I’m new to the blog and feel it’s important to toss out a disclaimer before I continue: I am unapologetically fat and super great with that. Now, you’re either tossing your hands in the air excitedly about that proclamation with a ‘yassss-girl-on-the-internet-I-don’t-know’ or you’ve hit the X and I lost you and that’s ok too. […]

Freedom To Define Fitness: I’ll Do It My Way (Guest Post)

A few years ago Jenn wrote this terrific post about the freedom to define fitness on your own terms. Loved that idea then and love it now, especially since during the pandemic, under varying degrees of lockdown and stay at home orders, fitness is doing different work than it used to.

Has the role fitness plays in your life changed during the pandemic? How? Tell us your fitness story in the comments?

A couple of weeks ago we watched as Rachael Homan won her grand slam title in curling three weeks after giving birth. This was presaged by her big win when she was eight months pregnant, just a few weeks before.

The media was agog: she was inspirational, a super woman. Homan herself was careful to say her experience was not one every one could replicate. She told CBC Sports: “I want to be clear that every pregnancy, delivery and recovery is different and you can’t compare from person to person. I feel so fortunate to be able to play and I know that wouldn’t be the case for a lot of people.”

I think it is great that we no longer treat pregnancy as a time of fragility. Yes, some pregnancies can be precarious, and luckily, for most conditions, we have options, treatments, and interventions. I also think it’s great that if you are a fit and active person before achieving pregnancy, you are encouraged and supported in being fit and active during pregnancy and after.

There’s been a trend though to treat pregnancy as a time of fatness; to see the weight gained to grow a tiny human as a negative unless you can achieve a perfect basketball shaped bump. And horrors, should you gain weight and change shape in a non-artistic manner, then it would behoove you to eliminate the weight and return your body to its pre-pregnancy shape as quickly as possible once the tiny human arrives.

There are any number of reasons an individual can return to a pre-pregnancy state swiftly. Some are good and some are not. There are also any number of reasons a person could achieve an international curling title before delivery of tiny human and also achieve a record breaking grand slam title after.

The big issue here is there’s a lot we don’t know about pregnancy, athleticism, and post partum recovery. Standard advice today says eat well and be reasonably active, but there’s a lot of safety, caution, and care wrapped up in that package. While it might be reasonable not to pick up running while pregnant if you’ve done neither before, what if you were always training hard for competition? What’s reasonable or safe then?

Go back a few decades and you’ll find moderate to challenging exercise was a non-no during pregnancy. Was this evidence-based? Nope. Pregnancy was a get-out-of-research card and there were, and likely still, biases and assumptions baked into those guidelines.

Here’s a charming piece of advice from The Canadian Mother and Child (1947 edition). Forget being athletic, pregnant women weren’t supposed to even attend athletic events: “Attendance at sport events, such as hockey and football matches, is not suitable during these momentous months because of the excitement, and also at times on account of the prolonged exposure to cold.”

It wasn’t that long ago that female athletes delayed child bearing until after the pinnacle of their athletic career, while others risked injury for returning too soon post partum because they needed the income and to keep their sponsorships. Check out this link for some forward-thinking work that resulted in paid maternity leave for pro athletes.

When I was pregnant, a little more than 20 years ago now, I maintained a level of fitness that was pretty consistent. In fact, I was an active potter and kept working in clay up until my eighth month. I stopped only because the baby bump got in the way of my reaching the wheel. I also moved house part way through that pregnancy and held down a demanding job. I didn’t worry about maternity fashion, I ate well, and I walked a lot. Post delivery, I focused on recovery from a difficult birth and enjoyed achieving my goal — a healthy happy baby.

Homan also had goals and she met them. Yay Homan! Many athletes are training and competing while pregnant, and it shouldn’t be that big a deal when they recover and return to competition after they deliver. They know how to train and they know how to fuel their muscles. What really matters is making room for that kind of recovery and also for the kind that requires more time and care.

So just because Homan did doesn’t mean you have to. Is she super human? Perhaps. She’s very fit, very skilled, and an amazing curler. Is she inspirational? Probably. If you too entertain dreams of winning titles before and after pregnancy, great.

But if you aren’t, that’s okay. You don’t have to accept Homan’s bar of success as your own.

It’s all right to treat yourself kindly while growing a tiny human. It’s hard work. It’s okay to eat well, work out, and feel good about the process. It’s okay to cocoon and nest. Pick a reasonable goal for you; develop a realistic plan to make it happen, and then get to work.

What you can take away is Homan’s own advice: “every pregnancy, delivery, and recovery is different and you can’t compare from person to person.” Or as SamB often says, you do you.

The other day, my cats were loudly demanding dinner, and I was walking toward their dishes and simultaneously trying to open a new bag of dental kibble. As usual, not paying much attention to where I was walking. The round ball of fur that is Emmylou snaked around my feet and tripped me. As she yowled, I did an agile little dance to free myself of her without stepping on her, dropped the kibble and executed a perfect little chataranga onto the edge of my kitchen island, avoiding smashing my face into the granite.

Functional fitness, baby. That’s what all those early morning squats and lifts and mobilizations have been about.

I wrote last week about how unmotivating movement is for me — and many others — right now. Other bloggers, including Sam and Catherine, chimed in with how one of the only things getting them to the yoga mat or the bike seat is thinking about all of the things they are going to want to do in the summer — camping, hiking, riding. That’s functional fitness right there: the movement that prepares you for other movement.

I was thinking about my relationship to functional movement during my virtual superhero workout this morning. I was noting how hard it is for me to do a squat with complete precision holding an 18 lb kettlebell — and contrasting that to the devil-may-care squats I used to do in the before times with 100+ lbs of barbell on my shoulders. That was just “grin and bear it,” brute force grunting. Now, I’m focusing on the kinds of movement that make it possible for me to sit at my desk in the zoom for hours and hours and then stand up without pain, go for a walk or short run without triggering the daisy chain of middle-aged aches I’ve come to know so well. (Here, have some morton’s neuroma in your left foot (stabbing pain #1!), and add crappy hip mobility, which causes pain in both knees and the occasional acute flare up in my SI joints (stabbing pain #2!) and don’t forget the shoulder impingement that makes lifting my left arm SOMETIMES, unpredictably, the kind of thing that suddenly makes me screech and fall to the floor (STABBING PAIN #3!), and sometimes just like doot de doo, all is fine).

As we did carefully curated split squats this morning, Alex reminded us that this is the kind of movement that make it possible to run, to walk, and to continue running and walking as we age. So after class, I asked them “what ONE thing would you recommend right now for functional movement?”

Alex being Alex, they responded “YES! What a great question! Do you want psychological or physiological tips?”

BOTH please, I said. So here’s their advice.

Physiological I would say we’re missing out on “openness” right now- both in terms of the world around us, but also our bodies. How do we expand our body and open it up compared to our constant states of being hunched over a phone or a computer, sitting, rounded. I would suggest a mid back or hip elevated shavasana daily to decompress.

Really any movement is good movement right now, but especially those that open us up. Neck circles, that kneeling hip flexor stretch with the side lean that I love.

On the psych side, I would say less is more right now- this pandemic is traumatic and tiny movement promises to yourself go a long way. Try and pick one small habit that’s so manageable you almost feel like it’s “not enough” and do it daily. This can be doing a wide leg fold while you’re waiting for your coffee to brew, or 3 squats while you brush your teeth.

Here is a link to Alex’ program offerings — there are live classes, video on demand and one on one coaching. All infused with the kind of philosophy that will let you be in your body in a way so you can trip over your cat and not smash your head in.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who is very grateful for the Virtual Superhero workouts she’s been doing about four times a week for more than a year now. It doesn’t matter where she actually lives because she hasn’t really left the house since October. Here she is with the less murdery cat, Georgia.