Getting Stronger Faster in Pregnancy with Erica Ziel

Erica started experiencing knee pain when she was five and the doctors told her it was growing pains. When she stopped growing at 14, her parents took her to the Mayo Clinic and the specialists there told her she needed to strengthen her legs. This was the turning point for Erica and she began her journey into strength training at a young age. She found success in her training and eventually became a specialist in the field. Erica shares her story with Beverley on the show.Erica experienced the power of movement to heal the body at a young age and was fortunate enough to learn how to do Olympic lifting with a great coach. She went on to study exercise science and Pilates, which further opened her eyes to the world of movement and healing the body. She was able to get rid of her own knee pain by the time she was 21 and continues to help her clients with their own movement and healing.Erica is a serial entrepreneur and Pilates instructor who started exploring fascia and pelvic floor function. She found that many of her clients, particularly moms in their late twenties and thirties, were experiencing aches and pains and being told by doctors that they would either have to have surgery or suffer with the problems for the rest of their lives. Erica realized that through fascial training and addressing pelvic floor function, she could help her clients. She switched her certifications to understand the techniques and verbiage used in the fitness world and found that focusing on the fundamentals of movement could help eliminate the pain and dysfunction her clients were experiencing. This led her to create her own instructor training.Erica gives an overview of his signature program, Core Rehab, which is designed to help people, even those without physical dysfunction, to learn more about the importance of balance and strength. She also created a pre and postnatal exercise specialist course to help instructors better understand the body and labor during pregnancy.Erica explains that she has seen that pregnant women can become stronger faster during pregnancy, but they should still be cautious and get their doctor's approval before beginning any exercise program. She emphasizes the importance of understanding the core and how to engage it properly, as this will help a pregnant woman use her core with every movement. 

HIGHLIGHTS"Those are like three common things that we see a lot of and are taught a lot of in fitness, still taught in fitness. And my first thing is, and I educate them on why I don't, I want them to start to be aware that we need to start breaking those habits.""How are you measuring performance? How are you changing the experience so that moms, so that your clients and, and, and you know, and important, how are you communicating as an instructor? To really shift expectations and help clients see that they're having progress.""Or he has to have energy and connection up through the entire body, feeling a light pelvic floor, lower belly, all the way through the top of the head, like with that full lift.""So, and a lot of women, especially a lot of moms, they talk their pelvis because it was a way to help compensate during pregnancy. I am, oh, I am untucking pelvis.""It causes us to lose space in our hips, causes us to use our back too much, and it causes massive imbalance in the pelvic floor. And so then if we have a tucked pelvis and we're going up and down in a squat in more of a tucked pelvis way, and we've got it loaded with a heavy weight and we're really not focused on lengthening through our body, we're not focused on finding the movement through our pelvis."

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About Today's Guest 

Erica Ziel, mom of three, received her Health and Human Performance degree from Iowa State University, is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, Board-Certified Holistic Health Coach, personal trainer, Pilates instructor, deep core a