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What are Mindful Mums fitness classes?

New mothers are given very little choice by fitness class providers.

There are classes for new mothers but they either don’t include Baby, or they don’t recognise the pain and problems that pregnancy and birth can bring.

Mindful Mums is a class that recognises what a Mum’s body has been through and understands that Baby can be included in, and have fun at, a fitness class.

Mindful Mums uses gentle, primitive movements to help new mothers regain full and pain free movement. From there, we move on to low intensity strengthening exercises to help Mums become more capable in everyday life.

So what are primitive movements? This is where the genius of the Mindful Mums class lies. Primitive movements are the movements that most children make as they progress from lying, to rolling, to crawling, to climbing  furniture and finally, walking unaided. In a sense, in a Mindful Mums class your baby can be your coach!

When: Mondays @ 1000 (from Mon 4th Sept)
Where: Funkstar Fitness, Ladeside Business Centre, St Catherines Rd, PH1 5RZ
Cost: £25 for the 5 week block
Contact: colin@mindfulstrength.co.uk
Spaces are limited to 8 mums plus their baby/s.
Babies must be 3 to 12 months and mums must be post natally cleared for exercise by their Doctor or Midwife.

 

 

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Willpower is weak

Willpower is weak, few successful people rely on willpower in the long term for success. Sure willpower is like a muscle, we always get that analogy. So let’s take that analogy to its logical conclusion.

To get stronger or more powerful we need to work the muscle, we need to work it hard enough to introduce tiny little failures in it. Then we need to leave it alone for a period of time so that it can recover and improve.

If we work it too hard, it will break big time and not improve as it recovers. Also we’ll have had to wait a long time for it to recover so we can use it again. If we don’t allow it enough time to recover, over time it will not be able to restore itself to even its starting level of strength.

The same is true of willpower. If we exercise it to a certain degree everyday and don’t overly rely upon it, it will get stronger. If we try to overly rely on it… it may work for a short spell but invariably we end up gorging on Jaffa cakes, vegged out on the sofa watching a Game of Thrones marathon (or is that just me?).

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Your fitness class is oxymoronic

If I paid money to go to a german language class and all the instructor did was shout random words in german at me for 45 minutes, do you think that would be an effective method of learning the language?

Likewise, if I went to a Judo class and all the instructor did was throw me on my head for an hour and a half do you think I would have learned much in the way of practical application?

Then why do we go to fitness ‘classes’ to be shouted at by a sweaty psychopath for 30 to 60 minutes? Are we learning anything new or practising/executing a skill we’re proficient at?

drill-instructor-yelling

These types of classes lack the key factors that cause the physical changes you want to achieve, consistency of practice and variation of difficulty.

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Re-framing: The art of being awesome when the chips are down

Don’t you just hate people who never get ‘down’? Or those people who seem to have all the luck? Because all the luck you personally have is bad, right?

My six year old was recently telling me “You make your own luck” and he’s about 88.2% correct.

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I really buy into the idea that:

Luck = Preparation + Opportunity

Preparation is something that is (almost) completely under your own control. Read more

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Training is only 10% – Part Deux

In the first part I laid out that if training is only 10% of achieving your physical goals, then the remainder is made up from:

Sleep – Training equals trauma, sleep is when you repair. Poor sleep means little improvement.

Nutrition – If you ain’t got the bricks and mortar, you ain’t building the body you want to live in.

Stress free lifestyle – Stress induces hormones which work against looking like a movie star, fact

The first part detailed how focusing on specific strength goals, along with a nutritional plan, are necessary to more easily accomplish any body composition (aka ‘fat loss’) goal. This article is going to focus more on that last part.

 

Stress free lifestyle

Nobody leads a stress free lifestyle. In fact I think if we did then we’d all become too slovenly to actually do anything. We need moderate amounts of stress to make us more productive and to do things. Who would do their tax return if there wasn’t an April deadline (and a fine)?

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The training is only 10%

Iceberg

I could have said that the ‘workout’ is only 10 percent, but I like how Mark Rippetoe puts it. The legendary barbell coach describes the difference between ‘training’ and ‘working out’ is that training is something you do to achieve an end goal over a period of time, whilst a workout is something you do to ‘feel good in that moment in time’. Whilst I could argue the semantics and words used, I’m totally behind the idea at play.

Many people go to the gym with an idea in their head of what they want to look like, or be like. They don’t really understand the process required to get there and so do what they’ve always done, or been led to believe is the ‘best way to workout’. Read more

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