Actually, I Love This: Workouts *With* My Kids
How I stopped thinking of my kids as mental obstacles to ‘me time’ and ended up with a lot more of it
Welcome to this week’s edition of Actually, I Love This, the series about the parts of motherhood the internet insists are awful — but that I’ve found myself unexpectedly loving.
It’s 6 a.m. and the alarm is blaring. I turn it off and roll back over because my three year old was up half the night for one million reasons. I’ll work out later. I have the whole day.
It’s noon. The five year old is at school, the baby is down for a nap, and the three year old is doing quiet time in her room. I grab my weights. The dog barks, the baby is up, and the three year old now refuses stay in her room because no one has FOMO quite like a middle child. I put the weights back down. Maybe I’ll work out when my husband comes home.
It’s 5 p.m. Dinner’s cooking, the girls are coloring, and my husband texts to say he’ll be late. Maybe I’ll squeeze it in after bedtime.
It’s 8:30 p.m. The girls are asleep, the house is quiet, the kitchen is semi clean again. I look at the weights, but I’m exhausted and I just want to sit with my husband for a half hour before I fall asleep. I’ll work out tomorrow.
Does this cycle sound familiar to you?
This ran my life for a while until I learned a simple truth that transformed me as a mom.
If I keep letting my kids be the reason I don’t do something I want to do—if I keep letting them be my excuse—I will never actually reach the goals I want to reach.
And that will not be my kids’ fault. It will be mine.
It is only me who can figure out a workaround. So I did
Like any good journalist, I started with the 5 w’s.
I took a few minutes to write out who I want to be and what I actually wanted to accomplish here.
I want to be a hot mom (sue me).
I want to feel good in my body.
I want to be strong again.
I want to have pictures with my kids that I am proud to hang on the walls.
What’s my timeline here? I would like to be a comfortable weight by summer. That’s about twenty pounds to go.
The how? Weight training and running are my go-tos. Weights for how good they are for overall health and for the high I feel when I see muscles poking through.
Ok, now for the when. Mornings just are not happening until my kids sleep through the night consistently, so maybe sometime in ten years. My alone time is like five minutes at best, and I also have freelance writing clients to squeeze in.
So this left me with one real option: work out with my kids.
To make this possible I really had to figure out how to significantly lower the bar. I took the advice from James Clear’s Atomic Habits to heart: if you want to start a new habit, make it easy.
Everything I’m doing to make working out with my kids the easy option
I work out with these dumbbells in my living room. I see them on facebook marketplace all the time! I chose these because I don’t have to worry about not having the weight I need, and they take up minimal space.
I don’t go upstairs to change into workout clothes anymore. I work out in my pajamas and fuzzy socks. I removed the barrier of “workouts must be in workout clothes,” and I cannot tell you how much mental gymnastics it has saved me.
I use the BodyLura app. I’ve used it for years and it’s so great. It’s the app that’s most like having a real trainer—and I’ve tried a lot of apps. I don’t have to think about progressive overload or what muscles to work out when. The app tells you all of that. So I can turn my brain off and just do it, which is the only way anything gets done in this season.
I give myself way more than an hour to finish a workout that would take me 40 minutes max alone. If I’m not rushing, a baby climbing on me while doing crunches is funny. If I am rushing, it’s rage inducing. And rage isn’t fun for anyone!
For running, I love a good solo run with no music in my ears. Just that beautiful, rare silence that moms dream about. But that’s not a realistic thing right now, so I take the girls in our wonderfold wagon and push the damn thing for as long as I can 2 days a week. Sometimes during a successful nap time I’ll use the treadmill in the basement.
I know that if I wait until afternoon it’s pretty unlikely that any workout is going to happen. I used to try to fight that, but now I go with it. I figure out how to do whatever workout I’m planning to do at some point during my time with the girls in the morning or at nap time/quiet time (read about how we do quiet time here). If nap time/quiet time doesn’t happen, my workout still does. Flexibility is key here!!
Something to note: I’m not setting any PRs. Not even a little bit.
But I am remembering how to show up.
I’m remembering how to keep a promise to myself and how to figure out a way to do something even when the circumstances seem impossible.
I said I would do it, and I am doing it.
I’ve been doing this for about four months now, and aside from being knocked out with both flus on separate occasions, I have not missed a day.
It turns out, working out with your kids is fun
Like everything so far in motherhood for me, I am having so much more fun than I thought I would.
My husband brought home little one pound weights for the girls and they get more excited for workouts now than I do. And if I’m stalling they’re the first ones to yell ‘Mom! it’s time for your workout!’ It’s so cute to watch them do the moves I’m doing, and I feel like I have little cheerleaders for every run I go on.
As this note from Loni Bergqvist reminded me, it is so important to do things that are for us in front of our kids. They mirror everything we do, the good and the bad.
I hope that one day they carve out time to move their bodies or sit down and journal or do whatever they need for themselves at that time because that’s what their mom did, so that’s what they do.
I hope remembering that they are important too is not a years long journey like it has been for me. I hope it’s automatic.
I hope these workouts are helping it be just that.
And how lucky am I that I now have the cutest gym buddies a gal could ask for?
I’m thinking maybe more ‘me time’ was never the answer.
Maybe the answer was always letting my kids watch me take care of myself.
If you’ve found ways to include your kids in your goals instead of waiting for the elusive “me time,” drop your story in the comments.
This is so powerful, Courtney! It's so important that we don't push our own needs completely away because as you say- our kids are always watching.
Important to carve out time for ourselves. To do exercise or whatever. Our kiddos take a lot of our time, so it’s good to think about ourselves too in a healthy way! Good read