August Moving: Arms

Having strength in your arms is important, it helps improve your posture which means your back is strong, resistance training your arms has shown that it reduces the risk of musculoskeletal injuries or at least reduce their severity. But proper form is important.

  • Strong muscles will enhance your workout. Once you start concentrating on your upper body, other exercises will seem easier.
  • Working your arms can help protect your bones. Every year your bones loose more strength, but the good news is, the more you work them, the more you help to maintain healthy bones and build density.
  • Working your arms, gives you that feel good factor, the satisfaction that you’ve worked something hard and will reap the rewards. It will help your exercise mindset going forward.

Exercises to try –

If you can do the 2 exercises 2 – 3 times a day. You will start to feel a noticeable difference in your arm strength.

  1. Forearm pulse: Connect your forearms together from your elbow all the way up to your fingertips, palms together. Push the forms arms together to create tension. Pulse your arms up and down, maintaining contact with no gaps and pressure. Do this for 30 seconds/ pulses. Ensure your shoulders stay down and your core is still scooped in.
  2. Press ups: You probably thought you might get away with out these, but no such luck. A few things to remember about press ups. The further your feet are away the harder it, which means the lower your arms/ centre of gravity the harder it is too. So bear this in mind when you choose the level you want to do the press ups at. Place your hands just wider than your shoulders. Keep your shoulders down and tummy scooped. Make sure your body is in a straight line, so your bottom is tucked in. inhale on the way down. Exhale on the way up. Aim for 10 reps.
August Moving: Arms

August Moving: Quads

The quadriceps are one of your power house muscles in your body (alongside your core), that really need to be strong and stable. The muscle groups in your legs work together to ensure that your balance and stability are in the right place when your body needs it, as well ensuring your knee flexes and extends as needed.

  • Having strong quads will aid the stability needed for the knee joints, which can inherently be unstable and depend on ligaments and muscles to protect them from injury.
  • The inner thigh muscles also provide internal rotation, which counterbalances the external rotation from your outer thighs and glutes.
  • Like any major muscle groups they require care and maintenance, stretching in particular is important as no stretching can lead to a shortened thigh muscle which in turn means your knee won’t be able to flex effectively.

Exercises to try –

If you can do the 2 exercises 2 – 3 times a day. You will start to feel a noticeable difference in your quad strength.

  1. Squats – super easy to integrate into your day when you’re brushing your teeth, making a cup of tea, cooking tea and more! You need to have you feet hip or shoulder width apart and a straight back. Remember to scoop in your core and engage it. You want to bend your knees, ensuring your knees stay behind your toes, and your chest stays higher than your hips. You have the choice to do normal squats down and up, or add in a pulse at the bottom before you come up. Aim for 15 reps.
  2. Standing leg raises: Standing up tall with your tummy scooped in. Raise your leg up in front of you so it is slightly bent and then lower back down, let your big toe tap the ground but nothing else and lift leg back up. If you need to hold onto something to keep your balance, rest your hand lightly on a chair. The lifting of the leg must come from the thigh not the knee. Aim for 15 reps on each leg.

August Moving: Core

Our core can be something that we obsess about, what it looks like, how strong it is and the exercises that we do. During my time as a dance teacher and Buggyfit trainer I have seen many different exercises to work the core.

  • My conclusion, simpler is the better and conventional is not always best. What I mean by this is that sit ups and burpees are not the answer, they don’t target our inner core.
  • Our core is a complicated part of our body, and many different things impact it. What we forget is that our body is made up of many different layers. Conventional exercises focus on building strength in the upper layers, whilst inner core work goes deep down.
  • Training these muscles is essential for stability, joint control through motion and ensuring all those inner muscle work together to propel you forward in the best way.

Exercises to try –

If you can do the 2 exercises 2 – 3 times a day. You will start to feel a noticeable difference in your core strength.

  1. Box scoop: Kneeling on all fours ensure your knees are directly below your hips and your wrists are below your shoulders, have your back in neutral alignment. Relax your tummy, it’s really important that you really let it all go! Otherwise the exercise won’t work effectively. Inhale and let your tummy fill with air, as you exhale slowly scoop your in and up. You want to begin from the top of your pubic bone and finish at your belly button. Your aim is to create a C scoop as you draw your tummy in. Take 4 counts to exhale and 4 counts to inhale. You need to have control through both directions. 5 reps. This can also be done standing up, but by doing it on your hands and knees, you work against gravity more, so your muscles work harder!
  2. Candlestick Dipper: This will work your transverse abdominus and your obliques. Kneel on the ground, with one leg out to the side. Ensure your back in straight and your hip is stacked above your knee for the one you’re kneeling on. For the one out to side, keep the toe facing forward and the heel to the back. Option A is to raise your arms out to the side at shoulder height, maintaining a straight line with your body tilt to the side away from the foot that it out. Touch the floor with your fingertips. The further away you touch the harder it is. Option B join your fingertips together above your head. Maintain contact with your fingers as you lean to the side and then bring yourself back up. It’s important to keep yourself aligned for both these options and don’t allow your bum to out backwards and you reach forward with you arms. For those who have a weak core or less than 5 months postpartum, only do option A!
August Moving: Core

August Moving

Summer months is always a time when we naturally pick up the pace and move more, whether that’s through day trips out or just because the weather is nicer, we are outside more. I’m someone who needs to go outside and move everyday whatever the weather. But the reality of moving in a specific way apart from day to day tasks can be daunting, we might all think about it lots, but the actual doing of it, can take some extra focus.

Throughout August I want to offer some real quick ways to integrate movement into your everyday that will allow a daily habit to be created. I’ll also provide some extra info about why we might want to support or exercise that part of the body.

Week one: Ankle | 5th August

Why start with the ankles? Ankles are one of our main joins that take the stress and strain of our whole body as we go about our day. They help keep us stable, work our core and pivot with changes of direction and motion as needed. Here’s some other key facts to remember about ankles –

  • A major function is proprioception, when neutral transmitters in and around the joint respond to signals from the brain that enable you to identify where the ankle is and how well balanced you are on it.
  • Improving the flexibility of your ankle will significantly help with your strength, squat and reduce injury.
  • The ankle is a hinge joint and works on one plane of motion – dorsiflexion and plantarflexion. Plantarflexion is the movement downwards – pointing your toes like a ballet dancer. Dorsiflexion is the movement up, when your toes go towards the sky whilst your heel is on the ground.
  • Strong dorsiflexion means the front of the shin can move forward during a movement, which helps with crucial body alignment and application of force.

Exercises to try –

If you can do the 2 exercises 2 – 3 times a day. You will start to feel a noticeable difference in your ankle strength.

  1. Flexion and extension of ankle: sitting on the floor extend your legs out in front of you, alternately flex your foot to the ceiling and then point it down to the ground. Push to the point that you feel a stretch. Aim for 10 reps flexing, 10 reps extending. This can also be done on a chair/sofa. What ever you choose, ensure you’re sat up straight and your shoulders are down.
  2. Heel raises: ensure you are standing up straight, place your feet hip width apart and take a slight bend. This is the position that you will hold during the exercise. Keep your knees and rest of body still, lift up your as far as you can, pushing the top of your foot forward. Lower back down. Do 10 reps. This can also be done on a step, by dropping heels below the top of the step and then raising them up.
August Moving: Ankles

The reality of moving post birth – what you’re not told

I don’t know about you, but from the moment you find out you’re pregnant all the ‘preparation’ that you are told about, explore, look up seems to centre on most of these topics – how your pregnancy will develop, how the baby grows, things you need to be aware of at birth, what to remember at birth, breastfeeding, bottle feeding, what changes the baby goes through and much more. What isn’t spoken about enough or made aware to mums enough is the reality of how you and your body feels physically post birth.

When I had my daughter, this was the bit I struggled with the most, since then I’ve spoken with many mums about how they actually felt post birth and it’s shocking. It’s the one thing they weren’t prepared for, hadn’t been told or heard about, and it’s the thing that had one of the greatest impacts on them as they came to grips with being a new mum.

9 hours old – newborn snuggles once I could feel my arm!

I want to share with you two things – my post birth pain story and how you can help yourself to get out moving after birth that will aid healing in the right way. I recognise everyone’s story is different, and for some mums, they may be the lucky few that experience a positive birth, with minimal visible damage and easy movement after. But sadly, there are a lot of mums that don’t get that.

The birth of my first child wasn’t what I pictured it would be. To start with she was 10 days late! I was in slow labour, with sporadic contractions for 5 days. My waters broke but I didn’t have any regular contractions and I was scheduled to be induced. A high-powered walk eventually shifted things into regularity. However, in the final pushing stages it all went wrong… very quickly, and I ended up in theatre with an episiotomy, forceps and a baby not breathing, after 6 very long minutes we heard our baby. Thank you, God.

In the hours after the birth I eventually managed to get up, although I could walk, albeit very slowly, I could not sit. What followed as I attempted to recover, navigate a very painful breastfeeding journey (a story for another time), go through all the new mum, baby, family processes. Was the realisation that whilst I was prepared to ‘become a mum’, I most definitely was not prepared (nor had I read anywhere) for the immense pain, immovability and recovery of my body. The hardest part was transitions, once standing, or sitting in a fixed place I was okay, but moving from one to the other, turning over in bed, getting baby in the night to do feeds, was excruciating, it was at least 4 weeks if not longer before I could sit comfortably and transition between standing and sitting comfortably.

9 days – the tiredness has kicked in.

Mentally I really struggled with this. I’m a doer, some one who likes to keep busy, and realising that I still needed to be on a ‘go slow’ a lot longer than I thought, I struggled with. It was around 4 months post-partum that my friend invited me to try out Buggyfit. What a God send! By this point I had worked out that sleep and my daughter didn’t mix. But the outdoors and buggy produced a small amount of sleep, hallelujah! Over the next 3 or 4 months with Helena at Buggyfit Farnham, I learnt a lot more about our post-partum bodies and rehabbing them in the right way. Plus, the importance of knowing if we have diastasis recti (tummy gap), and how strong our pelvic floor is (let’s be honest, we all mean to do the exercises, but the reality of actually doing them…?!).

I took a lot longer to recover than I thought I would, in fact it hadn’t crossed my mind that it would take long to recover – I mean nothing is said in any of the magazines. But think about it, you’ve taken 9 months to grow your baby, allow it time to recoup, recover and regrow as needed.

4.5 weeks – Frensham Pond walk

Fast forward to now, I’ve been a Buggyfit instructor for 3 years running classes in Odiham, Hook and Alton (more info here), I love it. I’m passionate about ensuring mum’s get moving in a safe, supportive and fun environment and I love being able to encourage them not only in their fitness journey, but also in being a mum.

So what can you do to help your movement post birth? Here’s 3 things that I would make a priority –

Slow and steady wins the race – giving birth is equivalent to doing a marathon, not only pace yourself during your labour, but also after it. No consistent* running, high impact, jumping, HiiT, Boxercise or similar until you are 5-6 months. This sounds like you must wait an eternity, but although you might look and feel great on the outside, there are many layers of muscles and healing that need to take place deep down. Follow the advice of your postnatal trainer but depending on your recovery some of these can be started sooner. Walking is the best place to start.

Little and often – get out for a walk every day. This might mean on day one, you walk to the end of the driveway or garden and back and that’s it. But firstly, you’ve moved and secondly you got outside, win win! Fresh air helps you to regroup, blow away a little bit of tiredness and help you feel like you’ve done something. Moving, wakes up your muscles to help them to start contracting back to where they should normally be. Each time you walk, walk as fast as you can, this might be like a snail to start with, but you will get quicker!

Remember your breathing – just like during labour, breathing is your lifeline. Taking several lots of deep breaths, a day will not only send more oxygen round the body to your muscles, but also help rebuild your pelvic floor and tummy gap.

If you’re keen to get out and get moving soon after birth, then I’d recommend heading to a local Buggyfit class where you can get your outside fresh air fix, baby can go to and all the instructors are postnatally trained, so you will be in the safest of hands to get your body moving and active post birth.

When looking for classes postnatally, it is really important that you check (ask to see certificates if need be), that your class instructor is qualified to teach postnatally. You will do more damage to your body if you go back into exercise and begin throwing weights around, doing sit ups, running sprints and more. There are many other exercises that work more effectively to rebuild your core, tone your muscles and build strength.

Put your body first, let it recover, know that it might be painful and accept you might need to watch a little more tv whilst you recover!

Check out where you local Buggyfit class is here – http://buggyfit.co.uk/

Interested in classes in Odiham, Hook or Alton check the info here – https://ucgrace.co.uk/joinus/buggyfit.html

*Running for short bursts within for example, a set of circuits can be fine, but isn’t recommended before 12 weeks, at the discretion of the instructor depending on the mum’s recovery.