Willpower Won't Power Your New Mom Butt Exercise Routine-But Here is What Will
Struggling with getting exercises in for yourself? Here is the mindset change that will help you to start small but start now.
Mom Butt Definition: (noun?) The 'mom butt' is a term used to describe buttocks that have gotten fluffy (as my daughter told me once) or flatter because of the posture that occurs during pregnancy, plus the sleep deprivation and lack of butt-strengthening movements that occur after pregnancy.
I get a LOT of questions about what exercises to do for different parts of the body. I am a Physical Therapist and board-certified athletic trainer and have worked in fitness for over 20 years. I got certified in step aerobics when I was 18. It is shocking that I was not more popular in high school when I could move up and down on a step to music.
Many women often want exercises to improve their “derriere.” I can tell you that having good glutes (i.e., your butt muscles) are helpful for several reasons:
With strong glutes, you can have a nice-looking backside in pants
With strong glutes, you can avoid spectacular falls as the glutes help with balance.
With strong glutes, your pelvic floor muscles can have stronger contractions, helping to decrease incontinence.
Definition of derriere. Noun. The fleshy part of the human body that you sit on. colloquial, 1774, from French derrière "back part, rear," originally an adverb, "behind, behind the back"
*you are welcome for the history lesson on derriere. Feel free to use it in a sentence today.
The Real Problem Behind Mom Butt
The problem with getting great backside definition or starting any exercise at all is that you will need to exercise the muscles consistently to see results. The first six weeks of any exercise program consist of growing more nerves into the muscle so you can get a better muscle squeeze (muscle contraction). Getting the muscle defined and stronger won’t happen for at least six weeks. At the bottom of this post, I will give you some of my recommendations, all of which can be done at home without equipment. However, the best exercises ever won't work if they aren’t done.
There are many different reasons for a person to have difficulty starting and maintaining health habits and routines. I have read all the books I can find on goal setting, habit formation, and medical research articles on maintaining healthy habits. Here are the reasons I commonly see moms struggle with specifically:
The problem of ‘I need lots of time (and I don’t have it).’
The problem of ‘I will make good choices at the end of the day.’
The problem of ‘I can only succeed and celebrate when I have completed my goal.’
Problem #1: I Need Lots of Time
It is common to buy into the story that it is ‘all or none,’ and you must commit to large overhauls of your daily routine. However, these mindsets are typically how New Year's resolutions die. Start small and start now. 1% better each week results in 68% better at the end of the year. 1% worse each week results in 40% worse by the end of the year. Small, consistent improvements that you can maintain are HUGE.
We all have a finite amount of energy to give each day. I want you to picture your daily energy, the mental capability to accomplish all the things needed today, as a collection of a hundred spoons. Each activity you have to think about takes a spoon you won’t have for later that day. What to wear? Give up a spoon. Google ideas for decorating your rainbow-themed kids' bedroom on Pinterest. Give up a spoon. What to eat for breakfast? Give up a spoon. You get the idea.
Most people start the day with few options on where their spoons can go because of what they have already committed to at work or with their kids. When we are young, we have the energy to do whatever we desire because someone else makes sure your food is purchased and dinner is cooked. Your bills are paid, and laundry is done. You never think about how many spoons you have for today because you always have extra. However, when we start jobs, find spouses, buy possessions that require maintenance, and especially if we add kids to the mix, energy is very much a commodity that is not limitless.
The idea is to create a tiny change for good that does not require a whole spoon. The more often you have success, the more often you want to do that activity. We feel good when we do something good for ourselves. This will create a feedback loop in your brain that wires in this new tiny self-care habit. Large overhauls of your day-to-day are too mentally taxing, and then use too many spoons. You must build up to the large change bit by bit. Just 1% a week.
Instead of waiting for the “right time,” we need to discuss how to launch a rescue mission for your current in-between-time. Often, there is a small chunk of time after the completion of one activity and before you can start another. This could be waiting for your coffee to finish brewing or for your kids to get off the school bus. The 1-5 minutes provides an ideal opportunity to exercise or do something else to get you closer to an exercise or healthy eating goal. One of my favorite in-between-time exercises is doing pelvic floor contractions as I sit at stoplights or doing squats while brushing my teeth in the morning. Yet another in-between-time activity is cutting up fruit or veggies for the week as I help my kids with their homework on the weekend.
As a working woman or mom or BOTH, you have got to start small and start now. By starting now, you are changing your perspective from “I am someone who can't make goals because I can’t maintain them” to “I am a woman who makes goals and makes them in a way I can maintain them.”
Problem #2: I Will Make Time at the End of the Day
I don’t know about you, but the end of the day is barely managed chaos. Exercise and eating well are HARD, and my desire to do anything productive after 5:00 pm is minimal. Planning for good eating or exercising at the beginning of the day leads to that 1% improvement.
I often hear working women and moms alike tell me that all they want to do at the end of the day is have a glass of wine and scroll Instagram or Tic Tock. I get it. I don’t want to do anything either…but I like K-pop music videos on YouTube vs Tic Tock. However, the problem with doing this every night is that you are creating a system where you stay up later than you intend because it just feels so amazing that no one is bothering you or asking you to do anything. The reality is you wake up tired and have to hit the ground running because you slept as long as possible before getting out of bed.
Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest don’t care if you take time for self-care. They don’t care if you exercise or eat well. They want your time and mental energy. I am not saying these companies are bad, but they are certainly not out there to make you better or improve you.
“But I’m a night owl! I need to wind down later than others,” is another reason people give me when I encourage them to get up early and work on one of their goals or plan their day to get in their in-between-time exercises. This may be true, but the problem is that the phones, tablets, and TVs we constantly have in our space influence our ability to get enough sleep.
We need to parent our use of electronics at night during the week, especially our phones. Catherine Price, the author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, discusses how and why our phones are designed to take away our free hours in this great talk. Does this mean that I never use my phone after 5:00 pm and don’t drink wine after dinner? No. But I proactively set up my phone only to allow 10 minutes of Instagram daily. I know where I struggle to say no to myself. Another way is to set your phone to bedtime mode or grayscale just before bed. And really, it is not worth looking at Instagram without color.
If you leave your goals for the end of the day, the odds of them getting done are about the same as for a cat becoming a professional dog walker—unlikely and ultimately not going to work. To ensure spoons are spent in the areas you want, you need to plan out your day when you have spoons, which means the morning before the kids are up. Otherwise, your kids will start the day spending your spoons, and the day will start without the plan you want. Getting up early and being rested to create your spoon spending plan requires you to go to sleep earlier. We need to take a relationship break from our phones and TVs one hour before we need to go to bed, go to sleep, and then we can use the morning to figure out how to get in those mom butt exercises.
Problem #3: I can only succeed and celebrate when I have completed my goal
First, we need to address the fact that you should have a specific goal. I will give some good examples of mom butt exercise goals at the end. However, each day you work on your goal, you must celebrate the fact that you made time for yourself. Seriously. It is validated in research by smart people who only listen to podcasts, read Shakespeare for fun, and don’t watch television.
I have two girls. They are ages 7 and 9. I let my oldest daughter help me make labels for organizing the garage last year about this time. The containers with Christmas decorations are labeled “Christmas decerashens.” She was and still is in the process of getting better at spelling.
I celebrate her attempts by telling her things like, “Good job putting in all that hard work.” I don’t berate her for not spelling decorations correctly. I don’t give her a box of Oreos and a hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps and tell her, “Well, just go watch YouTube because I guess spelling is just not going to work out for you.” That would be both poor parenting and very wrong.
She is actively trying to get better, and to keep her going, I verbally praise her effort. Sometimes, we do a silly dance in the kitchen when she gets something that is hard correctly. We celebrate, or sometimes I celebrate, and she mocks my silly dance. I celebrate that she showed up and made the attempt before she could do it perfectly. I don’t let that attempt be the last one, and I let her know that with persistence and learning, it will get easier and easier. It will cost her fewer spoons because it will take less mental effort. There are hard days when she cries about how hard it is. We discuss that learning is hard and it is okay to feel upset. But we do hard things because they help us grow, and we don’t quit in the middle.
As we grow up, we forget that we need to celebrate the steps. We must say aloud, “GOOD JOB for showing up today!” We are learning. When scientists learn, they don’t fail. They experiment. They blow things up. They burn things down. They tinker. They smash. They mix. And when an experiment doesn’t go the right way, they don’t call it a failure. They say, “Look what we learned that will help us in our next experiment.”
To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops.
Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing
Emotions create habits, not repetition or frequency. Seriously, that is the science behind habits sticking around. Just because you do something 67 times doesn’t mean you will have it forever. You have to celebrate the small steps and continue walking that road to an amazingly strong and defined butt and your bigger goals that will follow.
Application Time: Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going
I signed my husband and myself up for pottery classes last year as a regular date night for 6 Mondays. I thought it would be fun to try something different instead of going to the grocery store on our date nights (Whole Foods is a very underrated date night spot. Just sayin’). We would be learning pottery for the first time together. We were horrible. We could have quit after the first week because it was pretty clear neither of us had the desire to be great at pottery. It was just a random idea, not a lifelong goal of being great at pottery. We chose to see it as learning and had a lot of laughs as well as some really mediocre pots to prove our time in the class.
When you choose to move your body more or fuel your body with more good stuff, fear would love for you to try just one, get discouraged, and then march right back to how you were before. You need to get a block of clay and surround yourself with people who are in the boat of learning with you. People who laugh with you, support you and help you see a better way to mold the clay. Your path through learning might be littered with broken pottery and poorly spelled words. Give yourself the freedom to do something ugly and work on it long enough until it is great. Make sure you celebrate that you showed up each time, even if it is just for 5 minutes.
Mom Butt Exercise Time
I was watching Bluey with my kids yesterday. Let me just say that I love Bluey because even though it is a show about cartoon dogs, I feel like it brings in so many of the challenges involved in real-life parenting. There was a recent show called ‘Exercise.’ In it, the dad used interruptions by his kids as just different exercises. I got a bit inspired to involve my kids, So here are your mom butt exercises done with my girls. These are short exercises that, ideally, you can work into your day consistently. If you do them after something that occurs regularly during your day, like washing your hands, they will add up. Do the exercises that don’t take up a whole spoon when you are just starting.
In-Between-Time Exercise Examples
I will do 10 squats each time after I wash my hands before I leave the bathroom. I will pat myself on the back after I have done it each time.
I will do 30 squats holding my two-year-old after breakfast, after lunch, and after dinner. I will do a silly dance with them to celebrate that I did the squats each time.
Example Mom Butt Goal
I will do 15 squats during my in-between-time of brushing my teeth in the morning and evening five days a week or more because it is important to me to be able to go on a hike this summer with my kids.