Even a short jog asks a lot of your body. Every step is a burst of ground reaction force, absorbed, coordinated and redirected through your pelvic floor and entire core system, over and over, hundreds of times per run. It’s not just an impact event — it’s an endurance one, repeated with every single stride.

Building resilience for that kind of demand starts well before your first run back.

Foundational strength comes first. Positions that support impact draw heavily on the glutes, quads, feet and calves, alongside control and power through the hips and pelvis. This strength is what your body will lean on the moment impact enters the picture.

From there, your body needs to know how to produce force quickly and explosively, not just generate it slowly under load. That’s a different demand, and it’s what creates the drive you’ll need off the ground once running returns.

Just as important is the other half of the equation: absorbing force well. Before jumping high or covering distance matters, your body needs to know how to land — decelerating and distributing load efficiently through the legs and core. This is where pelvic floor support and symptom management really come into play.

Together, these pieces train your body to manage impact in a safe, progressive way, bridging the gap between early postpartum rehab and a genuine return to running.

Muscles to strengthen before you introduce impact

Before plyometric work enters the picture, strength is a must.

Your glutes are the primary driver of hip extension, the movement that propels you forward with every stride and controls your pelvis as your foot hits the ground. Strong, well-coordinated glutes reduce how much load gets passed further down the chain, including through the pelvic floor.

Your quads absorb and control knee flexion on landing, working alongside your glutes to decelerate your body weight with each step rather than letting it collect at the knee or hip.

Your feet and calves are the last point of contact before force enters your body, and the first to respond to it. Strength through this area supports ankle stiffness and rebound, which directly affects how efficiently force moves back up through the leg.

And your hips and pelvis need to hold their position under fast-changing load, not just when standing still. This is what allows the diaphragm, abdominals and pelvic floor to keep coordinating pressure even as the demand on your body shifts stride to stride.

Together, these areas form the base that impact work is built on. Strength here doesn’t just prepare individual muscles, it prepares the whole system to manage force well before speed and impact are added.

Why graded impact matters before your first run

Running places a genuinely different demand on your body than most rehab or strength work does. It’s not just heavier, it’s faster. Ground reaction forces arrive quickly and repeatedly, and your body needs to be ready to absorb, coordinate and redirect that force in a fraction of a second, hundreds of times over.

Jumping straight from strength training into running skips an important step: teaching your body how to manage force at running speed. Plyometric and impact-based drills exist to close that gap. They introduce impact in a controlled, graded way, so your tissues, joints and pelvic floor build tolerance to loading rate gradually, rather than encountering it for the first time mid-run.

Coordination and control are what make this progression work. You want to understand whether that force moves through your system efficiently, or whether your body compensates somewhere else to manage it. Graded impact training gives you the chance to build that coordination in a lower-stakes setting, so it’s already in place when running’s full demand arrives.

With that foundation in place, here are three drills that introduce graded impact in a controlled, progressive way:

Explosive transition to heel raise

This drill trains your body to produce force quickly and explosively, straight from a dead stop before we add any kind of jump. Starting seated removes any swing or counter-momentum, so all the drive has to come from a fast, powerful push through the floor. It’s a foundational way to build the kind of rapid force production your body will call on the moment running impact returns, without adding any landing demand yet.

Triple Extension – Wall Supported Progression

This drill builds explosive force through a full hip, knee and ankle extension pattern, with the wall giving you feedback and light resistance to work against. Starting from a single leg hinge means the drive has to come from the hips, not momentum, and pausing tall on the toes at the top reinforces full extension under control. It’s a step up from a pure calf-driven drill, bringing the hips into the force production equation the way running actually demands.

Drop to base

This drill trains deceleration — the ability to absorb force well, not just produce it. This is what we want to learn before we are landing from a jump squat. Dropping quickly into a squat teaches your body to distribute load efficiently through the legs and core as you land. Keeping the chest up as the arms drive back reinforces control through the landing, which is exactly what’s needed before impact volume increases.

Building these pieces is making sure your body is genuinely ready for what running asks of it. Strength gives you the foundation, force production gives you the drive, and force absorption gives you control on landing. Together, they bridge the gap between early postpartum rehab and running that actually feels good in your body.

This is exactly the kind of progressive, foundation-first approach we build in Return to Strength. The program takes you through strength, control and graded impact step by step, so you’re not guessing when it’s time to add the next layer. JOIN NOW!