The Importance of Fitness
How do you make time to move and get active in your juggle? What fitness activities do you do and maybe enjoy as well? 🙂 What are the benefits of fitness for you? What are some of the challenges and obstacles that can make it hard to be active?
Early Morning Fitness
I workout in the morning before our kids get up, at 5:30 AM, Monday to Friday. One morning a week, I head to the pool for an early morning swim and the remaining four I usually workout in the basement either running on our treadmill, riding on my road bike with a wind trainer, or doing a resistance workout. Getting my workout “out of the way” first thing seems to work best with my juggle particularly with our kiddos having extracurricular activities in the evenings. I workout because it is something for me, it makes me feel less stressed and more patient, and it keeps me healthy and able to keep up to our kids!Â
Sharing Fitness Space with Your Husband Can Be Dangerous
Usually my husband gets a membership at our local leisure centre but this school year he hasn’t yet. One morning, we were both working out in the basement. I was doing push ups and he was using the TRX (a suspension trainer that uses your own body weight). He did not have the TRX attached correctly to our chin up bar, it came detached when he was leaning really far back, and he fell on me. This resulted in me getting rug burn on my knees. It really hurt! When you tell people that you got rug burn on your knees while working out with your husband, they tend to give you a bit of a funny look!Â
Fitness Tools for Success
Here are some of my tools for success that have helped me with my early morning workouts:Â
- Not hitting snooze when the alarm goes off 🙂
- Planning what I am going to do for my workout the night before (run, swim, bike, weights etc.)
- Having my workout clothes laid out the night before
- Watching Cityline or Marilyn Denis while running on the treadmill or spinning on my bike – They are entertaining programs that are a great distraction and I can learn things as well (fashion, food, home decor, DIY etc.)! It’s all about the multitasking!Â
- Purchasing some free weights (I have weights from 3 lbs – 25 lbs for the time being) and portable exercise equipment such as sliders, a TRX, a resistance band, and resistance loops
- Using a DVD or streaming a workout for resistance workouts – It is much easier to have someone tell you what to do then to have to think first thing in the morning. My recommendations for these are:
I am currently mainly using Beach Body on Demand for resistance workouts. It costs $99 for one year and I get access to all of the Beach Body workouts. I stream them on my laptop but you could also use Apple TV or Chromecast to stream them on your TV. There is a great variety of workouts (yoga, weights, pilates, cardio) and you can download them as well. I downloaded a number of them when our family travelled to Germany for a month this summer. I feel that this has been great value for my money!Â
Fitness and Human Connection
In my current temporary state of unemployment, I did decide to join a once a week exercise class at a nearby leisure centre. The instructor is a close friend and I have a few other friends in the class. The class is at 10:30 AM which is out of the norm for me but it is a fantastic variety of non-choreography style classes (HIIT, circuit, TRX, boot camp etc.). With not working right now, I don’t think I realized how much time I have been spending alone. Having this weekly fitness/social outing each week has been a very soul filling (albeit somewhat painful in a good way) experience!Â
I would love to hear about how you make fitness fit your juggle!
I’m less of a lion (grumpy, irritable, stressed out) when I exercise, which makes my jungle experience more calm and manageable – for the most part!
Tiana
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