What Do You Tell Yourself?

Working out can be so damn frustrating. Look I’m just calling it like I see it. There are some days when holy crap the workout doesn’t work out at all. Maybe you slept wrong, maybe you didn’t have breakfast or coffee, maybe your kids are interrupting you or the dog is being a pain in the ass...regardless there’s gonna be days when your workout will lead to more frustration than release. 

That was my workout this morning. I knew I was pressed for time, but I needed to move my body. So I grabbed one of my quick workouts from the YouTube channel and attempted to get to work. Only to be interrupted like 5 million times (I’m exaggerating but you feel my pain) by my freaking dogs. Like why do you have to wrestle on TOP of my mat??!

But then I checked myself. Like hard. Because I don’t mind a workout getting hard, I know it will and it should, but I definitely mind getting distracted when I workout. Here’s the thing though: it’s still better than not doing anything or not being ABLE to do anything. 

I started thinking back to the days when I first got hurt, when I was doing bicep curls in a bed because I couldn’t walk, and I started thinking about how far I’ve come. It brought me to tears. When I was knee deep in my injury, when my body was wrecked after I had Grace, I never thought I would be able to move my body in the way I can now. Seriously sometimes I even surprise myself. 

I started thinking that every workout I do, every time I move my body, it’s an opportunity for me to show myself of my capabilities. Even if the workout doesn’t go as planned, even if I’m frustrated, it’s still a reflection of how far I’ve come. It’s still an opportunity for me to show up for myself. That makes even the shittiest workout worth it to me. 

We all know that parenthood and incorporating healthy living into it won’t go as planned. That’s the best lesson I’ve ever learned as a parent, the art of being flexible and patient, and now I know that it all starts in my head and if I can look at things from a different perspective, it makes all the work worth it. 

So when the workout gets frustrating, regardless of why, I want you to focus on how far you’ve come, how much you’ve shown up for yourself and how proud of yourself you should be. Let those thoughts give you power and motivation to finish STRONG.

Your World Totally Changed, Now What?

Before I became a Mom, I always tried to be that friend who was super understanding to the people around me with kids. I obviously knew on some level that kids took over every single aspect of your life, that more often than not their needs surpassed your own, and I tried really hard to be cognizant of that, but I felt like this whole idea of a “Mom Club” was stupid.

Why should there be any difference between them and me? Just because they had kids already and I didn’t have a family yet. I was obviously understanding to their needs as well as to what their kids needed. I knew my life would change when I had kids, I would talk about the need to be flexible all the time, the unknown of what my life would become all the time.

Holy shit girl was I totally off. Like beyond completely and totally just freaking wrong on every single level.

I didn’t understand my wrongness until I had Grace and all of a sudden it was like ya no wonder no one told me anything because there is literally NO way anyone could understand this level of change unless they went through it themselves. I think that’s why moms with screaming kids at Target give the silent nod of solidarity. Because we get it and we don’t truly have the words to describe it to anyone else.

And girl I would get SO frustrated in the beginning. I would want my day to go a certain way and then it wouldn’t happen for whatever reason, and it would drive me crazy. All that flexibility I talked about before that I knew I needed to have was non-existent. It always seemed to happen in relation to my workouts, that I would want to do a certain workout and for whatever reason, it would never happen. And the reasons my friend, were plentiful, most of which I don’t remember now.

I wish I could say that I found a solution overnight and everything was totally ok. That wasn’t the case for me. I spent a long time being frustrated, a lot of days not getting the workout in that I wanted, and a lot of days wondering when things would go back to “normal”.

So I embarked on this journey of trial and error. I needed to figure out what would work and I wanted to have a plan because that’s just in my nature. I tried to workout when Grace was awake (you can read previous blog posts to see how that went), I tried to go to gyms that had daycare, I tried to workout after Grace went to bed or when she was napping. The one thing I learned almost immediately was that every single day was going to be different.

After a ton of trial and error, I learned that my plans needed plans. Seriously though. Oh and I needed to HAVE a plan because trying to wing my workouts wasn’t working with the kind of sleep deprivation every new mom operates under.

Eventually I found that what worked for me was having a contingency plan. Like the plan of the workout I would ideally want to do and the time I would ideally like to do it, and then a back up plan. The Oh Shit plan as it were. This plan gave me alternate times for working out in case my original plan didn’t work, as well as alternate workouts. 

In all fairness, this takes some thought and duh obviously planning on my part which is something I usually do over the weekend when I’m looking at my week ahead. It takes me being intentional and realistic to my time constraints as well as being methodical for what workouts go on which days (as well as back up workouts) so I can continue to see gains from working out.

For me, this works most of the time. I’m still learning the art of being flexible and patient but I feel better knowing that I now have something to fall back on just in case.