Rachel Welch Of Revolution Motherhood: What I Did to Heal Emotionally and Physically After a Challenging Childbirth
An Interview With Lucinda Koza
Structured movement practice that is integrative, healing, compassionate and progressive. And, a daily plan to get it in — put it in your calendar like your doctor appointments. Begin with 15 minutes and be ready to pivot your plan and just push play on a video. Get your workout in while you’re in your undies with spit up in your hair if the unexpected window shows up in your day. Just do what you can and you’ll be laying a powerful foundation for learning how to tend to yourself in concert with meeting your family’s needs.
Childbirth can be a beautiful yet challenging experience that impacts women both emotionally and physically. The journey to recovery is often filled with unique hurdles and personal growth. We would like to feature and interview individuals who have navigated this journey to share their stories and insights on the steps they took to heal emotionally and physically after a challenging childbirth. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rachel Welch.
Women’s health advocate + prenatal and postnatal fitness expert, Rachel Welch. With over 20 years of experience, her life-elevating fitness method arms women with the tools and skills to understand, heal and embody motherhood from the inside out. Revolution Motherhood, her industry disrupting fitness and lifestyle method, is a 3-phase method that came out of the experiment of rehabbing her own postpartum body (3 times!), while filling the gaps in knowledge in medicine, fitness, PT and all mom-based healing modalities. She frequently partners with physicians and pelvic PT’s to treat + strengthen pre and post-natal conditions including; rehabilitating scar tissue, pelvic floor functionality, organ prolapse, incontinence and diastasis recti. Every mom deserves to make a full and active recovery from pregnancy and childbirth, every time.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you tell us a bit about you and your backstory?
Thank you for having me — it’s truly a privilege to be here.
My story is woven with grace and serendipity. As the only child of a single mom who had me at 23, I watched her work through college and earn her PhD. This left an indelible mark on me, instilling the value of hard work and the belief that I could change my circumstances through persistence and vision.
Movement has always been part of my life’s tapestry. From watching my mom do Jane Fonda videos to joining the college crew team, physical activity has been my constant companion. It was in college that I discovered yoga — a spiritual balm to complement my athletic pursuits.
After college, I moved to New York City. A chance encounter with a wellness space in Soho led me to study Shiatsu therapy. I also found a yoga studio in the West Village that became the springboard for me becoming a teacher, changing my career path forever, and launching me fully into the pursuits of human physiology, anatomy, movement patterns, neuro-strength rehabilitation, and every cutting-edge boutique fitness method hitting NYC.
Despite over a decade in the fitness and wellness industry, by the time I was pregnant with my first daughter, I was quickly realizing that I knew almost nothing about the specificity of women’s bodies and maternal health. This knowledge gap was eye-opening as to the masculine paradigm in which I had been educated. No one had ever invested in studying women’s functional bodies, developed precise language to help women understand the changes that occur through motherhood or craft a comprehensive program of long-term thriving and recovery. We were (and still are!) left to figure out our health needs on our own. Living the reality of this massive gap in the fitness, medical, and PT industries lit the fire in my belly to create the answers that I, and all women, need and deserve to have. Ultimately, leading me to create Revolution Motherhood — a holistic, integrative fitness and lifestyle method that empowers mothers to go beyond making a full recovery from pregnancy and childbirth…but to thrive while they’re doing it.
Can you share your childbirth experience and what made it particularly challenging?
I’ve experienced the full spectrum of motherhood — giving birth to two daughters and losing a son at 21 weeks. Each experience was a profound teacher, encompassing every aspect of the human condition.
The main challenges were the lack of maternal guidance and the medical and fitness industry’s gaps in supporting maternal health and physical recovery. With each experience, I became more informed and self-possessed, realizing that our bodies are the gateway to knowing ourselves through the life-altering reality of becoming mothers. Without our physical health, every other aspect of ourselves becomes dimmed and diminished, and that is such a loss! Motherhood is one of the greatest opportunities to know your truest self and to embody a dynamic and a big expression of who you are in this lifetime.
What were the first steps you took to begin the healing process after childbirth?
With my first, I felt I needed to be moving by day 10, despite the common 6-weeks rest recommendation. I began with a super gentle yoga practice. It was the best choice I made in those early days — listening to my intuition and going carefully but authentically into my body. It helped me process the stress of sleep deprivation, open up my tight shoulders and neck and begin to know my body again.
How did you seek support during your recovery? Did you seek support from healthcare professionals, family, or community groups during your recovery? If so, how did their involvement contribute to your healing journey?
I did. I ended up loving my OB who ultimately saw me through all 3 of my pregnancies. She was supportive, compassionate, and highly skilled. But, her scope ended at each 6-week check up.
From there, it was up to me to figure out the rest of my healthy fit life and what that would look and feel like. I had a friend who had delivered her first baby a couple weeks after me. She was a fitness trainer and was super plugged into the Doula and pelvic PT scene — all of which was very new and pretty scattered around the city 15 years ago. So, I started hanging out with her and her network, asking a lot of questions. I went to meetings for different groups of practitioners working with women’s health and just sponged up the information. I’d then turn around and try it out in my practice/on my body and increasingly with private clients. My body was healing in real ways, I could feel my core, I was developing a language and I was unexpectedly forming a wonderful community of women and moms who were mentally and emotionally supportive and fun. Being an only child, I really didn’t anticipate the need for a network and community, but it was really powerful and fun.
Were there specific practices that played a significant role in your recovery?
Therapy was invaluable for processing the overwhelming emotions of motherhood. Equally important was daily movement — it opened a release valve to feel better physically and mentally.
Can you share “5 Things You Need to Heal Emotionally and Physically After a Challenging Childbirth”?
1 . Structured movement practice that is integrative, healing, compassionate and progressive. And, a daily plan to get it in — put it in your calendar like your doctor appointments. Begin with 15 minutes and be ready to pivot your plan and just push play on a video. Get your workout in while you’re in your undies with spit up in your hair if the unexpected window shows up in your day. Just do what you can and you’ll be laying a powerful foundation for learning how to tend to yourself in concert with meeting your family’s needs.
2 . Set your expectations: I see so many moms struggle with wanting to take care of themselves but who get stuck in the details of how unpredictable life has become. You can’t plan and schedule the same ways as you did before you had children — you are in a new version of life and reality. What you used to do for yourself to feel good/to process hard emotional moments may or may not serve you any more. You haven’t lost yourself, you’re writing a new chapter and learning new ways to meet your needs.
3 . You don’t have to understand why you’re having feelings. Emotions want to be felt and moved.You don’t have to process everything right away, but you need to let the feelings out. When I lost our son, I couldn’t get on my yoga mat for a while. It was too intimate. I was totally not ready to go there. I needed to just rage and burn out the grief. I did really hard spin classes, and ran in the park and just leaned hard into playing with and being with my daughter and husband. The processing came slowly, in weeks, months, and even years that rolled out ahead of me, as I was ready to feel the rawness and let my conscience self come to terms with the tragedy, and in many ways, the unprocessable. Sometimes we just accept hard experiences as part of the fabric of your life’s history — time really heals a lot this way. The memories become less consuming and the joy of life begins to become more colorful and vibrant.
4 . Know yourself and your superpowers. I really need a clean and tidy house in order to feel grounded and calm. I absolutely could not maintain the level of order I needed, plus mom and work with a newborn. Our solution? We have always prioritized hiring weekly help with our home so that we can have cleanliness without fighting and struggling against all of the other tasks on our endless to-do lists. If you hate to cook, look for a great postpartum meal delivery plan so that you are getting exceptional nutrition. These investments can be short term and remember the landscape is always changing with a baby. But, think about what you need to be healthy and thrive and then look at how to meet those needs with some outside support that makes sense for you and your family.
5 . Get out of your house and spend time with other moms. Do you love groups? Join a mom’s group. Do you want to be more one-on-one? Try taking your baby to the park and just chat with other moms on the playground. It’s vulnerable and it will always feel awkward if you’re not a super extrovert, but make yourself get out there and socialize. The first few years, you really need to be around other moms who are at the same stage as you, but also who are beyond you and can help normalize your daily doubts, thoughts, experiences, struggles and blissful joys.
In what ways has society supported you as a new mother recovering from a traumatic birthing experience?
I don’t do much social media, but in many ways it has set moms free — to talk, share, and champion a mom’s real-life journey. After I had the D&E, I was struck by the total societal and educational void for women who endure a loss. It was 2014 and no one was talking about “late-term abortion.” I hadn’t considered its meaning much myself prior to having to go through it. The silence that surrounded me was crushing — no one knew what to say to me, so they just avoided the topic. I was sitting with a friend about a year later sharing this and she happened to have a podcast. I said that I wanted to tell my story so that other women facing these procedures would have something to turn to and could feel solidarity knowing they weren’t alone. My friend and I sat together in front of her microphone and I told my entire story — infused with information, medical terminology, and their meanings. I had no idea how it would play out in the world, but people were so responsive and so supportive. They literally came out of the woodwork and said “thank you” and started sharing their stories of loss. It was a really powerful moment of healing for me and unifying for so many moms in our community.
How did you navigate the balance between taking care of your newborn and prioritizing your own healing needs during the postpartum period?
Trial and correction! I just had to be in the moment each day and go with the flow. I’d have a plan and then it would change a dozen times before lunchtime. I became the queen of pivoting, multi-tasking, and my infamous mom-hacks — like sitting on the edge of the bathtub during my daughter’s bath time so that I could simultaneously soak my aching feet, or filling mason jars with nuts and dried fruits, and placing them across my kitchen counter so that I could grab a quick snack and eat it with one hand, that was nutritious and energy boosting.
Wonderful. We are nearly done. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?
Michele Obama. I would love to have a private breakfast with her and talk to her about her journey — being in the throes of early motherhood to supporting and working with her husband all the way to the White House and beyond.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-).
I did — it’s called Revolution Motherhood!
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
About the Interviewer: After becoming her father’s sole caregiver at a young age, Lucinda Koza founded I-Ally, a community-based app that provides access to services and support for millennial family caregivers. Mrs. Koza has had essays published in Thought Catalog, Medium Women, Caregiving.com and Hackernoon.com. She was featured in ‘Founded by Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Female Founders’ by Sydney Horton. A filmmaker, Mrs. Koza premiered short film ‘Laura Point’ at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and recently co-directed ‘Caregivers: A Story About Them’ with Egyptian filmmaker Roshdy Ahmed. Her most notable achievement, however, has been becoming a mother to fraternal twins in 2023. Reach out to Lucinda via social media or directly by email: lucinda@i-ally.com.
