Postpartum training often gets broken down into isolated pieces: core work here, pelvic floor work there, maybe some glute activation thrown in. But your body doesn’t function as a collection of separate parts, it works as one integrated system. A full body, systems-based approach means training with an understanding of how these muscles communicate and support each other, so your strength actually holds up under real demand, not just in a rehab setting.

Breath is often where postpartum training starts, and for good reason. Breathing mechanics lay the foundation for pressure management, coordinating the diaphragm, deep core and pelvic floor so your system can handle load efficiently. But breath alone isn’t the whole picture. You cannot breathe your way to a stronger body. At some point, that foundation needs to be loaded, progressively and intentionally, so the muscles doing the work postpartum actually have the capacity to meet the demands of daily life, exercise and, for many, a return to running.

That’s where a well-rounded strength program matters. It’s not enough to train the muscles that get the most attention. A genuinely full body approach means building in accessory strength work for the areas that often get missed entirely, and three in particular tend to fly under the radar: your serratus anterior, your adductors and your calves.

Serratus Anterior

Serratus anterior sits along the side of your ribcage, and while it’s known for its role in rotating and protracting the shoulder blade, its relationship with your ribcage is just as important. It helps anchor your ribs down and back, supporting a more stacked position rather than letting them flare up and forward.

During pregnancy, rib flare is common as the ribcage expands and lifts to accommodate your growing uterus. In that extended position, serratus tends to get underused, and postpartum, it’s rarely retrained directly. Most upper body programming defaults to lats, chest or shoulders, without addressing serratus’s role in ribcage control at all.

When serratus isn’t doing its job, it shows up most clearly in overhead work. Pressing or carrying overhead without serratus engaged tends to pull your ribs into flare and your lumbar spine into extension, rather than allowing controlled scapular upward rotation while your ribs stay stacked. That’s not just a shoulder issue, it’s a pressure management issue, and it ties directly back into the rib-pelvis stack work that everything else in your training builds on.

Supine Serratus Press (KB)

Pressing straight up toward the ceiling while keeping the arm fully extended asks serratus to complete the final piece of the movement, protracting the shoulder blade and reaching beyond a standard press. Because you’re supported on your back, there’s no compensation available from the lumbar spine or ribcage, so the demand falls specifically on serratus to control the scapula through that end range. It’s a direct way to isolate the muscle that’s so often left out of upper body training, in a position where flare and compensation have nowhere to hide.

Plank Walk Out (Knees Down)

Walking your hands out from a kneeling plank position asks you to actively push the floor away and protract your shoulder blades as your hands move further past your head, exactly the job serratus is meant to do. The kneeling regression keeps the demand focused on the upper body and ribcage without adding the extra stability challenge of a full plank, so you can really feel serratus working to control the shoulder blade and support the ribs through that extended range, rather than the movement being driven by momentum or compensation elsewhere.

Adductors

Your adductors are a major stabiliser at the pelvis, especially during single leg loading and gait, and they work in synergy with your pelvic floor and deep core to manage pressure through co-contraction.

During pregnancy, your centre of gravity shifts and your body naturally favours wider stances and bilateral movement patterns. This adaptation means your adductors gradually contribute less to pelvic and hip stability as pregnancy progresses. By postpartum, your adductors are commonly underused, even in people who stayed active throughout.

Alongside this, when the adductor strength, timing or coordination is reduced, your pelvic floor is often left to compensate, increasing tone or bracing to hold stability in their place. This is part of why adductors so often present as feeling tight postpartum, despite lacking true strength. That sensation of tightness is frequently your body using tension as a stability strategy, not genuine shortness.

Because of this, stretching alone rarely resolves it. What’s actually needed is rebuilding real capacity, deliberate contraction and connection first, then control through range, then integration into standing, full body, loaded movement.

Side Lying Adductor Lift (Up + Over)

The side lying position removes the complexity of standing balance and bilateral loading, allowing the adductor to be challenged in relative isolation before being asked to contribute to more demanding full body patterns. What makes this variation particularly valuable is the “up and over” component — rather than simply lifting the leg, the movement requires the adductor to generate force from a lengthened position and maintain control as it moves through a fuller range of motion.

This is directly relevant postpartum, as weakness in the adductors tends to be most apparent at end range rather than in mid range or static positions. Training the adductor to produce and control force here begins to address the gap between what feels manageable in supported positions and what is actually required in dynamic movement.

Kneeling Adductor Slides

The slide introduces an eccentric demand through a functional range of hip abduction, requiring the adductor to lengthen under control rather than passively releasing. This is directly relevant to the tightness many postpartum women experience which, as discussed above, is often a tension strategy rather than true shortness. By training the adductor to move through range while producing force, this exercise begins to resolve that pattern at its source.

Slider Lunge with Band Resist

The band resistance in this variation cues the adductors to actively pull the sliding leg back toward the midline throughout the movement, meaning they are working continuously rather than passively. Within a lunge pattern, this keeps the pelvis organised under load and reinforces the relationship between the adductors and glutes in a single-leg dominant position. A pattern that directly transfers to walking, running, and stair climbing.

Calves

Your calves, the gastrocnemius and soleus are a major elastic energy source in gait and running, storing and releasing force through the achilles and foot and they absorb and control load through your lower leg with every single step.

Most postpartum programming prioritises hips, core and glutes, which means calves are rarely trained directly. That gap matters most if running is part of your return to exercise. Running places a far higher demand on calf strength and elasticity than walking does, repeated single-leg landing, load absorption and push-off, at speed, over and over. Returning to running without rebuilding that capacity can make your calves a limiting factor, or a site of overload, a common contributor to lower-leg pain and injury when return-to-running progressions add volume or pace before strength.

It’s not only about raw strength either. Your calves work eccentrically to absorb impact on landing, then concentrically to produce push-off, so what running actually demands is the capacity to load and unload repeatedly under speed. As a benchmark, pelvic floor physical therapists generally recommend being able to perform 20 single leg calf raises before returning to running, a useful, concrete marker of whether your calves are ready for what running will ask of them.

This is also where your foot and ankle come into the picture. The intrinsic foot muscles and the muscles crossing your ankle control pronation, arch stability and how force transfers up into your ankle, knee and hip. Like your calves, they’re almost never trained directly, and postpartum hormonal changes can affect ligament laxity and how load is managed through the foot. A stable, well-controlled foot underneath you is part of the same running-readiness picture: without it, force can leak out through excess pronation or instability rather than transferring efficiently up the chain.

Calf Raise with Single Leg Eccentric

This variation builds toward the full single leg calf raise standard by isolating the eccentric portion of the movement, controlling the lower under load rather than dropping through it. Slowing down and owning that lowering phase builds real strength and control in a position many people haven’t trained directly, and it’s a practical stepping stone if you’re working toward hitting that 20-rep single leg benchmark before returning to running, giving your calf the capacity to absorb load with control rather than just push through it.

Single Leg Long Lever Bridge with Calf Raise

Building through a single leg bridge into hip extension already demands real glute and pelvic control on one side, but adding a calf raise at the top layers in a second demand right when the leg is under the most load. This connects your posterior chain and calf strength in a single pattern, asking the calf to generate push-off style force from an already-extended hip position, closer to what’s actually required during the propulsive phase of running than an isolated calf raise alone.

Floating Heel Split Squat

With the working foot balanced on the edge of a plate and the heel free in space, this variation asks your foot to actively grip and stabilise against the ground throughout the entire movement, rather than relying on your heel for a stable base. That constant foot-ground engagement builds real strength through your foot and ankle, alongside tendon capacity through the achilles and patella tendon and joint-angle specific strength through the quad, hip and calf. It’s a direct way to bring the foot and ankle work covered earlier into a loaded, single leg pattern, closing the loop between foundational foot strength and the demands of return-to-running training.

Serratus, adductors and calves rarely get attention in postpartum programming, but each plays a direct role in how your body manages pressure, stability and load. Training them isn’t about isolating three “missing” muscles, it’s about closing the gaps in a full body system so your strength holds up in daily life, in the gym and in a return to running.

This is exactly the kind of accessory strength work built into Return to Strength. Alongside the foundational rib-pelvis and pressure management work, the program progressively layers in the strength these areas need so nothing gets left undertrained.

A note for coaches: I’m regularly asked whether I’ll ever teach how I actually structure postpartum programming. The answer’s yes, I’m building something for early next year. If you want to be the first to hear when it’s ready, JOIN THE LIST!