Active Mom Podcast: Pregnancy, Postpartum, Perimenopause, Menopause & Beyond

Send us Fan Mail Melanie Cote spent years believing runners were a certain kind of person — thin, disciplined, elite — and she wasn't it. So when a coworker organized a 5K, she showed up to cheer instead of run, too embarrassed to try. A year later, she crossed that same start line. Today she's a half-marathoner who runs as @the.curvy.runner, and her story is for every mom who's eve...

Send us Fan Mail Bringing this back because the "what exercises should I actually be doing?" question never gets old. Johnson cuts through the noise on rehab and strength work for runners — the movements that move the needle versus the filler. Practical, specific, and easy to act on this week. Today I speak with Chris Johnson, physical therapist, coach, author, teacher, consultant, and m...

Send us Fan Mail Can you run with pelvic organ prolapse? In this solo episode, Dr. Carrie Pagliano takes on one of the most feared pelvic floor diagnoses… and why prolapse doesn't have to mean hanging up your running shoes. Carrie introduces your "prolapse personality" — because prolapse isn't one experience, it's many. She busts the myths (no, running didn't cause it...

Send us Fan Mail This is the single most-downloaded episode in Active Mom Podcast history… and if you joined in the last two years, you've probably never heard it. Dr. Alison Grimaldi connects hip strength and stability to the pelvic floor symptoms so many women keep chasing in isolation. If you've been faithfully doing your pelvic floor work without the result you expected, this convers...

Send us Fan Mail What load actually reaches your pelvis when you run? For years we couldn't really answer that — we just said "wait twelve weeks, then go." Babe, we've come a long way. Dr. Megan James is back — and this time it's Dr. James. She finished her PhD and brought two new papers that quietly shift how we think about returning to running postpartum. First: a graded...

Send us Fan Mail Becoming a mom can take your lifelong habits, chew them up, and spit them out. So how do you build new ones when there's no such thing as a typical day in parenthood? In this Summer Rewind — our season one finale — Dr. Carrie Pagliano sits down with James Clear, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits . Carrie picked up the book thinking it was about business...

Send us Fan Mail Thin evidence. Loud opinions. And a body that still wanted to climb.  That's where professional high-altitude climber Lotta Hintsa found herself when she got pregnant — wanting to stay active and keep doing her job, in an area where the research on altitude and pregnancy barely exists and everyone seemed to have a take on it. In this episode, Lotta walks me through how she na...

Send us Fan Mail This one's for every mom whose week is built around practices, meets, and the pool-deck waiting game. It's honest, real-talk strategy for squeezing your own training into a life that runs on everyone else's schedule — across postpartum all the way to perimenopause. No interview, just usable tactics, and it's landed with way more than the swim crowd. Today I spe...

Send us Fan Mail Gráinne Donnelly is back — and this time she's the editor and primary author of a brand-new Elsevier textbook, Sports Medicine and the Pelvic Floor: Science to Practice . It's the book this field has been waiting for... and the honest truth at its heart is that we don't know everything yet. What we do have is the clearest picture so far of where the science actually...

Send us Fan Mail Hildee Weiss didn't run her first full mile until she was 46. And honestly? She was convinced she'd look ridiculous doing it… like Phoebe from Friends, flailing around while everyone stared. (If you're Gen X, you already get it.) Fast forward 12 years and she's 57, a mom of five, a grandma of five, and she's done 5Ks, half marathons, trail races, two Spart...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when the body that carried you through marathons suddenly starts changing the rules on you mid-stride…? In this episode, I sit down with Whitney Heins — founder of The Mother Runners run community, host of the Mother Runners Podcast, and a lifelong runner who chased an Olympic Qualifying marathon time through years of frustrating injuries before becoming a certified r...

Send us Fan Mail Your bones started changing before you noticed. Most women don't find out until something breaks. Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein — orthopedic surgeon at Duke and co-author of The Complete Bone and Joint Health Plan — is here to change that. We dig into what perimenopause and menopause actually do to your bones, joints, and shoulders, why osteoporosis risk flies under the radar for act...

Send us Fan Mail She's run ultras. She's survived pregnancy nausea. She's raced with a baby at home. And she has opinions about all of it. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Erin Kennedy Dalisay — ortho & sports PT, run coach, marathoner, ultramarathoner, and founder of RunWell Clinic — and we are getting into ALL of it. The stuff nobody talks about. The stuff every running...

Send us Fan Mail She was mid-serve at a volleyball match in Cyprus when the device fell out completely. It landed in her underwear. There was a crowd. She ran off the court, grabbed it, and ran back on—so fast her coach didn't even process what happened. That's Aimee Oliver's life as a high-impact athlete with stress urinary incontinence. And after 10 years of trial and error, devic...

Send us Fan Mail After interviewing 10 pelvic floor support device companies—6 internal, 4 external—Dr. Carrie Pagliano sits down with researcher and pelvic health physiotherapist and researcher Dr. Christina Prevett to do what she couldn't do alone: process it all. This is the debrief episode for the Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know mini-series—and it&apos...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series  Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Lauren Barker, CEO & Co-founder of Uresta—a company developing a self-managed internal support device for stress urinary incontinence. Uresta was designed to provide a more accessible alternative to traditional pessaries by allowing...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series   Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Ariana Sopher, COO at Reia —a company developing a modern pessary for pelvic organ prolapse. Reia was designed to improve on traditional pessary models by allowing for easier insertion and removal through a collapsible shape and applica...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Steve Bollinger, Founder @Revive —an internal pelvic floor support device company based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Revive was developed to address stress urinary incontinence and light bladder leakage by providing internal urethral...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series  Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Goli Ameri, PhD (Head of Research) and Cara McDougall, MPT (Clinical Specialist, Founder of Toronto Pessary Clinic) from COSM Medical. COSM was founded by Derek Sham, BEng, MBA , whose background in developing widely used urodynamics sys...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series  Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Melody Roberts, CEO & Co-founder of Liv Labs —a company developing a pelvic floor fitness device designed to support active women. Pippa is an internal resistance-based device that works by creating load within the vaginal canal to s...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series  Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Sandra Whittle, pelvic health physiotherapist and inventor of SomaFlex —a device designed to provide a softer, more flexible approach to internal pelvic support. SomaFlex was developed to offer an alternative to more rigid internal devic...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series  Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Lauren Fleming, Founder @HEM Support Wear —an external pelvic floor support device company based out of Central Texas (just outside Austin) . HEM Support Wear is a woman-founded pelvic health company redefining what support looks and fee...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Jeanice Mitchell, Inventor @myPelvicBra —an external pelvic floor support device company based out of Central Texas (Killeen) . As a pelvic floor physical therapist with prolapse herself, she set out to create a device that offered suppor...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series  Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know, we’re speaking with: Sinead O’Donovan, Founder SRCHealth—an external pelvic floor support garment company based out of Port Melbourne, Australia. After experiencing significant pelvic girdle pain and postpartum recovery challenges, Sinead set out to create a...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Active Mom Podcast mini-series Inside Pelvic Floor Support: Devices, Fit & What You Should Know , we’re speaking with: Rosie Dumbrell, physiotherapist and founder of Everform Therapywear—a company developing compression garments designed specifically for pelvic floor support. Everform uses a targeted compression system (Femcore™ technology) to provide mo...