I originally had a salmon recipe to share with yummy pictures, but I completed a 30 day fitness challenge today and thought I’d share some of the blessings I had this last month for focusing on my fitness and I'll save the salmon for next week’s Fish Friday.
After 3 kids, my body has taken on a whole new shape. My feet are even joining in the fun and are a full half-size bigger, which I knew was to be expected. There are other things however that I didn’t expect, like my once poker-straight hair now being curly on half my head. I can’t decide between straightening half of it or curling the other half, so my solution is usually a pony-tail.
But back to my post-babies body. My friend Stefanie wrote an empowering post about all the ways that pregnancy changes your body and how important it is to embrace your post-baby body. While I do have some pre-pregnancy pants that are in my closet daring my hips to ever come back together to fit in, my motivation for working out and completing the 30 day challenge was literally to try and work muscle groups that I know had been ignored since I was marathon training 5 years ago.
I am a person that works better with a long-term goal and has a plan that tells me what to do each step of the way so that I keep myself accountable to doing it. If I’m left to my own decision to just go for a run or do some squats or whatever, I’ll always find some excuse of an unfinished load of wash, dishwasher to empty, etc. to not get the workout in.
Going from occasional workouts to something every day for 30 days was an exciting challenge and I don’t know if my daily attitude of gratitude I’ve been doing for Lent has fueled my passion to workout or if working out has fueled me to be more grateful.
During the 30 days, there were times felt dumb for not knowing how to do some of the workouts, froggie anyone?...but then loved my feeling of accomplishment when I found the YouTube video and tried something new, though I may not be in love with froggies (Seriously, you’re going to look-up that YouTube video now aren’t you?).
To be expected what I loved is that the workouts were effective. Soreness meant growing stronger and the level of challenge was high. Over the process, somewhat unexpectedly, vicarious learning started happening with my kids.
Now, I know kids learn what they see from my post on my son riding his bike down a hill the day he learned to ride without training wheels and my husband calling me out on my fear of riding bikes, but I never really focused on the seeing part. In the past, my husband and I would tell the kids we were going to workout, going to the gym, etc. We want them to know we value this and it’s important. And we are certainly active with them, but have done less formal exercising with them, apart from soccer drills. This past month has been a daily dose of my kids seeing me do all sorts of new exercises and then start trying them themselves.
Now, even when I go back to hitting the treadmill at the gym or long runs outside, I want to remember to do exercises at home with the kids so that the value of exercising is more than just words.
