Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast.

My name is Christina Previtt.

I'm a pelvic floor physical therapist, researcher in exercise and pregnancy, and a mom of two who has competed in CrossFit, powerlifting or weightlifting, pregnant, postpartum or both.

In this podcast, we want to talk about the realities of being a mom who loves to exercise, whether you're a recreational exerciser or an athlete.

We want to talk about all of the things that we go through as females, going into this motherhood journey.

We're going to talk about fertility, pregnancy and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual.

While I am a pelvic floor physical therapist, I am not your pelvic floor physical therapist and know that this podcast does not substitute medical advice.

All right, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together, and I can't wait to get started.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast, christina Previtt.

Here and today I was going to have just a little bit of a more unprompted session talking about some really cool experiences that I've been having within my own family, kind of speaking to this foundation of lifelong exercise and athlete development in my kiddos.

My kids are almost four, my youngest turns four and six.

We're trying for baby three, so we're hoping that we're going to add one more into the mix there, but right now my kids are almost four and six and so while they are still little, they are definitely not littles and they're a little bit further down the line.

I feel like there's a lot of conversations that happen around exercise in the early postpartum period, you know, when we have newborns and babies that are still napping right, and how you kind of try and fit exercise into your day and in your routine as parents.

There's a lot of reels that go around social media that talk about you know, you just got to get up earlier.

And as someone who has a child who wakes up at 5.15 every single morning and she has done that since she was born and she's my biggest right Maya she is a 5.15 to 5.30 waker-upper and she has been since, honestly, probably since she was like eight months old when she started sleeping through the night.

Her wake up time when she slept through the night was 5.15, where, you know, you kind of get all these competing messages and you have all these things that are coming up and you kind of just feel like you're failing in every moment and if you're an athlete, you're so used to this being your protected time and it's just something that is just so, so, so, so, so challenging and can be so frustrating.

And so we've done podcast episodes.

I had an episode where Nick and I went on the podcast together and we talked about how we try and navigate that as a couple that, you know, prioritizes movement and fitness, and we talked about some of our journey when they, when we had kids that were little, where we were lucky enough to have a gym that had daycare, and then we have a garage gym and working out close to home and not having to have the extra energy to move and have to go to a gym and just worked for our family and we've kind of done that.

But it's been really interesting because now our kids are a little bit older and so that means that that nap time has gone away.

I know my Nick is a stay-at-home dad so he used to hold on to Quinn's nap for as long as he could, because he would always work out during nap time and he just was trying to hold onto it and so when he dropped that nap it became again this whole other dynamic when you have school-aged kids and then they have things at night and they're starting to do they just did soccer this summer and Quinda swimming and Maya does gymnastics and all of these things start coming up and now you get into a different set of challenges.

Right, you get into a different set of challenges, but you also get into a very cool space.

I have been running.

I've talked about this on the podcast and I posted a reel on Monday of this week, or I posted on my story on my personal page that my daughter decided that she wanted to come with me.

Last summer I was training for a half marathon.

This summer I've been prioritizing weightlifting a little bit more.

You just shift, I just do it just based on what I feel like doing in the moment.

But last year she had tried to do a couple of runs with me and she had gotten into a couple of weeks where before school she was trying to run continuously up to a kilometer and that was really tough for her and some days she would want to do it and some days she wouldn't.

We're really trying to foster this love of movement and this appreciation for moving the bodies, our kids' bodies, without it feeling forced because she wanted to come running with me and she's little right.

She was five at the time and so it really it just didn't work right.

And so then she was thinking, well, maybe I can go on my bike with mommy and she can run.

And so we had tried that and she just Didn't have the endurance yet it was fine, we ended up stopping and starting.

But bold transparency.

I'm like, oh man, this is my only time to run and now I'm not getting the intensity of my run.

It's like it's fine but like also it kind of sucks.

Right, but you want to try to encourage her to love movement with you.

Anyways, we tried that a couple of times and then she inevitably she's five, she gets distracted and didn't do a lot of runs with me so fast forward to this year and she's been getting a little bit more consistent with us in the gym.

She's a bit older now, so I'm not worried as much about things like her not knowing to be out of the way if we're lifting weights or making sure that she knows that if I can't see her, then I can't see her when I have a barbell right, so she's behind me so that she doesn't get in the way, all those types of things, just from a safety perspective.

And she's been doing gymnastics for the last couple of years, so she's been playing on the rings.

We have rings in our garage and she's been doing all these things like that.

We've also been doing a lot of biking, and so this week again, she comes and she's like Mommy, I want to go on the run with you.

And I said, okay, kiddo, like mommy plans to do our loop from kind of the big loop that we have around our house is about 5.6, 5.7 kilometers.

I was just going to do a quick loop at lunch and I'm like Okay, it's like a 5.6, 5.7 kilometer bike ride for you.

We're going to go all the way around and we're going to try and do it without stopping.

Like, what do you think about that?

She's like she thinks about it and she goes.

I think I can do it.

And so we go off me, her on a bike, right and I was like you know what, I'm not going.

So we get on the road and she starts and she's like chatting with me the whole time, which is really fun, and she goes mom, I believe in you, I believe that you're going to be able to run this whole time, and I believe in me too, and so we just start running, right, or she's biking and I'm running, and she's just like you can just see as she's getting further and further and she's noticing that this is feeling different than when she used to do this with me, that her fitness is better because she's a little older, her body's a little bit more mature and she's also been doing some fitness things in the summertime and we get like a kilometer or two in.

She's like I think I can do this, like I'm feeling okay, I'm pretty proud of myself right now, and she's like I'm a little sweaty, like the wind on my face is just feeling so good, right, and I just can't help it.

I'm like beaming this entire time because one, this is what I've always wanted, Like you, literally, when you think about your life, when you're in, especially your early twenties, and you're thinking about having kids and things like that, and then you meet your forever person gosh, I'm going to tear up just thinking about this.

You think about these moments, right, like something that, for probably many of you that are listening to this podcast fitness or moving your bodies in some way, is something that's important to you, right, and you want to keep doing it in pregnancy and we think about it in early postpartum.

But I don't think we ever like truly imagine just how much that role modeling, even when it doesn't feel perfect to us you know, like there's so many days that doesn't it doesn't feel perfect but that role modeling day after day and how, like the messaging and how you talk about exercise not as something that's punishment.

We don't talk about it as something that's around body recomping.

It's really about feeling confident and being able to do all the things we want to do.

To see that kind of reflected in my daughter and to see her confidence grow, her enjoyment of just moving her body.

And then so we finished this five and a half K.

I think we ended up going like 5.7 and she's super excited to tell her dad and she went the whole way and she's like I'm sweating, this is so great, mom, I'm sweating almost as much as you're sweating.

And she's just so excited and like the first thing she says to her dad, she's like I think I could do 6K next time.

And she starts creating these like performance related goals and like kind of has this idea.

And even when we're on the run she's like, well, what about in the winter, like she's kind of thinking like how can I make this a routine that I get to do with my mom and I just I stepped back in those that moment and I just thought this is what I dreamed about.

This is what I dreamed about Like having kids.

Having kids is so hard and being a mom is so hard, but it's also so beautiful and to see your kids just have such a healthy and strong association with movement and how that movement is shaped around performance and excitation for moving their bodies and being able to do new things without doing it in a way that is forced right.

We really take the long-term athlete development model to heart in our household around how early years of life are around fundamentals and having fun in sport and in movement.

To see that in that moment was just so powerful and it was such a good reminder.

Because then today I'm like lifting and I don't feel very strong.

I feel pretty weak today and the dogs are around and we're getting a shipment order because we're doing some work in our backyard and like it's just chaos and I'm like looking at it like I've done like three sets and it's half an hour in and I had to stop myself and just think back to that moment yesterday and not just live it in that moment and then forget about it, about how it's the accumulation of little moments and how my fitness is still there, even if my training isn't perfect.

And I need to remember that.

You know I'm in the game of life right now and it's the active for life type of mentality that we are trying to personify and that, even when it's not perfect, the fitness is still good.

And so you know seeing those moments.

And then you know, in that the garage we were working out and Quinn's trying to learn a new skill on the rings, and so he's working on that.

So every time we were resting between sets we were trying to help him and again it just kind of highlighted this beautiful chaos and this perfectly imperfect set of moments that just happens with fitness.

And then, of course, you want your time where family isn't always around you when you're exercising, so you get some of that debrief time too.

But I think it's such a beautiful reminder, especially because I know a lot of women who listen to this podcast are kind of in the trenches of like in pregnancy either for the first time or again and having little ones at home.

That all of that hardship, all of those like hard days with working out and knowing that it's not perfect, or stopping mid-workout because the toddler's about to die, because they are very good at trying to kill themselves when they're trying to learn how to move right, like all those things, it really does shape them and it really does help with their thoughts and concepts around their bodies and it was something that made me really proud.

Proud in its perfectly imperfect expression, and so that was what I wanted to share today, because I know it's not research or anything like that, but I've been reflecting on it a lot as somebody who is kind of trying to be in this pregnant postpartum space myself, again with baby three, but also that has been in this parenting role for a couple years now, now that I'm a parenting expert let's make that very clear but just kind of seeing kids grow up and, you know, taking that time to take a step back and reflect on just how amazing it is.

There was that quote, I think it's from the Office.

It's like I really wish that I wouldn't have known that I was in the good old days when I was in them and it came up on my feed a couple of weeks ago and it's been living rent free in my head ever since, because I've turned to my husband, nick, a couple of times and I thought to him or said to him this is everything that we dreamed about.

You know all of the chaos, we have dogs and we have chickens and we have kids and we have I have a crazy career and he's helping so much with the kiddos but it's everything that we ever dreamed of and I'm just so thankful for that.

I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week.

Please share some of those parenting wins yourself, if you've had some of those same thoughts and feelings.

Otherwise, we will see you all next week.