Reclaiming Your Prepregnancy Body: Toning Your Chest, Thighs, and Tummy

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Chest: Power Circle
With the added weight of pregnancy, you may have assumed the habit of slouching forward. This exercise will help you retrain your body to hold your shoulders straight, opening up your chest and allowing you to breathe more deeply. Begin by standing in the Pilates stance: your heels together with your toes pointed outward. Lean forward as if the wind is slightly pushing you. Bring your belly in and up, straightening the spine. Grasp a Pilates Circle in the palms of your hands, or any ball about the size of a soccer ball. (Pilates balls are available for purchase at www.peakpilates.com.) Squeeze the ball with your hands as you constrict your deepest abdominal muscles (visualize squeezing your abdominal muscles just as your hands are squeezing the ball). Breathe regularly as you complete four to eight repetitions.

Thighs: Wall "Squat"
Stand straight with your back against a wall and your arms at your sides. Use the wall as a yardstick to straighten your spine. Slowly slide your body down the wall, bending your knees and keeping your feet planted, until you reach a seated position. Hold this posture for three to five seconds and then slide your body back up to the starting position. Do three repetitions.

Abdominal: ISO-Abs
Here's a good exercise to practice correct breathing and simultaneously strengthen your abdominals. Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet on the floor. Put your hands in a diamond shape and place the diamond over your lower abdomen with your thumbs at your bellybutton and your index fingers pointing toward your pubic bone. Imagine three buttons, one below thumbs, one below index fingers, and one in between. Gradually breathe in drawing breath first to the lowest button, then to the middle, then to the highest. Exhale, bringing in breath to the lowest button, middle, and then the highest. Do this exercise as often as you like throughout the day.

The Tupler Technique

On her road to developing the Tupler Technique, Julie Tupler gleaned knowledge from her background as a nurse, a certified personal trainer, and childbirth educator. With her extensive background, Tupler developed exercise techniques to best help women regain their prepregnancy form.

Tupler's book Lose Your Mummy Tummy explains how to get what clients from her New York City studio have been enjoying for years—flatter tummies and stronger bodies. Tupler's discovered that many exercise routines miss isolating one of the deepest abdominal muscles—the transverse muscle. This muscle draws in the other abdominal muscles and prevents a "mummy tummy," or a poochy belly. For this reason, Tupler says you should envision your transverse muscle and try to isolate it in each of these exercises. She equates the transverse muscle to an elevator that runs laterally from your bellybutton to your spine with six floors, the first floor being at the belly button and the sixth floor close to the spine.

When to Begin: With your doctor's approval, a day or two after delivery.

How Often: Daily.