Are you spending all your time scheduling your family life around workouts? Waking up super early to squeeze a workout in? Or never taking the time to workout at all?
Exercise or movement is vital to our health.
It’s well established that movement in any form is good for our bodies but for many clients they are using it in a way to punish themselves, maintain their weight, or part of a routine that is holding them hostage to perfectionism.
Movement should be for you and something you enjoy.
Walking, running, roller skating, yoga, lifting weights, hiking, sex, beach combing, pilates, boxing, progressive muscle relaxation (google it), frisbee, chasing kids, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, and many other activities are all movement.
The key to movement is to understand which type of person you are:
When? Morning, afternoon, evening?
How? Large chunks or small nibbles of time? Group classes? Workout buddy? Home gym? Online classes? Indoor or outdoor? Organized or freestyle?
Why? What motivates you? What movement do you enjoy?
My job during sessions is to help you figure out these questions so you make it a non-negotiable choice everyday.
Once you figure out the when and the how, you can focus on planning it into your life. Habit hacking can be super helpful here:
Implementing the 2-Minute Rule: get dressed and do the activity for just 2-minutes. If you feel like you can keep going, then do it, if not, either switch to something else or just stop for the day (maybe you just need to rest).
Understanding WHY you workout so you can have the right mindset about doing it.
Focus on how it feels, the benefits, and how it impacts sleep.
Rewards/incentives.
When working with my mom clients I find they are under a tremendous amount of pressure and stress. In Emily Nagoski’s, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski’s, DMA book Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle, they describe how important it is to close the stress cycle each day or you’ll burn yourself out. Almost every client I have worked with is suffering from burnout and the number 1 way to close the cycle and de-stress? Yep, movement.
Signs of burnout include:
Disengaging from motherhood: not spending time with kids, not meal planning, not cooking, ordering takeout, not getting out of bed, allowing kids to watch hours of TV because you just don’t have the energy to engage with them.
Feelings of anger, frustration, and rage seemingly out of nowhere.
Stomach aches, headaches, and also signs of hunger.
Emotionally drained: unable to cope, living day-to-day, unable to start anything new, feeling unmotivated, not enough energy to get through their day, feeling numb.
When working with a client who is suffering from burnout the first thing we do is incorporate gentle movement as a stress management technique. We will work together to find a movement practice that works for them, their energy level, and lifestyle. At the same time, we work on Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger so they can nourish their bodies consistently and have the energy to cope with their daily responsibilities.
There are so many beneficial reasons to move your body, but for moms it’s closing the stress cycle that leads to them feeling better right away and more empowered to take charge of their lives and motherhood.
Mothers have many barriers and obstacles to creating a movement practice and my job is to first identify the barriers and second help you find solutions that work for you. Questions I might ask are: how important is exercise on a scale to 1-10? What do you need to make movement a non-negotiable priority? What has stood in your way in the past? What has worked in the past?
At the end of the day, the more movement you can incorporate and the less you sit, the healthier your body will be.
Do you find it difficult to make time for movement in your daily life? Do you want to move more but don’t and want to figure out why so you can find solutions? Book a free 30-minute consultation to find out how you can incorporate movement into your daily routine without it feeling like a slog. Work with me and let’s turn movement into something you look forward to.
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