Fit Mum's back and she wants to know - have you got five minutes?

If you want to get healthy and fit, but are feeling overwhelmed about how to find the time, Fit Mum has some good news. 

If you’re a mum trying to lose weight, getting to the gym is the last thing you need to do.

Julius and I do everything ourselves. We don’t have a steady pay cheque or holidays or even days off.  When he’s working, I look after the kids.  When I’m working, he looks after the kids.  We don’t have a house cleaner or nanny or chef.  We do everything ourselves.  In fact, we don’t have any family close by that helps us out either.  For us to go on a date night, we have to save up and get a babysitter.

While we do work from home, we still force ourselves to work as though we were employed.  We lock ourselves in the office and work our minimum 8 hours a day.

Julius starts at 3am and works to 11am when he helps me get the kids down for an afternoon nap. We both work until they wake (anywhere between 11.05am and 2pm).

I keep going until 5 while Julius looks after the kids.  At 5, we start “crazy time,” getting the kids fed, bathed and into bed.  Once they are in bed, I work until about 9, or longer if they had a shorter lunchtime sleep.

I’m not telling you this to brag or get sympathy, only to point out that we are no different to anybody else.  We’re not living in a gilded castle with servants and helpers who come at the ring of a bell (we are those servants, and the sound of the bell is a child’s voice)

So then, how do we fit fitness into this?

Firstly, we don’t have gym memberships.

Most mums don’t have the capacity to work out at the gym for an hour.  I certainly don’t.  An hour workout at the gym would actually take around 2 hours out of the day.  What, with getting myself and the kids ready, driving there, getting the kids into the creche, doing the workout, showering afterwards, collecting the kids and cleaning up any disaster they have left in the creche and driving back home to cries of “I want… I want.”

I applaud mums who can do this, the time management skills they have must be phenomenal.

For us, going to the gym is just out of the question.  The time we do spend with the kids needs to be spent with the kids.  We decided before having kids that we would want them to grow up and choose us as friends, not because we were their parents, but because they actually liked us.

With no family close by, we really only have each other and our kids as friends.  What do we do with friends?  We do stuff with them.  If I had friends, I’d exercise with them.  That’s the benefit of the gym.  You get to enjoy the experience with someone else.  My kids are my friends, so we exercise together.

It certainly has its limitations, but here’s how I get around it.

No phone. My phone is such a huge distraction, hearing a text message come through could turn into an hour of dead time (staring blankly at a smartphone).  When I’m with my kids, I’m with my kids.  Answering the phone means that the person on the other side is more important to me than my kids.  I won’t do that to them.

No weights. We don’t use weights around the kids because it’s just too dangerous.  Everything is bodyweight resistance (or we use kids).

Short workouts. Kids have a very short attention span, so we can’t stand in front of the TV doing an hour long Jillian Michaels DVD.  Workouts have to be less than 15 minutes long, and able to be cut short if needed.

Workout around the kids, don’t make them workout. This is obvious, but from a lot of the comments you’ll get, people will assume you’ve got your kids lined up like Chinese acrobats, forcing them to exercise.  Kids can join in if they want, but the exercise needs to happen independently of them.

Intensity substitutes time What is harder?  Walking 2km or sprinting 200m?

Sprinting 200m will absolutely demolish you, the fat loss after a 200m sprint will far outweigh the fat loss you’d get walking for 2km.

Sprinting takes less than a minute.  Walking 2km takes half an hour.  When I do get that 15-minute window to exercise, I make sure it is intense.  15 minutes doesn’t last long if you’re a 1-hour pump class type of girl.  But if you attack your workout from the very first minute like a sprinter, there’s a good chance you won’t make it to 15 minutes.

15 minutes is the goal.

When I say 15 minutes, I mean that 15 minutes is the goal.  If I can get to 15 minutes without blowing out or a nappy blowing out, I have won the exercise lottery.

I’ve outlined 3 workouts from my Fit, Healthy Happy Mum program below.  Attack each of these like a sprinter and you’ll never go back to the gym again.

These are only 3 of the 60 or so workouts we have in the Fit, Healthy, Happy Mum program; an online program I created for busy mums to get their body back in record time.

But that’s just the physical goal, the overall result of the program is to be a better mum by achieving small things one after the other.

Get your self back, your kids deserve the best version of you, your husband deserves the best version of you and most importantly, you deserve to live the best version of your life.

Be fit, be strong, be healthy.  You gave birth, so you are therefore capable of ANYTHING!

Find out more about Sharny's and Julius' online coaching service for mums at sharnyandjulius.com. Follow Sharny on Facebook here.

Have you got any secrets for finding the time to exercise with kids?