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If you had been working out before pregnancy and doing exercises during pregnancy, then after childbirth it should not be too hard for you to get back into shape. If, however, you are like me and have never worked out, or did so only from time to time, then daily exercises should become obligatory for you after your baby’s birth. Even if you think you are in good shape and strong enough, taking care of a baby, bringing them up and participating in their games requires a lot of energy and physical strength.
Therefore, you really need to get back to your normal weight, have strong muscles, a healthy back and knees, strong arms and a clear head.
Before you go further with this, think about whether you sleep enough, in what conditions you live and what your lifestyle is.
Sleep, sound environment, comfortable living conditions and good habits are the essential components that determine whether you can be healthy or not. If you do not sleep enough, if you have a very uncomfortable bed, if it is hot, dry, dusty or vice versa too cold, humid and damp in the room or there is noise from the street or the neighbours, if you do not drink enough water, eat mainly junk food, are frequently constipated, have headaches, and often get viral diseases, exercising is still in any case good for you, however it is unlikely that you will have a desire to work out if you have chronic fatigue and irritation.
First, you need to create a healthy atmosphere around you. If you sleep enough, live in comfortable conditions, have friendly relationships with your family, then as soon as you feel good enough after your baby’s birth and your doctor has not imposed any restrictions on you, little by little you can start to exercise.
To begin with, you need to strengthen your back, which carried a heavy load during your pregnancy, especially for the last months. For the moment, your baby is not heavy and weighs about four kilos, so, the load for your back is not too heavy. But even so, now you need to hold the baby in your arms over long periods, often bending over with the baby in your arms, or standing in an inclined position and not getting enough rest.
In addition, with weak muscles, you will get tired faster, have backache more and more often and, as a result, probably start regularly taking painkillers. Try to take these pills as rarely as you can. If you have a backache, lie down on a hard mattress with a small pillow under your neck and a large pillow or rolled up blanket under your knees. Rest well in this position for ten minutes and you will feel much better.
When your child weighs from ten to fifteen kilos, he/she is still a child and you will still be carrying him/her in your arms, and playing together doing “acrobatic stunts”, straining your back for a long time and often being in uncomfortable positions. Therefore, striving for a healthy back is your basic initial task, followed by your knees, neck, shoulders and arms, and then everything else.
The best and most enjoyable way to strengthen the muscles of the back and the whole body is by swimming.
However, if you can only workout at home, choose three, five, seven, ten exercises that you like. You do not need to choose exercises which are too complicated, too fashionable, and too effective. The simplest exercises, such as standing up and doing forward and side bends, squats, twisting the shoulders from side to side, turning your head in different directions, raising your arms and legs, twisting, push ups, sit-ups and any other exercises which are COMFORTABLE for you to do and during which you feel your muscles work and how these muscles are filled with heat. These simple and comfortable exercises will certainly be effective since your muscles work and enrich the blood with oxygen. Do not forget to breathe right, exhaling when you make an effort.
So, you have chosen several exercises, for example, five. You need to do as many reps of each of these exercises as you can. If you can do only ten reps of each exercise, that’s great. If it seems to you that this is not enough, do the math – five exercises ten times each is fifty movements. Not bad for the beginning!
But you must work out every day, even if you haven’t slept enough, are in a bad mood or in a hurry. You need to mark each day in your diary when you did your work out and then if you miss one day, the next day, do two sets of each exercise. If you missed two days, you have to do two sets for two days, and so on. Follow this plan for thirty days. Thirty days later, do each exercise not ten times but twenty times, resulting in a hundred movements. Every thirty days, add ten more reps to each exercise.
When your child is about one year old, you will be doing five exercises one hundred times each, which in total is five hundred movements. Believe me, you will feel much better than if you do not do any.
If you do your exercises every day for several months, it will become a habit, and you will no longer wish to deny yourself the pleasure of feeling great. It will become a part of your pleasant daily routine.
Your child is growing up, demanding more and more of your attention. Kids don’t like it if mom is doing something else instead of playing with them. It may become more difficult for you to do even a few exercises over time. But do not stop working out! If you can’t do all the exercises at once, do a few throughout the day. Your task is to do that minimum of movements that you have decided to do, every day. The more varied exercises you can do, the better for you.