16. Everything That Counts as Exercise When Raising Little Kids
16. Everything that Counts as Exercise When Raising Young Kids
Hey Everyone,
Since becoming a mother, have you ever guilt-tripped yourself for not exercising, or compared yourself to other moms who are more physically active? I have, for sure.
But have you ever, say, sweated through a t-shirt by 10am from hustling through the morning hours? Or discovered that the arm you carry your child in the most is absolutely jacked?
As you know, being a Mom is a very physical undertaking, and frankly, a lot of what we do in a day constitutes exercise. There are obviously key differences between a guided workout, or a balanced yoga sequence, and a day spent taking care of little kids.
But the sheer fact of needing a water break while a toddler ramps up for their next 10 minute burst of activity, which you’ll be doing to some degree, too, proves how physically demanding the first years of our children's lives are.
Some of you listening are in that busy toddler phase while also breastfeeding an infant, healing from a C-section, etc. Your body is working on a whole other level.
When I set out to create an online yoga program that could alleviate some of the strain that Mothers endure in the First Five years of their child’s life, I started by asking Moms of young kids about their well-being, and the obstacles they face in maintaining it.
Part of these conversations dealt with fitness-related activities, and every mom I spoke to lamented being less active than they wanted to be. Taking a broader view of this, I see a separation of sorts between the athleticism we perceive in certain kinds of activities, and the perpetual strength training that is raising a child.
So my aim with this episode is to:
Point out everything you probably do in a day that constitutes a form of exercise.
To Explain why working out feels impossible sometimes - so you don’t fall into thinking that it’s some character flaw. ‘Cause it’s not.
Ultimately, this is to help you determine which physical activities can help you feel your best, and will feel like something you can actually do during this phase of your child’s development.
Welcome to Yoga for Mom-Life. I’m Susana Jones, and I help lighten the mental and physical load of early motherhood. With practical wisdom, and seasonally-oriented yoga, you can be present for your family, and have energy left for you. Start today with a free download of play room-friendly yoga poses at yogaformomlife.com.
So, last summer, I got on the phone with 25 Moms whose children were 5 and younger. And one of the questions I asked was, “how much exercise are you getting these days, if any?” Some interesting trends emerged from their responses to this, and I think they can help us resolve feeling bummed-about-not-exercising-enough and being basically athletes when it comes to what our bodies actually manage to do everyday.
It’s easy to beat yourself up for not going on a walk, or hopping on that Peloton, when you finally have 30 minutes to dedicate for yourself. But if you look objectively at how much energy per day it takes to care for a child under, say, the age of 3, it makes sense why Apple TV and like 3 glasses of water are the obvious choice once they fall asleep for the night, which we’re never quite sure will last.
But say you are a breastfeeding Mom. According to a few articles (linked in my show notes), that studied the energy output of breastfeeding, breastfeeding a child uses about as much energy as walking 4-6 miles a day (Bzikowska-Jura et al., 2020). And that’s every day you breastfeed. When I think of walking 5 miles as an isolated activity, like a hike, that’s the big event of the day. Other than giving myself props for being active.
But when I think about walking those 5 miles on top of the physicality of caring for an infant or toddler, I’m floored. Because a single diaper change can be a feat of endurance, let alone several of those in a day. Getting down onto the floor to play with them takes little work, but getting up from that floor the second you sit down, multiple times, followed by putting all the toys away? That all adds up to sustained exertion.
Getting a 1 year old into and out of their crib, or cleaning up beneath their high-chair, is like a workout. Then you consider the other household tasks like meal prep, dishes, and laundry, which are never-ending.
Now, the articles that compared this energy usage to walking 4-6 miles concluded that their findings underscored the importance of quality nutrition for breastfeeding mothers (Snyder et al., 2020). And that’s what they were looking for, so that’s great.
But it also gets me curious about who’s doing the food shopping and carrying those grocery bags inside? Who is making the food? Is anyone there to help with those things? If not, you’ve got like 3 more forms of physical activity there in addition to being a breastfeeding Mom. So, depending on how much of the food-shopping, and meal prep a mother does, compared to a partner etc, those things are part of her daily energy output as well.
And again, we’re taking this broader view of, essentially, the occupational health of Moms so we can first see how active we really are and then have a better sense of what’s missing in terms of physical activities that keep us feeling our best. The art in this is how to get those into our lives in ways that make sense given our children’s stages of development, etc.
I breastfed my little guy for nearly two years, and I recall being so relieved to sit down in my nursing chair simply because I needed to rest after everything I’d done with him since his last feeding.
What felt like a much-needed break was still a lot of work at the physiological level. Fortunately, it involved oxytocin and other feel good hormones that were good for my changing body and emotions, but even as rest, my body was working.
Now, maybe breastfeeding is well in the past, and now you’ve got a busy little toddler on your hands who gets faster and more defiant by the day. This is when the athleticism of being a Mom really ramps up.
(Note: The following section was corrected on 10/22 to better reflect the age of study participants.)
You may have heard about a study out of France that was published in Frontiers in Physiology which compared childrens’ endurance levels and rates of muscle recovery to those of endurance athletes.
They wanted to explain why kids seem to have endless energy, and they found that childrens’ stamina may surpass that of marathon runners and triathletes because they recover faster than adults do (Birat et al., 2018). Their muscles resist fatigue by clearing lactic acid out more quickly, so they can essentially handle intense physical exertion and bounce back from it more easily than even elite athletes can do (Bontemps et al., 2019).
The child participants in this study were boys between 8-11 years old, so these findings don’t directly relate to the First Five years, but it may make sense to think of those toddler years as training grounds for essentially elite-level athletes-in-the-making.
I cracked up when I read this. Partly because it’s cute thinking of their tireless little bodies eventually outdoing pro athletes, but also because I picture all of us parents who are not especially endurance-trained breathlessly keeping up so we can at least keep our kids safe.
But for the purpose of supporting Moms’ fitness, it’s worth keeping in mind that while we keep pace with these tiny athletes to some degree, we don’t necessarily have the whole training regimen available to help us meet that challenge in a sustainable way that helps us recover.
So if you’re like why am I so tired?” after you’ve spent one day - let alone all the days - of keeping up with a 2 year-old, it makes sense.
Now, of the 25 Moms I interviewed last summer, about a third of them reported exercising 3-5x a week. Every one of them said they did so because it was essential for their mental health, but also for general well-being.
Now before you start comparing yourself to other Moms, I’ll tell you that these regularly-exercising Moms either had children over 3, who were in school, or a full-time nanny.
These are relevant to their ability to exercise regularly. If you have a child under 3 and no additional childcare, you probably have less time and energy available to dedicate to a workout routine. So it’s not a personal shortcoming if you’re finding it hard to do much exercise in this phase.
This group also shared that their routine would sometimes get upended due to changes at home, such a child’s new developmental milestone, where things went a little haywire.
Because of that, some of them shared that they’re diligent about getting little bits of physical activity in wherever they can, knowing that at any time, a kid’s cold, or a big project at work, or a baby’s cognitive leap could disrupt their healthy routine for a week or more.
They said that getting back into their routine could be tricky, but that the benefits they got from exercising tended to keep them on track. Two Moms were actually out on walks while talking to me so they could get some movement into their workday, which happened mostly at a desk. Again, peoples’ occupational profiles in terms of daily postures and repetitive movements differ.
Fortunately, there seems to be a progression whereby, as kids grow, we can work out more.
Now that my little guy is 4, I find it much easier to get exercise in that 3-5x/week range, but it took a while to get to this point. My body was exhausted from keeping up with my toddler’s elite-level endurance, and early mornings were for getting the sleep I missed overnight when he needed me.
And these were the kinds of things the Moms of children under 3 shared in their interviews. They wanted to be more active, but were discouraged by the lack of time, energy, and motivation.
I related to that 100% when my son was 2 and my recovery time during sleep was often disrupted by middle-of-the-night wakings.
So, getting back into what we normally consider exercise while our kids are still teeny has some real challenges to it. And it’s worth pointing these out for the sake of externalizing some of the grief we might give ourselves for being “less active” than we feel like we should be.
How we feel about how much we’re working out (or not), becomes a bigger subject when we consider body image, and adjusting to our post-birth shape. It makes sense to be a little annoyed that we are, in fact, expending all this energy, and actually being quite active, but we still feel frumpy and our clothes don’t fit right.
It doesn’t help us that impossible beauty standards are in our faces regularly, and that some of those are about “bouncing back” to one’s pre-pregnancy body. It may give us this sense that we should be able to just workout, and have things look and feel like they did pre-children.
And this is a little toxic because it makes you feel worse and it fails to acknowledge how much you bust your butt everyday to keep your family healthy.
When our children are still in that 0-2 or 3 year range, they keep us moving.
So a good focus for this time frame is energy efficiency and rest. Because every ounce of energy counts, and your body needs to recharge.
Regularly getting little bits of mindful movement in where you can feels great and goes a long way. Taking a walk, or doing a 15 minute yoga class with me on-demand, for example. These are attainable and help us avoid getting down on ourselves when more robust workouts aren’t feasible.
Whatever form of mindful movement you choose will initiate a positive cycle that leads to more energy for what matters to you, better sleep and solid recovery, a more constructive headspace, and so on.
And no, you don’t need the pressure of feeling absolutely amazing every day of your life. That’s not realistic. But we seem to have accepted a status quo for Moms in which it’s normal to feel like crap a lot of the time. But what’s normal isn’t necessarily good, and Mom-life doesn’t have to be that way.
So, when you’re not feeling your best, do something that picks you up rather than picks you apart. Because what you do every day as the Mother of a child this young takes incredible strength and endurance. And your training sessions are daily for like 12 hours. Without especially good sleep for recovering.
When you’re tired, go with it. Don’t fight it. I learned in an Ayurveda seminar on circadian rhythms with Indu Arora that humans are the only mammals who resist sleeping when they’re tired. I’ll devote an episode to this sometime, but for now, consider letting yourself be tired and start closing out the day mindfully.
Dim the lights. Stretch a little. Release the tension that built up throughout the day. A little evening wind-down yoga session next to your bed feels great, and can clear out the lactic acid in your muscles that built up while chasing little ones around, picking them up 70 times that day, putting their toys away, etc etc.
Just like stretching after strength training, it helps us make healthy gains rather than residual funk, which makes us drag.
By doing what is actually relaxing and side-stepping some guilt around “being less active” than you were pre-baby, you can regain the motivation to do those things that make you feel good, and start building momentum in a positive direction. Desiring that forward momentum is something all the Moms I spoke with had in common, and it can help us get back on track when changes at home or work throw things off.
It also helps you get into that flow-state I spoke of in my last episode. In a flow state, your body and mind act as one, like someone practicing Tai Chih. Each movement is distinct, but they flow together, one at a time.
Imagine yourself going about the 1,000 things you do in a day as if they were all connected by purposeful attention.
From this vantage point, you can picture yourself bending down to pick up the stuffies, folding the towels, washing the vegetables, all from a core of consciousness that is present in the moment, feeding a sense of well-being that carries you from one thing to the next.
Breathing through the nose, in and out energizes your cells and helps calm and center the mind. See what happens when you exert yourself physically with greater attention on your breath and your form. It will make the athletic nature of mom-life more clear to you, and give you a lot of the benefits of the physical activities you feel you may be missing out on.
It’s OK for this to not be perfect, and we do want to keep working as a society to have more help available to us in the earliest days of motherhood, with things like paid family leave and affordable childcare. Vote for leaders in this election who care about these things.
And talk with your partner and family about the division of tasks in your home so everyone contributes, and see what kinds of tasks might be better to outsource so you can have time and energy for activities that give you a well-deserved break. Labor standards don’t apply to domestic work, so you might need to advocate for the rest breaks you need to replenish.
This is important when we take into account that what we consider a rest break, like sitting down, often involves some form of physical or mental labor, like breastfeeding, or managing the family schedule. We need actual forms of relaxation in our lives.
As Moms we are somehow able to do all the things we do. And that’s pretty amazing of us, so let’s not exploit the fact that we can do a lot of essential work without necessarily having essential support.
I hope this takes away some of the anguish of feeling like you’re “not being active enough” or comparing your level of fitness to other Moms, when maybe their kids are in school, or they happen to be elite athletes who train for a living and have ample support with that.
The physical day-to-day for Moms in America with kids under 5 looks different, depending on the kind of work one does, how they get around, and how much support they have with raising the children and doing household tasks.
But every one of us upped our game big time the second we held our first baby in our arms. And we’ve been rising to the occasion ever since.
To build strength and boost recovery for the journey ahead, join me for on-demand yoga practices that are 5 to 30 minutes in length. Practices are available in audio, video and PDF formats, and designed to enhance your weekly routine while raising young ones.
Join the waitlist for my Fall-to-Winter season at YogaforMomLife.com
Thanks for tuning in, and sharing this show with the Mamas you love. It’s Yoga for Mom-Life, and it’s about time.
References
Birat, A., Bourdier, P., Piponnier, E., Blazevich, A. J., Maciejewski, H., Duché, P., & Ratel, S. (2018). Metabolic and fatigue profiles are comparable between prepubertal children and well-trained adult endurance athletes. Frontiers in Physiology, 9(387). https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.00387
Bontemps, B., Piponnier, E.. Chalchat, E., Blazevich, A. J., Julian, V., Bocock, O., Duclos, M., Martin, V., Ratel, S. (2019). Children exhibit a more comparable neuromuscular fatigue profile to endurance athletes than untrained adults. Frontiers in Physiology, 10(119). https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00119
Bzikowska-Jura, A., Szulińska, A., Szostak-Węgierek, D. (2020). Resting energy expenditure during breastfeeding: Body composition analysis vs. predictive equations based on anthropometric parameters. Nutrients 12(1274). https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12051274
Snyder, K., Pelster, A. K., Dinkel, D. (2020). Healthy eating and physical activity among breastfeeding women: The role of misinformation. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 20(470). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-020-03153-x
