The six week check is not a green light. It is a conversation with your GP about whether you are healing normally, and it says almost nothing about whether your body is ready to run, jump or lift heavy things.
What follows is the staged timeline I actually use, including the physical tests I want people to pass before they run. Dates on a calendar are a poor guide. What your body can currently do is a much better one.
What has actually changed
Pregnancy alters the abdominal wall, the pelvic floor and the way load transfers through your trunk. Birth adds its own demands, and a caesarean is abdominal surgery with a surgical recovery timeline underneath everything else. Layered on top of that sit broken sleep, feeding, and hormonal changes that affect how tissue tolerates load, particularly if you are breastfeeding.
None of that makes you fragile. It means your starting point is different from where you left off, and the progression has to respect that. I say this as someone who worked as a musculoskeletal therapist before retraining as a physio, and who has been through this personally. The gap between how ready you feel and how ready your tissues are is the thing that catches people out.
Phase one: weeks 0 to 6
This is a reconnection phase, not a training phase, and treating it as one is the most common early mistake.
What to do
- Walking, starting short and flat. Ten minutes is a legitimate session in week two.
- Breathing work that reconnects the diaphragm and pelvic floor. Inhale and let the pelvic floor soften, exhale and gently lift. Practise it lying down before you try it standing.
- Positioning for feeding, so you are not spending forty minutes at a time in a shape that will give you neck and mid back pain by week four.
- Lifting mechanics for getting the pram out of the boot and the capsule in and out of the car, which are the two heaviest things you now do daily.
After a caesarean, add gentle scar mobilisation once the wound has fully healed, usually from around six weeks and only with your GP's clearance. Numbness and a tight, pulling sensation around the scar are common and very treatable.
What to avoid: sit ups, planks, running, and heavy lifting beyond the baby and the capsule.
Phase two: weeks 6 to 12
This is the phase that matters most, and it is the one people skip on their way to running.
What to do: progressive strength work through the hips, trunk and upper body. Real load, built up gradually. Squats, split squats, hip thrusts or bridges, rows, and carries. Two to three sessions a week.
Carries are underrated here. Walking with a weight in one hand loads exactly the system you need for lifting a toddler on one hip while carrying a bag on the other, which is your actual life.
Pelvic floor work continues, now integrated into movement rather than done in isolation. Exhale and gently engage as you lift, rather than holding your breath.
Impact work does not belong here. If you take one thing from this article, let it be that these six weeks of strength are what make running safe at three months, and the people who have problems later are almost always the ones who went from walking to running with nothing in between.
Phase three: three months and the running tests
The evidence supports waiting until at least three months before returning to running, and more importantly waiting until you can meet a set of functional benchmarks. Time alone is not the criterion.
Here is the checklist. Do these on a day you are reasonably rested, and stop if you get symptoms.
Part one: load tolerance
- Walk 30 minutes continuously without symptoms
- Single leg balance, 10 seconds each side
- Single leg calf raise, 20 repetitions each side
- Single leg bridge, 20 repetitions each side
- Single leg sit to stand, 20 repetitions each side
- Side lying hip abduction, 20 repetitions each side
Part two: impact tolerance
Only attempt these once part one is comfortable.
- Running on the spot, 1 minute
- Forward bounds, 10 repetitions
- Single leg hop in place, 10 repetitions each side
- Single leg forward hop, 10 repetitions each side
All of these should be completed without pain, without leaking, and without any sensation of heaviness or dragging in the pelvis.
If you cannot pass a component, that is not a failure and it is not a reason to give up on running. It is a very specific piece of information about what to train for the next few weeks. Most people who cannot pass initially are through the whole list within four to six weeks of targeted work.
If you would like these tested properly rather than guessed at, book a postnatal assessment. It takes about forty five minutes and you are welcome to bring the baby.
Phase four: building back
Start with a walk and run structure rather than continuous running. One minute running, two minutes walking, repeated for twenty minutes, is a perfectly respectable first session and considerably better than a disheartening three kilometres.
Build run time before you build total distance. Add speed and hills last. Keep two strength sessions a week going the whole way through, because the strength is what is holding the running up.
Expect a slower trajectory than you had pre-pregnancy, and expect it to be non-linear, because your sleep is non-linear. A bad week of nights will show up in your running, and that is information rather than a setback.
Signs you have gone too fast
- Leaking with running, jumping, coughing or sneezing
- A sensation of heaviness, dragging or bulging in the pelvis, often worse late in the day
- Doming or coning along the midline of your abdomen during effort
- Back or pelvic pain that builds through the day
- Pain, pulling or a burning sensation at a caesarean scar during exercise
None of these are things to push through. None of them are things you have to accept as a permanent consequence of having a baby, regardless of who told you otherwise. They are signals to reduce the load and get assessed, and they respond well when they are addressed.
Common questions
My baby is two. Is it too late?
No. Postnatal recovery has no expiry date. I regularly work with people five and ten years down the track who never got any guidance at the time, and they respond just as well as anyone at twelve weeks. The tissue does not know how long it has been.
Do I need an internal examination?
Not necessarily, and never without your explicit consent. There is a great deal we can assess and treat without one. If it would meaningfully change your plan I will explain why, and you can say no, and we will proceed differently.
What about the gap in my abdominals?
Some separation is normal in pregnancy and it narrows for most people across the first year. What matters far more than the width of the gap is how much tension you can generate across it. That is trainable, and it is what we work on rather than chasing the gap closed.
Can I lift my toddler?
Yes, and you are going to have to, so I would rather teach you to do it well than tell you to avoid it. Lifting is good load when it is done sensibly.
Is it different after a caesarean?
The early phase is, because you are recovering from abdominal surgery as well as pregnancy. Scar work is added, and the strength phase usually starts a little later. By three months the pathway looks broadly similar, and the running checklist is the same.
Is running ever completely off the table?
Very rarely. For the vast majority of people it is a question of when and after what preparation, not whether.
Start with the tests
Run through the checklist above at home and see where you sit. Whatever you cannot do yet is your program for the next month, and knowing that is far more useful than a date.
You can book an assessment at our Elsternwick clinic, or have a look at the Clinical Pilates timetable if you would like the strength phase run for you rather than doing it alone.
