This is something that I hear so often when working with mums.
“I don’t have the time to exercise.”
…and I get it.
It is bloody busy and especially now with lockdown, home schooling, trying to keep hold of your mental sanity. It’s hard enough just trying to remember what day it is.
It’s a battle at the best of times.
For me personally, exercise has been the one thing keeping me sane during this lockdown.
And you?
How are you keeping sane?
There are huge links between exercise and mental health. It helps with so many things and provides a good stress outlet.
But how do you find the time to exercise? Here are my top five:
1. The first step is not finding the time but ‘making’ the time. This is a huge difference. If you are always trying to find time, it will never happen. But using your diary to programme the time into your normal schedule means it will happen.
2. Stop thinking about hours of exercise. The traditional approach to exercise has always been to fit it into a one hour block. A one hour class, one hour PT session, one hour at the gym.
During this postnatal time, lets re-think that approach. Why not divide your programme into 3 or 4 bit sized chunks of exercise? Perform each component during different times of the day and before you know it, you have done your whole exercise programme.
3. Link certain activities throughout the day with specific exercises. For example during feeding times, why not do your pelvic floor exercises? Or when you are cleaning your teeth perform single leg balance exercises. Make use of the times when you can’t really do anything else and get creative with your use of time.
4. Prioritise you! This is a hard one for a lot of Mums. There seems to be a lot of guilt out there that if you do something for yourself, then you are not looking after your baby. Bullshit to that I say! By looking after yourself, you are becoming a fitter stronger Mum who can handle anything.
5. Structure it into your everyday routine. My guess is that you are pretty organised with a routine for the little one. Feeding times, sleep times, bath times. How about structure yourself into that routine and keep the routine. All the little things add up over time and before you know it, your have a great routine which includes you and your exercise routine.
6. I know, I only said 5…Consistency. This is key. It doesn’t matter how much or hard you exercise. Just do a little bit at a time and before you know it these little bits add up. Don’t have one amazing week, then nothing the next week day. Just have a pretty good week every week. Then over the course of time you will get some really good results.
Good luck with it all and if you need any help, just contact me here.
Take care,
Lyndon
