The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Jen Affleck salsa’d her way through the season 34 premiere of Dancing With the Stars on September 16—just a cool 11ish weeks after having her third child, Penelope, in early July. If you’re doing the math, that means she hit the studio for training with her partner, new DWTS pro Jan Ravnik, within two months of giving birth. And given the MomTok influencer has had no formal dance training—except “being Latina,” as she said jokingly in her first behind-the-scenes clip—we have to imagine those sessions are intense. As she admitted in the clip: “My pelvic floor might not be ready.”
No doubt, it’s intrepid to tackle such a physical task in front of millions of viewers so soon after childbirth. While Affleck’s first dance to Bad Bunny’s NUEVAYoL didn’t blow judges out of the water (her scores put her in the middle of the pack), viewers at SELF watched and wondered: Is she risking her health by competing mere weeks postpartum?
Without knowing the specifics of her recovery, it’s tough to say whether she’s endangering her body—but in any case, pregnancy and childbirth do a number on your pelvic floor. “The muscles become overstretched, lengthened, and weakened during the 40 weeks [of pregnancy] because of all the hormone changes, and adding a vaginal delivery on top of that piles on even more strain,” Riva Preil, PT, DPT, a board-certified pelvic floor physical therapist, author of The Inside Story: The Woman’s Guide to Lifelong Pelvic Health and founder of Revitalize Physical Therapy in New York, tells SELF. (With a C-section, you might evade the impact of laboring and pushing a baby through your pelvis, but these births require a whole different kind of recovery for your ab muscles.)
While doctors often clear postpartum folks for any activity at the six-week mark, that’s really just the point at which your uterus will have healed; pelvic floor weakness, by contrast, can linger for 12 weeks, or longer, as SELF has previously reported. (Cue the painful sex and peeing-while-you-laugh that tends to mark this period.) That’s not to say you should hold off on moving your body for that amount of time; in fact, you may be able to exercise within a few days postpartum, provided you had an uncomplicated vaginal delivery with no perineal tearing and feel up for it. But the type of exercise matters in the postpartum phase, and that’s where Dr. Preil expresses concern about Affleck’s daily multihour dance rehearsals.
The soonest expert guidelines suggest diving into such high-impact exercise is at the 12-week postpartum point—which Affleck is still just shy of, Sara Reardon, PT, DPT, WCS, New Orleans–based board-certified pelvic floor physical therapist and founder of online pelvic floor workout platform The Vagina Whisperer, tells SELF. And even being able to do that is dependent on your individual recovery and whether you’ve rebuilt your pelvic floor and core strength in the prior postpartum weeks, she says. Otherwise, you put yourself at greater risk of developing pelvic organ prolapse, which happens when the pelvic floor fails to support the pelvic organs and they drop out of place. That can cause a painful bulge in your vaginal area, as well as urinary leakage, constipation, pain during sex, and other uncomfortable symptoms.
Also worth noting: Each additional vaginal birth increases the risk of prolapse because of the cumulative strain on your pelvis, Dr. Preil says. So there’s reason to think Affleck might be teetering into risky territory with high-intensity exercise following baby number three.
It’s key to take it “slow and steady” as you return to movement post-baby, Dr. Preil says, pointing to low-impact exercises like walking and swimming. You can also “absolutely start working on your pelvic floor and core within the first few weeks postpartum, particularly if you were following a pelvic regimen during pregnancy,” Dr. Reardon says. She also points to emerging research that suggests benefits of “gradually loading the muscles, for instance with upper- and lower-body strength training using weights and resistance bands.”
Once you surpass the 12-week postpartum mark, you can ramp up exercise intensity, but as you do so, be on the lookout for leakage, pelvic pain, and a feeling of pressure or fullness in your vagina, which might indicate that your pelvic organs have slipped downward. These are red flags that you’re doing too much, too soon, Dr. Preil says.
Of course, Affleck may be well aware of the health risks to her being on the show—and hopefully prepared accordingly. After all, she told Yahoo she ran the New York City marathon three months after her second baby. So who knows what kind of pelvic floor wizardry she’s been whipping up this time around?
And we can’t discount how being on DWTS might support other aspects of her postpartum journey, like her mental health. “If I didn’t have Dancing with the Stars, I’d probably be dealing with baby blues and potentially postpartum depression,” she told People. Dancing on her kitchen countertop was a coping strategy for Affleck during her prior postpartum periods—and now she gets to do the same, but on a way more glamorous stage.
Related:
- When Postpartum Depression Shows Up as Intense Anger
- 6 Small, Everyday Habits Pelvic Floor Physical Therapists Wish You’d Break
- I Had Postpartum Preeclampsia Like Meghan Markle. Here’s What It Was Like
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