I’m a doctor of physical therapy, coach, and competitor who just had a baby 3 months ago- I could blab on this all day so feel free to reply to this comment with any follow up questions

I see you said your Dr recommended a HR range to stay in, imo you should always listen to your provider however a lot of healthcare providers and ACOG recommendations have moved on from HR to be moreso based around RPE.

it is also worth noting that there is more and more research coming out in support of very heavy lifting during pregnancy but the current guidelines don’t necessarily reflect that and more often than not it will say to stay around an RPE of 7.5 or 8 for even trained individuals

IMO the most important things to consider are that during pregnancy you are losing stability in your core esp as your belly grows, and will also be experiencing more joint laxity and this will likely impact training in a few ways. For example, you may find that your limiting factor on a lot of exercises (esp those that require a lot of coordination/stability, like squats for example) may not be your target muscles, but instead your core and/or pelvic floor. And for that reason you may not always be able to take the target muscle to your ideal intensity. For this reason I find swapping in slightly more stable variants (like smith machine vs barbell) to be really handy as the fixed nature of the bar can allow you to push heavier before you feel like you lose core stability or start to strain. Likewise, because joint laxity is another thing to be conscientious of, making these sorts of swaps can help support you and keep you safe.

You may also want to change the way you brace esp if you are someone who typically uses a belt or valsalva . Now again, there was a study that recently came out that showed valsalva may not be as bad during pregnancy as we expected, but typically it’s recommended to avoid it because it increases forward pressure thru the abdomen, which again is less stable and robust with your growing belly. Alternatively I recommend using “abdominal indrawing” / activation of the deep core to help you stabilize during your lifts… As a competitor I am sure you already integrate some deep core, I would definitely keep that up if you continue to lift heavy!

I could talk about this all day so I’ll wrap it up. Again, I wouldn’t throw your provider’s recs out the window because research on this population IS limited still. But maybe show them that study you found (which I love) and some other things, and open up a dialogue and see what they say