with husband Eric Johnson, eats three meals and two snacks a day with “protein, fiber and healthy fat.”
For more on Pasternak’s post-baby body workout, watch the video above.
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With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
