Friday, September 11, 2009

Pilates for Mommies...or...Exercise for the Exhausted

Congratulations! Your new bundle of joy is home from the hospital and you are a mommy! You will get amazing love and snuggles, and this little baby will look at you like the sun rises and sets with you, because, in his eyes, it does. Bu, you will not get a good night's sleep again for the forseeable future, nor will you sit down to a meal without being inturrupted by a child that wants to eat (it doesn't matter when you fed them, they just seem to sense these things.) And if you have to go back to work anytime soon, you will likely experience the worst guilty feeling for leaving your child in the care of someone else, or, if you are lucky enough to be able to take him to work with you, guilt for not paying enough attention to him or your job.

Health time is going to be hard to fit in for the next little while, but it's very neccissary. First of all, your self-esteem needs to know how powerful your body is. The delivery high is gone, and you are left with a body with extra skin in places where it isn't flattering and extra fat stores that your body stocked away in some caveman-esque way so that you could produce breast milk for your new child. These fat stores would be useful if we didn't have ready access to food in our society, but we do, and just because you have the fat stored doesn't shut off your hunger triggers. So you have to learn a new balance of getting enough calories so your body produces enough milk for your child and doesn't go into starvation mode without overeating and adding to the bulk.

As for exerice, you need to be kind to yourself. I highly recommend walking, keeping the Pilates principals in mind. Concentrate on pulling your shoulders back and your arm pits down to open up you chest whenever you have the opportunity- you are spending a lot of time with your shoulders rounded looking down over your new little one. If you still have a diastasis, refer to my previous posts by Jennifer Gianni for safe Pilates exercises to do. If your diastasis has closed, start slowly, but begin doing work to tone you core- I recommend this series: Assisted Roll up, Single Leg Stretch, Double Leg Strech, Criss-Cross (aka Jane Fonda's Bicycle), Swan, Pilates Push-up. Do 3-5 reps of each, working up to 7-10.