Back to life, back to exercise
I had all sorts of visions of being pregnant: going to yoga classes, doing pilates dvds at home, lovely long walks in the glorious sunshine armed with a decaf to keep nice & fit. But in reality, I couldn’t do any of those things because I developed SPD whilst pregnant. SPD stands for Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction, and in layman’s terms it’s when your pelvis hurts the hell out of you during pregnancy, you know, just to add to all the other body traumas happening at the same time! Okay, I’m being slightly dramatic there – it’s essentially when the ligaments around your pelvis swell or soften, so it causes your pelvic bones to go out of line. It’s bloody painful, because everytime you get up off the sofa, or climb into the car or out of bed, you can’t really separate your legs to help you. And you often need crutches, like in my case, just to get you around doing simple day to day things. There’s a more in depth article about it here if you fancy a read 🙂
So my idea of a yummy mummy coffee-sipping, yoga-mat wielding pregnancy were out of the window by week 18. And bear in mind that, as an IVF pregnancy I’d been advised to take it easy until week 12 anyway, it left me very little chance to even go for lovely long walks.
But, hey ho, that’s how the cards were dealt, and here I am now 10 months after monkey bear’s birth and slowly getting fit again. I mean, he’s a 10kg weight that I’m lifting countless times each day, but to do that I realised I needed to kickstart myself at the gym, so I (foolishly?) joined an 8 week boot camp a few weeks ago – and in fairness, I’m loving it! There’s no ‘soft love’ here – it’s pure push push push, with weights, cardio and more weights. But I’m amazingly feeling myself getting stronger each week and it must be the endorphins because (shock horror) I actually look forward to going to each class! Wonders never cease!
I’ve not got any weight to lose, but I’m a ‘skinny fat’ person, so have got plenty of wobble to shift, an immune system to reboost, and a lot of muscle to build. I may be brave enough to post a picture one of these days, but for now I’m gonna wuss out! But it’s great to be making lovely supportive new gym friends, and feeling stronger for my little boy. I may be an older mum, but I’ll hopefully be a fitter mum for him too 🙂
Laura x
