The purpose of the Essential Mom Movements is to demonstrate that purposeful exercise aimed at increasing your life function has a huge carryover to your everyday movements. As a mom to four kids, I truly understand time limitations. It is easy to just go through the motions when it comes to exercise!
What is most of us really looking for when we exercise? Functional, yes. Strength, yes. But, most of all… we want to get a good calorie burn and feel energized after our workout! Unfortunately, many training programs are too aggressive and accomplish the calorie burn but sacrifice function.
What if I told you that you could accomplish all of those things… function, strength, calorie burn and increasing energy.
Well, let’s dig into this Month’s Essential Mom Movement!
Did you know that when your hips get tight, you are less able to fully load your pelvic floor?
Did you know that when your thoracic spine (basically, your ribcage) gets tight, you reduce your ability to take full and deep breaths which reduces your ability to properly load your core?
When you go through these two patterns, focus on your breath pattern! Inhale, as you move into the movement. Exhale as you move out of the movement.
Focus on moving through a full range of motion on each pattern.
These two exercises help to increase mobility in your hips while integrating your ribcage and your core. Many mobility exercises only work on segmented mobility…like stretching your quads alone and not integrating the movement. This leads to suboptimal results.
Perform each pattern for 3 rounds of 1 minute.
A note on diastasis!
By the way, I purposefully had my shirt off in this video to show you a functional diastasis. I still have a 2 1/2-3 finger split with good tensioning. This pattern is safe to do if you have good control through your diastasis. Notice, I do not have any doming during the movements. If you notice doming, that means the exercise is not appropriate, yet!